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Endlich
Took my Deutsch I final this morning. I don’t believe I did well. Probably 50%. It was oral with another student over Zoom. We each were given separate facts about a fictitious person that we had to ask questions about, and we had to answer in full sentences im Deutsch. My vocabulary is bad, because I didn’t do vocabulary drills.
Honestly, this return to school thing, as continuing education for fun, was meta-educational. I dropped out of school after 11 semesters in 1995 and so much about education has changed. Everything’s, like, computers now. Here are some lessons:
- Your first battle is eating the layer cake that is your local community college’s registration process and activating all of the disparate IT systems that have been slapped together like a ball of mud. Each one was a bad solution to a misunderstood problem, and now somehow they’re interconnected and dependent on expensive public-private partnerships. The guy that wrote the one infrastructure tool that binds it all together retired or died 7 years ago. He used to teach the HTML class.
- Your second battle is learning Blackboard, which is the LMS that ACC uses. Your college may be different. Bb is terrible. They’re all terrible. My buddy who is a PhD in EdTech says they’re all terrible. I believe him.
- Your teacher uses a textbook not sold by the campus bookstore, and it will have workbooks online. You will have to create an account at the outside vendor who publishes the textbook just so you can read it and do homework. This will cost 50% more than cost for the class, and your college catalog won’t mention this.
- They will not offer a PDF copy of the textbook. It will be a poorly-rendered electronic copy, in a browser tab immune from scraping, of a book designed for paper. Matter of fact, you have to pay extra for a paper copy of the textbook.
- Always buy the paper copy of the textbook, or you might not be able to read the textbook.
- Unfortunately, your paper copy of the textbook is loose leaf laser-printed sheets with 3-ring punched holes. It is not a bound textbook. You provide the binder.
- The printed margins of the book mean you have to use bulky 3-ring binders that take up 30% more coffee shop table space instead of slim paper folders because otherwise you wouldn’t see the print close to the spine.
- Don’t study in coffee shops. Space is at a premium, and the WiFi is shit.
- Your third battle is learning how the online workbook works. You will get the first 2 exercises wrong. Accept your fate.
- The online workbook is terrible. Sometimes you will have 3 tries to get your exercise right. Sometimes you will have 1. And you can’t go back and forth between exercises once you “submit” them, so it’s like playing a video game where you’re on the rails. Nothing says, “Open world games suck and should never be allowed” like higher learning.
- If you have 3 tries to get it right, your homework score will be amazing. And it will be a wrong assessment of your actual skill. You actually have to go out of your way (“yes, I want to submit this wrong lesson”, “no, yes, I’m sure.”) to submit wrong lessons just so you can track your actual progression.
- Your inflated homework score, weighted, will give you an inflated sense of ego, and you will be wrong.
- If you can’t play a video because your laptop’s browser couldn’t download and render it because of WiFi or browser glitch, tough shit. Don’t click “submit”. Retry it at home.
- If you have the option to “ask the teacher” about a technical issue, do it just so they know you’re having technical issues, but expect them to bring it up in the next Zoom class session in front of God and everybody.
- Don’t click “Refresh” on a page if it times-out on a submission because of shitty WiFi, or you will burn one of your 3 attempts and fail the lesson.
- Never use a Chromebook for class work. Never. Chrome on ChromeOS tricks the textbook LMS into thinking you’re on a mobile device, and it’ll render the page wrong, and your grades will suffer because you couldn’t click the dropdown options that don’t render because the Javascript thinks you don’t have enough screen resolution to draw it. And your touch screen will act stupid. And it’s underpowered for what you need. And it’ll drop connections to your Bluetooth earbuds randomly (and your wired earbuds will fall out of your ears).
- Once you login to your Chromebook with your school’s GMail-For-Schools account, you lose all admin access on your Chromebook to install real apps on that account (“Your Chromebook is administered by your Organization”). It’s a paperweight after that point, because everything will have to be a Chrome extension webapp, and they all suck.
- You can use an Android/IOS tablet to do your homework, but you can’t record your voice for the random surprise speaking lessons. It’ll be digital noise on playback, and your professor will hate you.
- Forget using an physical keyboard setting for umlauts and special characters. I enabled that on my Chromebook, and got dinged because my supposed Eszett symbol (ß) was marked as incorrect because it was actually entering a Beta symbol (β). Unicode is hard. Use the LMS Javascript character picker, or get a “QWERTZ” German keyboard with an AltGr key for special characters.
- Javascript character pickers are stupid.
- Use a real laptop, because you’ll randomly be asked by the professor to record a Zoom session, because your semester final might be a recorded Zoom session with another student and you’ll have to practice by submitting files generated by the Zoom app.
- Your university/college email will be spam central, and all the spam is from the Chancellor’s Office, the bookstore, or security. Even if your class is 100% online, you’ll get notifications that campus police have closed a site because of suspicious activity in the parking lot.
- Pay the parking fee, even if you won’t be parking on campus. It’s cheaper than a ticket on your student bill.
- Your campus bookstore only generates spam, because it’s in the business of making money on a captive market. File it accordingly.
- Do your vocabulary drills. Learn the gender of the nouns. Don’t be ein dumbkopf. Do your vocabulary drills.
Honestly, I’m doubting that I’ll sign up for Deutsch II. I feel like I should, just to be a completist, but let me be real: my stupid fantasy of living/retiring in Germany is dead. Come January 20, every country in the western world will be closing their doors to American expats. My language skills are shit, I don’t have a college Bachelor’s degree, and Germany is already full of tech-savvy engineers. I have nothing special to offer.
I learned more about my shortcomings this semester than I did about the language. There’s some soul-searching happening, and I’m in the middle of it. Let me never reach the end.
Meine Treppe wartet bis pro Jahr heir. (and I probably got that wrong, too.)
#ACC #AustinCommunityCollege #Blackboard #class #college #Deutsch #German #LMS #VHL
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Anonymous Submission to Jersey Counter-Info
More information on how to support Peppy and Krystal can be found on their support site.
Peppy and Krystal are two Pittsburgh community activists who are facing trumped up political charges on the federal level. Peppy has been locked up since they were indicted in June of 2023. Krystal is out on pretrial conditions.
Jury trial set for September 9th at the federal courthouse in Pittsburgh, PA.
Case Summary
In the early hours of May 19th, 2023, heavily-armed agents raided the home of two Pittsburgh community members, Brian “Peppy” DiPippa and Krystal DiPippa. Nearly a month and a half later, they were both federally indicted, and on June 30th, they surrendered to the court. Krystal, who was released on probation the same day, faces charges of (1) conspiracy and (2) obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder. Peppy was detained and has remained imprisoned at the time of this writing (March 2024). He faces charges of (1) conspiracy, (2) obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder, and (3) use of explosive to commit a federal felony. Peppy is incarcerated at a facility that does not provide any outdoor space whatsoever.
Because of the complicated nature of federal sentencing guidelines, we can’t know what the actual legal consequences are for these charges. Since our friends are being charged with conspiracy as co-defendants, they could face equal amounts of prison time in a range that could very well go beyond 10 years. We’ve been told that if convicted, Krystal’s sentence will probably be lower than Peppy’s.
The case against Peppy and Krystal (US v. DiPippa et al.) arose out of an April 18, 2023, demonstration against a University of Pittsburgh-sanctioned event promoting hatred toward transgender people and communities, featuring notorious transphobes Brad Polumbo and Michael Knowles on the question “should transgenderism be regulated by law?” The government alleges that in the protests outside the event, a “civil disorder” occurred, when one commercially available firework and two homemade “smoke bombs” were discharged. This “civil disorder” forms the context in which Krystal and Pep are charged. Click here for more specifics on the timeline and legal situation.
Analysis
The federal government’s targeting of Krystal and Peppy is political, plain and simple.
Even before the April 18th protest, FBI agents secretly followed our friends and used tactics straight out of the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) playbook to manufacture justification for the May 19th raid. Amongst other stalking schemes, federal agents performed a warrantless search of Peppy and Krystal’s garbage, in which they allegedly found a discarded pamphlet about the movement to Stop Cop City. Direct from the government’s search warrant affidavit: “the “Defend the Atlanta Forest” movement has been active since approximately April 2021 and involves protesters unlawfully occupying a wooded area of land where the city plans to build a police training facility.” In the unwarranted trash search, federal agencies allegedly found “a printed zine… discussing anarchist ideology.” It is important to note that in the affidavit for a search warrant, the FBI described their following of Peppy and Krystal beginning a week before the April 18th protest – that is, a week before any allegation of any law being broken. The FBI’s use of a Stop Cop City pamphlet to justify an aggressive raid on alleged Pittsburgh political activists draws a direct line from the federal crackdown on Atlanta-area organizers to the government’s national strategy of repression.
In its prosecution, the feds have continued trying to criminalize alleged political beliefs, retaliate for alleged participation in the April 18th protest, and intimidate others from protesting and/or supporting the rights and existence of transgender people. During court proceedings, the prosecution has continued to dramatize the political dimension of the case, and the judge cited these arguments in his Novemeber ruling to keep Peppy in pre-trial imprisonment with no possibility of bail. Specific criminal wrongdoing played a minimal role at that hearing: rather than dwelling on the state’s circumstantial evidence, the prosecution castigated Peppy for “a strongly held belief system that embraces anarchism” and for feeling “a sense of community, among anarchists.” The judge cited “sentiments supporting anarchism” as a key component to justify continued detention.
This political focus, which was already evident in the state’s earlier written filings and their use of the problematic acronym “AGAAVE” (anti-government and anti-authority violent extremist), continues a legacy of repression against perceived dissidents while showing anxiety about the strength of their evidence of criminal wrongdoing in this particular case.
Case Timeline and Details
Timeline (we will keep this updated as the case develops)
4/18/23: Transphobes speak at Pitt, community members protest.
5/19/23: With guns drawn, FBI agents along with police from various local agencies raid Peppy and Krystal’s home in the early morning. They were detained for several hours before being told they were free to leave.
6/29/23: Krystal and Peppy are notified by their lawyers that they are being federally indicted and are to turn themselves in the next day.
6/30/23: Krystal and Peppy surrender. They are held in custody until appearing before the magistrate to enter not guilty pleas. Peppy is ordered to remain in pretrial detention and taken to Butler County Prison. Krystal is granted pretrial release with conditions.
7/3/23: Hearing before the magistrate appealing the detention order. The appeal is denied and Peppy remains in custody.
10/26/23: Judge denies Peppy’s release from pretrial detention, with no bail option.
2/1/24: Counsel for Krystal and Peppy file extensive pre-trial motions requesting to review potential evidence, and for the court to discuss the case due to government misconduct and misapplication of statutes.
2/23/24: Judge grants the prosecution an extension and sets a revised timeline:
3/4/24: Government response to defense’s pre-trial motions due
3/11/24: Defense reply due
4/10/24: Decision from court
5/31/24: Rule 16 discovery and requested expert disclosures due
7/1/24: Expert Reports due
8/9/24: Government’s trial exhibits, exhibit list, witness list, and proposed jury instructions and verdict slip all due by
8/16/24: Objections and motions in limine due
8/23/24: responses to motions in limine due by
8/26/24: Rule 404(b) and Rule 609 material due
9/4/24: Pretrial Conference is set for
9/9/24: Jury Selection and Trial are set to begin on
Legal pre-trial arguments- Peppy
Peppy’s case, number 2:23-cr-00146-NR-1 (docket here), charges him with three counts: (1) 18 U.S.C. 371 conspiracy; (2) 18 U.S.C. 2 & 231(a)(3) obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder; and (3) 18 U.S.C. 844(h)(1) use of explosive to commit a federal felony. He has filed two motions to dismiss.
2/1/24: The motion to dismiss the entire case due to Selective Prosecution states that prosecutors made the decision on the basis of alleged political beliefs and associations that are statutorily and constitutionally protected.The prosecution’s theory is that Mr. DiPippa holds “AGAAVE” (anti-government and anti-authority violent extremist) beliefs that merit prosecution. The FBI applies its “AGAAVE” acronym to people with ideological agendas derived from anti-government or anti-authority sentiment, including opposition to perceived economic, social, or racial hierarchies; or perceived government overreach, negligence, or illegitimacy.
The FBI defines Anarchist Violent Extremists as people “who oppose all forms of capitalism, globalization, and governing institutions which are perceived as harmful to society.”[1]
Peppy’s motion to Dismiss Count 2 (obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder) argues that the civil disorder statute is overbroad and unconstitutionally vague because it’s imprecise; its subjective standards fail to provide fair notice to the public as to what is constitutionally protected and what criminalized; and it creates significant risk of arbitrary enforcement. The motion argues that statute’s phrasing is so broad and indefinite that it may interfere with and criminalize First Amendment protected speech and expressive activities.
Peppy also filed numerous motions related to discovery (the process of gathering and exchange of evidence). These include:· Moving to suppress electronic evidence or return of property seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment.· Asking the judge to order the government to reveal confidential informant(s) and any favorable treatment they have received from the government.· Asking the court to order federal and state investigative and law enforcement agents to produce: their notes; materials covered by Rule 16, such as surveillance (mail cover, electronic, photographic, mechanical, visual, aural or any other type) and all documents, photographs, and recordings; written or oral statements covered by the Jencks act[2]; evidence contemplated in Rule 404 and 609 covering acts of misconduct other than those specified in the indictment; and exculpatory evidence that could assist with the defense (otherwise known as Brady material).
Legal pre-trial arguments – Krystal
Krystal’s case, charges her with (1) 18 U.S.C. 371 conspiracy; and (2) 18 U.S.C. 2 & 231(a)(3) obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder.
Krystal asked the court for all the motions Peppy filed to apply to her. Additionally, Krystal’s filings:
· Moved to dismiss the indictment, (need a direct url to court listener filing once it is showing on court listener -there were technical issues) arguing that the “obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder” statute charges exceed the authority given to Congress. Congressional power is limited to regulating commerce between states and other things “necessary and proper” to executing that power.[3] Here, the motion alleges that the civil disorder statute impermissibly allows for federal criminal prosecution of intrastate, noneconomic activity, which is outside the limited scope of congressional authority to regulate commerce between the states.· Argued that the statute is impermissibly over-broad and criminalizes activities protected by the First Amendment.[4]· Asked for a bill of particulars to defend against the civil disorder charge. The purpose of this is to “inform the defendant of the charge against him (sic) with sufficient precision to allow him (sic) to prepare his (sic) defense.” The motion alleges that “[N]either the indictment or the indictment memorandum sufficiently states the government’s accusation as to the necessary element of interstate commerce, the element which would confer jurisdiction.” The motion asks the Court to require the government to explain how the allegations relate to interstate commerce, which is a requirement for jurisdiction to prosecute the case. · Filed a standard motion to know what evidence of her “character” the prosecution might use.[5]
The judge ordered the government to respond by 2/23/24, the defendants to respond by 3/1/24, and the court to respond by 3/30/24. Trial is likely to follow in the spring or summer of 2024. Note: the government asked for, and received, and extension for their response. See revised timeline.
[1] See, Department of Justice, Office of Inspector General Audit of the Department of Justice’s Strategy to Address the Domestic Violent Extremist Threat released in June 2023. Refer to Page 3, Figure 1.[2] More information on the Jencks Act is here.[3] Even though the conduct alleged does not seem to involve interstate commercial activity, the Commerce Clause is the legal basis for the statutes selected by the prosecutor. In reaction to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1968 congressional conservatives demanded a reciprocal but conservative corollary and passed Section 231(a)(3) as a reactionary measure to punish protestors. Krystal’s filing questions the scope of Congress’s statutory ability to criminalize people who engage in protest. [4] For more context on how prosecutors have been using civil disturbance statutes from the Wounded Knee Occupation of 1973 to the George Floyd uprisings in 2020, see The Federal Government’s Aggressive Prosecution of Protestors, Lawfare, July 13, 2020.[5] This motion is pursuant to Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b), which is the federal rule detailing to the admissibility of evidence related to a defendant’s “character” at trial.
Write to Peppy
Let’s make sure Peppy knows just how much support he has from all over the country and all over the world! Whether you sit down and write him one evening or get together with friends and all send him letters of support and solidarity! Never forget just how much each and every letter will mean day after day, week after week!
To write to Peppy, address the mail to:
Butler County Prison
c/o Brian DiPippa
#42322 PO Box 9156
Seminole, FL 33775-9156(All mail sent to the Butler County Prison has to get sent to that Florida spot where it’ll get scanned and then prisoners at Butler read it on a screen.)
Please be careful what you include in your letter to Peppy. Since he’s pre-trial and all mail will be monitored please don’t ask him about the case. Discussing any aspect of the case could come back to haunt him at any stage while the case is open. But don’t be afraid to let him know about a hike you just went on or a meal you just made with friends! The details of such events will help him get away from the isolation that he faces every day!
NYC ABC has a page on their website that serves as a great intro for anyone who has not written to a political prisoner before. Check it out before writing to Peppy for some helpful hints! nycabc.wordpress.com/write-a-letter/
As your’re sitting down to write that first letter to Peppy please know he’s looking forward to hearing from any and all supporters! And if you’re wondering what to write make note that Peppy really likes skateboarding, comedy, and uplifting and heartwarming stories. Autumn is his favorite season, so beautiful descriptions of the changing colors we see in Pittsburgh or wherever you may be writing him from would really hit the spot. As for Pittsburgh specifically and the aesthetically pleasing aspects of this city, he’d love to hear about your favorite spots. Maybe it’s one of the bridges or the city steps that go up hillsides! Peppy also likes hearing about and learning about people and places all over the globe. So, feel free to reach out and connect on any of those topics!
Solidarity!
https://jerseycounterinfo.noblogs.org/free-peppy-and-krystal/
#42322 #Analysis #Anarchism #Antifascist #general #MutualAid #news #PrisonSupportPrisonAbolition #solidarity
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Anonymous Submission to Jersey Counter-Info
More information on how to support Peppy and Krystal can be found on their support site.
Peppy and Krystal are two Pittsburgh community activists who are facing trumped up political charges on the federal level. Peppy has been locked up since they were indicted in June of 2023. Krystal is out on pretrial conditions.
Jury trial set for September 9th at the federal courthouse in Pittsburgh, PA.
Case Summary
In the early hours of May 19th, 2023, heavily-armed agents raided the home of two Pittsburgh community members, Brian “Peppy” DiPippa and Krystal DiPippa. Nearly a month and a half later, they were both federally indicted, and on June 30th, they surrendered to the court. Krystal, who was released on probation the same day, faces charges of (1) conspiracy and (2) obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder. Peppy was detained and has remained imprisoned at the time of this writing (March 2024). He faces charges of (1) conspiracy, (2) obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder, and (3) use of explosive to commit a federal felony. Peppy is incarcerated at a facility that does not provide any outdoor space whatsoever.
Because of the complicated nature of federal sentencing guidelines, we can’t know what the actual legal consequences are for these charges. Since our friends are being charged with conspiracy as co-defendants, they could face equal amounts of prison time in a range that could very well go beyond 10 years. We’ve been told that if convicted, Krystal’s sentence will probably be lower than Peppy’s.
The case against Peppy and Krystal (US v. DiPippa et al.) arose out of an April 18, 2023, demonstration against a University of Pittsburgh-sanctioned event promoting hatred toward transgender people and communities, featuring notorious transphobes Brad Polumbo and Michael Knowles on the question “should transgenderism be regulated by law?” The government alleges that in the protests outside the event, a “civil disorder” occurred, when one commercially available firework and two homemade “smoke bombs” were discharged. This “civil disorder” forms the context in which Krystal and Pep are charged. Click here for more specifics on the timeline and legal situation.
Analysis
The federal government’s targeting of Krystal and Peppy is political, plain and simple.
Even before the April 18th protest, FBI agents secretly followed our friends and used tactics straight out of the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) playbook to manufacture justification for the May 19th raid. Amongst other stalking schemes, federal agents performed a warrantless search of Peppy and Krystal’s garbage, in which they allegedly found a discarded pamphlet about the movement to Stop Cop City. Direct from the government’s search warrant affidavit: “the “Defend the Atlanta Forest” movement has been active since approximately April 2021 and involves protesters unlawfully occupying a wooded area of land where the city plans to build a police training facility.” In the unwarranted trash search, federal agencies allegedly found “a printed zine… discussing anarchist ideology.” It is important to note that in the affidavit for a search warrant, the FBI described their following of Peppy and Krystal beginning a week before the April 18th protest – that is, a week before any allegation of any law being broken. The FBI’s use of a Stop Cop City pamphlet to justify an aggressive raid on alleged Pittsburgh political activists draws a direct line from the federal crackdown on Atlanta-area organizers to the government’s national strategy of repression.
In its prosecution, the feds have continued trying to criminalize alleged political beliefs, retaliate for alleged participation in the April 18th protest, and intimidate others from protesting and/or supporting the rights and existence of transgender people. During court proceedings, the prosecution has continued to dramatize the political dimension of the case, and the judge cited these arguments in his Novemeber ruling to keep Peppy in pre-trial imprisonment with no possibility of bail. Specific criminal wrongdoing played a minimal role at that hearing: rather than dwelling on the state’s circumstantial evidence, the prosecution castigated Peppy for “a strongly held belief system that embraces anarchism” and for feeling “a sense of community, among anarchists.” The judge cited “sentiments supporting anarchism” as a key component to justify continued detention.
This political focus, which was already evident in the state’s earlier written filings and their use of the problematic acronym “AGAAVE” (anti-government and anti-authority violent extremist), continues a legacy of repression against perceived dissidents while showing anxiety about the strength of their evidence of criminal wrongdoing in this particular case.
Case Timeline and Details
Timeline (we will keep this updated as the case develops)
4/18/23: Transphobes speak at Pitt, community members protest.
5/19/23: With guns drawn, FBI agents along with police from various local agencies raid Peppy and Krystal’s home in the early morning. They were detained for several hours before being told they were free to leave.
6/29/23: Krystal and Peppy are notified by their lawyers that they are being federally indicted and are to turn themselves in the next day.
6/30/23: Krystal and Peppy surrender. They are held in custody until appearing before the magistrate to enter not guilty pleas. Peppy is ordered to remain in pretrial detention and taken to Butler County Prison. Krystal is granted pretrial release with conditions.
7/3/23: Hearing before the magistrate appealing the detention order. The appeal is denied and Peppy remains in custody.
10/26/23: Judge denies Peppy’s release from pretrial detention, with no bail option.
2/1/24: Counsel for Krystal and Peppy file extensive pre-trial motions requesting to review potential evidence, and for the court to discuss the case due to government misconduct and misapplication of statutes.
2/23/24: Judge grants the prosecution an extension and sets a revised timeline:
3/4/24: Government response to defense’s pre-trial motions due
3/11/24: Defense reply due
4/10/24: Decision from court
5/31/24: Rule 16 discovery and requested expert disclosures due
7/1/24: Expert Reports due
8/9/24: Government’s trial exhibits, exhibit list, witness list, and proposed jury instructions and verdict slip all due by
8/16/24: Objections and motions in limine due
8/23/24: responses to motions in limine due by
8/26/24: Rule 404(b) and Rule 609 material due
9/4/24: Pretrial Conference is set for
9/9/24: Jury Selection and Trial are set to begin on
Legal pre-trial arguments- Peppy
Peppy’s case, number 2:23-cr-00146-NR-1 (docket here), charges him with three counts: (1) 18 U.S.C. 371 conspiracy; (2) 18 U.S.C. 2 & 231(a)(3) obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder; and (3) 18 U.S.C. 844(h)(1) use of explosive to commit a federal felony. He has filed two motions to dismiss.
2/1/24: The motion to dismiss the entire case due to Selective Prosecution states that prosecutors made the decision on the basis of alleged political beliefs and associations that are statutorily and constitutionally protected.The prosecution’s theory is that Mr. DiPippa holds “AGAAVE” (anti-government and anti-authority violent extremist) beliefs that merit prosecution. The FBI applies its “AGAAVE” acronym to people with ideological agendas derived from anti-government or anti-authority sentiment, including opposition to perceived economic, social, or racial hierarchies; or perceived government overreach, negligence, or illegitimacy.
The FBI defines Anarchist Violent Extremists as people “who oppose all forms of capitalism, globalization, and governing institutions which are perceived as harmful to society.”[1]
Peppy’s motion to Dismiss Count 2 (obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder) argues that the civil disorder statute is overbroad and unconstitutionally vague because it’s imprecise; its subjective standards fail to provide fair notice to the public as to what is constitutionally protected and what criminalized; and it creates significant risk of arbitrary enforcement. The motion argues that statute’s phrasing is so broad and indefinite that it may interfere with and criminalize First Amendment protected speech and expressive activities.
Peppy also filed numerous motions related to discovery (the process of gathering and exchange of evidence). These include:· Moving to suppress electronic evidence or return of property seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment.· Asking the judge to order the government to reveal confidential informant(s) and any favorable treatment they have received from the government.· Asking the court to order federal and state investigative and law enforcement agents to produce: their notes; materials covered by Rule 16, such as surveillance (mail cover, electronic, photographic, mechanical, visual, aural or any other type) and all documents, photographs, and recordings; written or oral statements covered by the Jencks act[2]; evidence contemplated in Rule 404 and 609 covering acts of misconduct other than those specified in the indictment; and exculpatory evidence that could assist with the defense (otherwise known as Brady material).
Legal pre-trial arguments – Krystal
Krystal’s case, charges her with (1) 18 U.S.C. 371 conspiracy; and (2) 18 U.S.C. 2 & 231(a)(3) obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder.
Krystal asked the court for all the motions Peppy filed to apply to her. Additionally, Krystal’s filings:
· Moved to dismiss the indictment, (need a direct url to court listener filing once it is showing on court listener -there were technical issues) arguing that the “obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder” statute charges exceed the authority given to Congress. Congressional power is limited to regulating commerce between states and other things “necessary and proper” to executing that power.[3] Here, the motion alleges that the civil disorder statute impermissibly allows for federal criminal prosecution of intrastate, noneconomic activity, which is outside the limited scope of congressional authority to regulate commerce between the states.· Argued that the statute is impermissibly over-broad and criminalizes activities protected by the First Amendment.[4]· Asked for a bill of particulars to defend against the civil disorder charge. The purpose of this is to “inform the defendant of the charge against him (sic) with sufficient precision to allow him (sic) to prepare his (sic) defense.” The motion alleges that “[N]either the indictment or the indictment memorandum sufficiently states the government’s accusation as to the necessary element of interstate commerce, the element which would confer jurisdiction.” The motion asks the Court to require the government to explain how the allegations relate to interstate commerce, which is a requirement for jurisdiction to prosecute the case. · Filed a standard motion to know what evidence of her “character” the prosecution might use.[5]
The judge ordered the government to respond by 2/23/24, the defendants to respond by 3/1/24, and the court to respond by 3/30/24. Trial is likely to follow in the spring or summer of 2024. Note: the government asked for, and received, and extension for their response. See revised timeline.
[1] See, Department of Justice, Office of Inspector General Audit of the Department of Justice’s Strategy to Address the Domestic Violent Extremist Threat released in June 2023. Refer to Page 3, Figure 1.[2] More information on the Jencks Act is here.[3] Even though the conduct alleged does not seem to involve interstate commercial activity, the Commerce Clause is the legal basis for the statutes selected by the prosecutor. In reaction to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1968 congressional conservatives demanded a reciprocal but conservative corollary and passed Section 231(a)(3) as a reactionary measure to punish protestors. Krystal’s filing questions the scope of Congress’s statutory ability to criminalize people who engage in protest. [4] For more context on how prosecutors have been using civil disturbance statutes from the Wounded Knee Occupation of 1973 to the George Floyd uprisings in 2020, see The Federal Government’s Aggressive Prosecution of Protestors, Lawfare, July 13, 2020.[5] This motion is pursuant to Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b), which is the federal rule detailing to the admissibility of evidence related to a defendant’s “character” at trial.
Write to Peppy
Let’s make sure Peppy knows just how much support he has from all over the country and all over the world! Whether you sit down and write him one evening or get together with friends and all send him letters of support and solidarity! Never forget just how much each and every letter will mean day after day, week after week!
To write to Peppy, address the mail to:
Butler County Prison
c/o Brian DiPippa
#42322 PO Box 9156
Seminole, FL 33775-9156(All mail sent to the Butler County Prison has to get sent to that Florida spot where it’ll get scanned and then prisoners at Butler read it on a screen.)
Please be careful what you include in your letter to Peppy. Since he’s pre-trial and all mail will be monitored please don’t ask him about the case. Discussing any aspect of the case could come back to haunt him at any stage while the case is open. But don’t be afraid to let him know about a hike you just went on or a meal you just made with friends! The details of such events will help him get away from the isolation that he faces every day!
NYC ABC has a page on their website that serves as a great intro for anyone who has not written to a political prisoner before. Check it out before writing to Peppy for some helpful hints! nycabc.wordpress.com/write-a-letter/
As your’re sitting down to write that first letter to Peppy please know he’s looking forward to hearing from any and all supporters! And if you’re wondering what to write make note that Peppy really likes skateboarding, comedy, and uplifting and heartwarming stories. Autumn is his favorite season, so beautiful descriptions of the changing colors we see in Pittsburgh or wherever you may be writing him from would really hit the spot. As for Pittsburgh specifically and the aesthetically pleasing aspects of this city, he’d love to hear about your favorite spots. Maybe it’s one of the bridges or the city steps that go up hillsides! Peppy also likes hearing about and learning about people and places all over the globe. So, feel free to reach out and connect on any of those topics!
Solidarity!
https://jerseycounterinfo.noblogs.org/free-peppy-and-krystal/
#42322 #Analysis #Anarchism #Antifascist #general #MutualAid #news #PrisonSupportPrisonAbolition #solidarity
-
Anonymous Submission to Jersey Counter-Info
More information on how to support Peppy and Krystal can be found on their support site.
Peppy and Krystal are two Pittsburgh community activists who are facing trumped up political charges on the federal level. Peppy has been locked up since they were indicted in June of 2023. Krystal is out on pretrial conditions.
Jury trial set for September 9th at the federal courthouse in Pittsburgh, PA.
Case Summary
In the early hours of May 19th, 2023, heavily-armed agents raided the home of two Pittsburgh community members, Brian “Peppy” DiPippa and Krystal DiPippa. Nearly a month and a half later, they were both federally indicted, and on June 30th, they surrendered to the court. Krystal, who was released on probation the same day, faces charges of (1) conspiracy and (2) obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder. Peppy was detained and has remained imprisoned at the time of this writing (March 2024). He faces charges of (1) conspiracy, (2) obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder, and (3) use of explosive to commit a federal felony. Peppy is incarcerated at a facility that does not provide any outdoor space whatsoever.
Because of the complicated nature of federal sentencing guidelines, we can’t know what the actual legal consequences are for these charges. Since our friends are being charged with conspiracy as co-defendants, they could face equal amounts of prison time in a range that could very well go beyond 10 years. We’ve been told that if convicted, Krystal’s sentence will probably be lower than Peppy’s.
The case against Peppy and Krystal (US v. DiPippa et al.) arose out of an April 18, 2023, demonstration against a University of Pittsburgh-sanctioned event promoting hatred toward transgender people and communities, featuring notorious transphobes Brad Polumbo and Michael Knowles on the question “should transgenderism be regulated by law?” The government alleges that in the protests outside the event, a “civil disorder” occurred, when one commercially available firework and two homemade “smoke bombs” were discharged. This “civil disorder” forms the context in which Krystal and Pep are charged. Click here for more specifics on the timeline and legal situation.
Analysis
The federal government’s targeting of Krystal and Peppy is political, plain and simple.
Even before the April 18th protest, FBI agents secretly followed our friends and used tactics straight out of the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) playbook to manufacture justification for the May 19th raid. Amongst other stalking schemes, federal agents performed a warrantless search of Peppy and Krystal’s garbage, in which they allegedly found a discarded pamphlet about the movement to Stop Cop City. Direct from the government’s search warrant affidavit: “the “Defend the Atlanta Forest” movement has been active since approximately April 2021 and involves protesters unlawfully occupying a wooded area of land where the city plans to build a police training facility.” In the unwarranted trash search, federal agencies allegedly found “a printed zine… discussing anarchist ideology.” It is important to note that in the affidavit for a search warrant, the FBI described their following of Peppy and Krystal beginning a week before the April 18th protest – that is, a week before any allegation of any law being broken. The FBI’s use of a Stop Cop City pamphlet to justify an aggressive raid on alleged Pittsburgh political activists draws a direct line from the federal crackdown on Atlanta-area organizers to the government’s national strategy of repression.
In its prosecution, the feds have continued trying to criminalize alleged political beliefs, retaliate for alleged participation in the April 18th protest, and intimidate others from protesting and/or supporting the rights and existence of transgender people. During court proceedings, the prosecution has continued to dramatize the political dimension of the case, and the judge cited these arguments in his Novemeber ruling to keep Peppy in pre-trial imprisonment with no possibility of bail. Specific criminal wrongdoing played a minimal role at that hearing: rather than dwelling on the state’s circumstantial evidence, the prosecution castigated Peppy for “a strongly held belief system that embraces anarchism” and for feeling “a sense of community, among anarchists.” The judge cited “sentiments supporting anarchism” as a key component to justify continued detention.
This political focus, which was already evident in the state’s earlier written filings and their use of the problematic acronym “AGAAVE” (anti-government and anti-authority violent extremist), continues a legacy of repression against perceived dissidents while showing anxiety about the strength of their evidence of criminal wrongdoing in this particular case.
Case Timeline and Details
Timeline (we will keep this updated as the case develops)
4/18/23: Transphobes speak at Pitt, community members protest.
5/19/23: With guns drawn, FBI agents along with police from various local agencies raid Peppy and Krystal’s home in the early morning. They were detained for several hours before being told they were free to leave.
6/29/23: Krystal and Peppy are notified by their lawyers that they are being federally indicted and are to turn themselves in the next day.
6/30/23: Krystal and Peppy surrender. They are held in custody until appearing before the magistrate to enter not guilty pleas. Peppy is ordered to remain in pretrial detention and taken to Butler County Prison. Krystal is granted pretrial release with conditions.
7/3/23: Hearing before the magistrate appealing the detention order. The appeal is denied and Peppy remains in custody.
10/26/23: Judge denies Peppy’s release from pretrial detention, with no bail option.
2/1/24: Counsel for Krystal and Peppy file extensive pre-trial motions requesting to review potential evidence, and for the court to discuss the case due to government misconduct and misapplication of statutes.
2/23/24: Judge grants the prosecution an extension and sets a revised timeline:
3/4/24: Government response to defense’s pre-trial motions due
3/11/24: Defense reply due
4/10/24: Decision from court
5/31/24: Rule 16 discovery and requested expert disclosures due
7/1/24: Expert Reports due
8/9/24: Government’s trial exhibits, exhibit list, witness list, and proposed jury instructions and verdict slip all due by
8/16/24: Objections and motions in limine due
8/23/24: responses to motions in limine due by
8/26/24: Rule 404(b) and Rule 609 material due
9/4/24: Pretrial Conference is set for
9/9/24: Jury Selection and Trial are set to begin on
Legal pre-trial arguments- Peppy
Peppy’s case, number 2:23-cr-00146-NR-1 (docket here), charges him with three counts: (1) 18 U.S.C. 371 conspiracy; (2) 18 U.S.C. 2 & 231(a)(3) obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder; and (3) 18 U.S.C. 844(h)(1) use of explosive to commit a federal felony. He has filed two motions to dismiss.
2/1/24: The motion to dismiss the entire case due to Selective Prosecution states that prosecutors made the decision on the basis of alleged political beliefs and associations that are statutorily and constitutionally protected.The prosecution’s theory is that Mr. DiPippa holds “AGAAVE” (anti-government and anti-authority violent extremist) beliefs that merit prosecution. The FBI applies its “AGAAVE” acronym to people with ideological agendas derived from anti-government or anti-authority sentiment, including opposition to perceived economic, social, or racial hierarchies; or perceived government overreach, negligence, or illegitimacy.
The FBI defines Anarchist Violent Extremists as people “who oppose all forms of capitalism, globalization, and governing institutions which are perceived as harmful to society.”[1]
Peppy’s motion to Dismiss Count 2 (obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder) argues that the civil disorder statute is overbroad and unconstitutionally vague because it’s imprecise; its subjective standards fail to provide fair notice to the public as to what is constitutionally protected and what criminalized; and it creates significant risk of arbitrary enforcement. The motion argues that statute’s phrasing is so broad and indefinite that it may interfere with and criminalize First Amendment protected speech and expressive activities.
Peppy also filed numerous motions related to discovery (the process of gathering and exchange of evidence). These include:· Moving to suppress electronic evidence or return of property seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment.· Asking the judge to order the government to reveal confidential informant(s) and any favorable treatment they have received from the government.· Asking the court to order federal and state investigative and law enforcement agents to produce: their notes; materials covered by Rule 16, such as surveillance (mail cover, electronic, photographic, mechanical, visual, aural or any other type) and all documents, photographs, and recordings; written or oral statements covered by the Jencks act[2]; evidence contemplated in Rule 404 and 609 covering acts of misconduct other than those specified in the indictment; and exculpatory evidence that could assist with the defense (otherwise known as Brady material).
Legal pre-trial arguments – Krystal
Krystal’s case, charges her with (1) 18 U.S.C. 371 conspiracy; and (2) 18 U.S.C. 2 & 231(a)(3) obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder.
Krystal asked the court for all the motions Peppy filed to apply to her. Additionally, Krystal’s filings:
· Moved to dismiss the indictment, (need a direct url to court listener filing once it is showing on court listener -there were technical issues) arguing that the “obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder” statute charges exceed the authority given to Congress. Congressional power is limited to regulating commerce between states and other things “necessary and proper” to executing that power.[3] Here, the motion alleges that the civil disorder statute impermissibly allows for federal criminal prosecution of intrastate, noneconomic activity, which is outside the limited scope of congressional authority to regulate commerce between the states.· Argued that the statute is impermissibly over-broad and criminalizes activities protected by the First Amendment.[4]· Asked for a bill of particulars to defend against the civil disorder charge. The purpose of this is to “inform the defendant of the charge against him (sic) with sufficient precision to allow him (sic) to prepare his (sic) defense.” The motion alleges that “[N]either the indictment or the indictment memorandum sufficiently states the government’s accusation as to the necessary element of interstate commerce, the element which would confer jurisdiction.” The motion asks the Court to require the government to explain how the allegations relate to interstate commerce, which is a requirement for jurisdiction to prosecute the case. · Filed a standard motion to know what evidence of her “character” the prosecution might use.[5]
The judge ordered the government to respond by 2/23/24, the defendants to respond by 3/1/24, and the court to respond by 3/30/24. Trial is likely to follow in the spring or summer of 2024. Note: the government asked for, and received, and extension for their response. See revised timeline.
[1] See, Department of Justice, Office of Inspector General Audit of the Department of Justice’s Strategy to Address the Domestic Violent Extremist Threat released in June 2023. Refer to Page 3, Figure 1.[2] More information on the Jencks Act is here.[3] Even though the conduct alleged does not seem to involve interstate commercial activity, the Commerce Clause is the legal basis for the statutes selected by the prosecutor. In reaction to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1968 congressional conservatives demanded a reciprocal but conservative corollary and passed Section 231(a)(3) as a reactionary measure to punish protestors. Krystal’s filing questions the scope of Congress’s statutory ability to criminalize people who engage in protest. [4] For more context on how prosecutors have been using civil disturbance statutes from the Wounded Knee Occupation of 1973 to the George Floyd uprisings in 2020, see The Federal Government’s Aggressive Prosecution of Protestors, Lawfare, July 13, 2020.[5] This motion is pursuant to Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b), which is the federal rule detailing to the admissibility of evidence related to a defendant’s “character” at trial.
Write to Peppy
Let’s make sure Peppy knows just how much support he has from all over the country and all over the world! Whether you sit down and write him one evening or get together with friends and all send him letters of support and solidarity! Never forget just how much each and every letter will mean day after day, week after week!
To write to Peppy, address the mail to:
Butler County Prison
c/o Brian DiPippa
#42322 PO Box 9156
Seminole, FL 33775-9156(All mail sent to the Butler County Prison has to get sent to that Florida spot where it’ll get scanned and then prisoners at Butler read it on a screen.)
Please be careful what you include in your letter to Peppy. Since he’s pre-trial and all mail will be monitored please don’t ask him about the case. Discussing any aspect of the case could come back to haunt him at any stage while the case is open. But don’t be afraid to let him know about a hike you just went on or a meal you just made with friends! The details of such events will help him get away from the isolation that he faces every day!
NYC ABC has a page on their website that serves as a great intro for anyone who has not written to a political prisoner before. Check it out before writing to Peppy for some helpful hints! nycabc.wordpress.com/write-a-letter/
As your’re sitting down to write that first letter to Peppy please know he’s looking forward to hearing from any and all supporters! And if you’re wondering what to write make note that Peppy really likes skateboarding, comedy, and uplifting and heartwarming stories. Autumn is his favorite season, so beautiful descriptions of the changing colors we see in Pittsburgh or wherever you may be writing him from would really hit the spot. As for Pittsburgh specifically and the aesthetically pleasing aspects of this city, he’d love to hear about your favorite spots. Maybe it’s one of the bridges or the city steps that go up hillsides! Peppy also likes hearing about and learning about people and places all over the globe. So, feel free to reach out and connect on any of those topics!
Solidarity!
https://jerseycounterinfo.noblogs.org/free-peppy-and-krystal/
#42322 #Analysis #Anarchism #Antifascist #general #MutualAid #news #PrisonSupportPrisonAbolition #solidarity
-
Anonymous Submission to Jersey Counter-Info
More information on how to support Peppy and Krystal can be found on their support site.
Peppy and Krystal are two Pittsburgh community activists who are facing trumped up political charges on the federal level. Peppy has been locked up since they were indicted in June of 2023. Krystal is out on pretrial conditions.
Jury trial set for September 9th at the federal courthouse in Pittsburgh, PA.
Case Summary
In the early hours of May 19th, 2023, heavily-armed agents raided the home of two Pittsburgh community members, Brian “Peppy” DiPippa and Krystal DiPippa. Nearly a month and a half later, they were both federally indicted, and on June 30th, they surrendered to the court. Krystal, who was released on probation the same day, faces charges of (1) conspiracy and (2) obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder. Peppy was detained and has remained imprisoned at the time of this writing (March 2024). He faces charges of (1) conspiracy, (2) obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder, and (3) use of explosive to commit a federal felony. Peppy is incarcerated at a facility that does not provide any outdoor space whatsoever.
Because of the complicated nature of federal sentencing guidelines, we can’t know what the actual legal consequences are for these charges. Since our friends are being charged with conspiracy as co-defendants, they could face equal amounts of prison time in a range that could very well go beyond 10 years. We’ve been told that if convicted, Krystal’s sentence will probably be lower than Peppy’s.
The case against Peppy and Krystal (US v. DiPippa et al.) arose out of an April 18, 2023, demonstration against a University of Pittsburgh-sanctioned event promoting hatred toward transgender people and communities, featuring notorious transphobes Brad Polumbo and Michael Knowles on the question “should transgenderism be regulated by law?” The government alleges that in the protests outside the event, a “civil disorder” occurred, when one commercially available firework and two homemade “smoke bombs” were discharged. This “civil disorder” forms the context in which Krystal and Pep are charged. Click here for more specifics on the timeline and legal situation.
Analysis
The federal government’s targeting of Krystal and Peppy is political, plain and simple.
Even before the April 18th protest, FBI agents secretly followed our friends and used tactics straight out of the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) playbook to manufacture justification for the May 19th raid. Amongst other stalking schemes, federal agents performed a warrantless search of Peppy and Krystal’s garbage, in which they allegedly found a discarded pamphlet about the movement to Stop Cop City. Direct from the government’s search warrant affidavit: “the “Defend the Atlanta Forest” movement has been active since approximately April 2021 and involves protesters unlawfully occupying a wooded area of land where the city plans to build a police training facility.” In the unwarranted trash search, federal agencies allegedly found “a printed zine… discussing anarchist ideology.” It is important to note that in the affidavit for a search warrant, the FBI described their following of Peppy and Krystal beginning a week before the April 18th protest – that is, a week before any allegation of any law being broken. The FBI’s use of a Stop Cop City pamphlet to justify an aggressive raid on alleged Pittsburgh political activists draws a direct line from the federal crackdown on Atlanta-area organizers to the government’s national strategy of repression.
In its prosecution, the feds have continued trying to criminalize alleged political beliefs, retaliate for alleged participation in the April 18th protest, and intimidate others from protesting and/or supporting the rights and existence of transgender people. During court proceedings, the prosecution has continued to dramatize the political dimension of the case, and the judge cited these arguments in his Novemeber ruling to keep Peppy in pre-trial imprisonment with no possibility of bail. Specific criminal wrongdoing played a minimal role at that hearing: rather than dwelling on the state’s circumstantial evidence, the prosecution castigated Peppy for “a strongly held belief system that embraces anarchism” and for feeling “a sense of community, among anarchists.” The judge cited “sentiments supporting anarchism” as a key component to justify continued detention.
This political focus, which was already evident in the state’s earlier written filings and their use of the problematic acronym “AGAAVE” (anti-government and anti-authority violent extremist), continues a legacy of repression against perceived dissidents while showing anxiety about the strength of their evidence of criminal wrongdoing in this particular case.
Case Timeline and Details
Timeline (we will keep this updated as the case develops)
4/18/23: Transphobes speak at Pitt, community members protest.
5/19/23: With guns drawn, FBI agents along with police from various local agencies raid Peppy and Krystal’s home in the early morning. They were detained for several hours before being told they were free to leave.
6/29/23: Krystal and Peppy are notified by their lawyers that they are being federally indicted and are to turn themselves in the next day.
6/30/23: Krystal and Peppy surrender. They are held in custody until appearing before the magistrate to enter not guilty pleas. Peppy is ordered to remain in pretrial detention and taken to Butler County Prison. Krystal is granted pretrial release with conditions.
7/3/23: Hearing before the magistrate appealing the detention order. The appeal is denied and Peppy remains in custody.
10/26/23: Judge denies Peppy’s release from pretrial detention, with no bail option.
2/1/24: Counsel for Krystal and Peppy file extensive pre-trial motions requesting to review potential evidence, and for the court to discuss the case due to government misconduct and misapplication of statutes.
2/23/24: Judge grants the prosecution an extension and sets a revised timeline:
3/4/24: Government response to defense’s pre-trial motions due
3/11/24: Defense reply due
4/10/24: Decision from court
5/31/24: Rule 16 discovery and requested expert disclosures due
7/1/24: Expert Reports due
8/9/24: Government’s trial exhibits, exhibit list, witness list, and proposed jury instructions and verdict slip all due by
8/16/24: Objections and motions in limine due
8/23/24: responses to motions in limine due by
8/26/24: Rule 404(b) and Rule 609 material due
9/4/24: Pretrial Conference is set for
9/9/24: Jury Selection and Trial are set to begin on
Legal pre-trial arguments- Peppy
Peppy’s case, number 2:23-cr-00146-NR-1 (docket here), charges him with three counts: (1) 18 U.S.C. 371 conspiracy; (2) 18 U.S.C. 2 & 231(a)(3) obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder; and (3) 18 U.S.C. 844(h)(1) use of explosive to commit a federal felony. He has filed two motions to dismiss.
2/1/24: The motion to dismiss the entire case due to Selective Prosecution states that prosecutors made the decision on the basis of alleged political beliefs and associations that are statutorily and constitutionally protected.The prosecution’s theory is that Mr. DiPippa holds “AGAAVE” (anti-government and anti-authority violent extremist) beliefs that merit prosecution. The FBI applies its “AGAAVE” acronym to people with ideological agendas derived from anti-government or anti-authority sentiment, including opposition to perceived economic, social, or racial hierarchies; or perceived government overreach, negligence, or illegitimacy.
The FBI defines Anarchist Violent Extremists as people “who oppose all forms of capitalism, globalization, and governing institutions which are perceived as harmful to society.”[1]
Peppy’s motion to Dismiss Count 2 (obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder) argues that the civil disorder statute is overbroad and unconstitutionally vague because it’s imprecise; its subjective standards fail to provide fair notice to the public as to what is constitutionally protected and what criminalized; and it creates significant risk of arbitrary enforcement. The motion argues that statute’s phrasing is so broad and indefinite that it may interfere with and criminalize First Amendment protected speech and expressive activities.
Peppy also filed numerous motions related to discovery (the process of gathering and exchange of evidence). These include:· Moving to suppress electronic evidence or return of property seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment.· Asking the judge to order the government to reveal confidential informant(s) and any favorable treatment they have received from the government.· Asking the court to order federal and state investigative and law enforcement agents to produce: their notes; materials covered by Rule 16, such as surveillance (mail cover, electronic, photographic, mechanical, visual, aural or any other type) and all documents, photographs, and recordings; written or oral statements covered by the Jencks act[2]; evidence contemplated in Rule 404 and 609 covering acts of misconduct other than those specified in the indictment; and exculpatory evidence that could assist with the defense (otherwise known as Brady material).
Legal pre-trial arguments – Krystal
Krystal’s case, charges her with (1) 18 U.S.C. 371 conspiracy; and (2) 18 U.S.C. 2 & 231(a)(3) obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder.
Krystal asked the court for all the motions Peppy filed to apply to her. Additionally, Krystal’s filings:
· Moved to dismiss the indictment, (need a direct url to court listener filing once it is showing on court listener -there were technical issues) arguing that the “obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder” statute charges exceed the authority given to Congress. Congressional power is limited to regulating commerce between states and other things “necessary and proper” to executing that power.[3] Here, the motion alleges that the civil disorder statute impermissibly allows for federal criminal prosecution of intrastate, noneconomic activity, which is outside the limited scope of congressional authority to regulate commerce between the states.· Argued that the statute is impermissibly over-broad and criminalizes activities protected by the First Amendment.[4]· Asked for a bill of particulars to defend against the civil disorder charge. The purpose of this is to “inform the defendant of the charge against him (sic) with sufficient precision to allow him (sic) to prepare his (sic) defense.” The motion alleges that “[N]either the indictment or the indictment memorandum sufficiently states the government’s accusation as to the necessary element of interstate commerce, the element which would confer jurisdiction.” The motion asks the Court to require the government to explain how the allegations relate to interstate commerce, which is a requirement for jurisdiction to prosecute the case. · Filed a standard motion to know what evidence of her “character” the prosecution might use.[5]
The judge ordered the government to respond by 2/23/24, the defendants to respond by 3/1/24, and the court to respond by 3/30/24. Trial is likely to follow in the spring or summer of 2024. Note: the government asked for, and received, and extension for their response. See revised timeline.
[1] See, Department of Justice, Office of Inspector General Audit of the Department of Justice’s Strategy to Address the Domestic Violent Extremist Threat released in June 2023. Refer to Page 3, Figure 1.[2] More information on the Jencks Act is here.[3] Even though the conduct alleged does not seem to involve interstate commercial activity, the Commerce Clause is the legal basis for the statutes selected by the prosecutor. In reaction to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1968 congressional conservatives demanded a reciprocal but conservative corollary and passed Section 231(a)(3) as a reactionary measure to punish protestors. Krystal’s filing questions the scope of Congress’s statutory ability to criminalize people who engage in protest. [4] For more context on how prosecutors have been using civil disturbance statutes from the Wounded Knee Occupation of 1973 to the George Floyd uprisings in 2020, see The Federal Government’s Aggressive Prosecution of Protestors, Lawfare, July 13, 2020.[5] This motion is pursuant to Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b), which is the federal rule detailing to the admissibility of evidence related to a defendant’s “character” at trial.
Write to Peppy
Let’s make sure Peppy knows just how much support he has from all over the country and all over the world! Whether you sit down and write him one evening or get together with friends and all send him letters of support and solidarity! Never forget just how much each and every letter will mean day after day, week after week!
To write to Peppy, address the mail to:
Butler County Prison
c/o Brian DiPippa
#42322 PO Box 9156
Seminole, FL 33775-9156(All mail sent to the Butler County Prison has to get sent to that Florida spot where it’ll get scanned and then prisoners at Butler read it on a screen.)
Please be careful what you include in your letter to Peppy. Since he’s pre-trial and all mail will be monitored please don’t ask him about the case. Discussing any aspect of the case could come back to haunt him at any stage while the case is open. But don’t be afraid to let him know about a hike you just went on or a meal you just made with friends! The details of such events will help him get away from the isolation that he faces every day!
NYC ABC has a page on their website that serves as a great intro for anyone who has not written to a political prisoner before. Check it out before writing to Peppy for some helpful hints! nycabc.wordpress.com/write-a-letter/
As your’re sitting down to write that first letter to Peppy please know he’s looking forward to hearing from any and all supporters! And if you’re wondering what to write make note that Peppy really likes skateboarding, comedy, and uplifting and heartwarming stories. Autumn is his favorite season, so beautiful descriptions of the changing colors we see in Pittsburgh or wherever you may be writing him from would really hit the spot. As for Pittsburgh specifically and the aesthetically pleasing aspects of this city, he’d love to hear about your favorite spots. Maybe it’s one of the bridges or the city steps that go up hillsides! Peppy also likes hearing about and learning about people and places all over the globe. So, feel free to reach out and connect on any of those topics!
Solidarity!
https://jerseycounterinfo.noblogs.org/free-peppy-and-krystal/
#42322 #Analysis #Anarchism #Antifascist #general #MutualAid #news #PrisonSupportPrisonAbolition #solidarity
-
Anonymous Submission to Jersey Counter-Info
More information on how to support Peppy and Krystal can be found on their support site.
Peppy and Krystal are two Pittsburgh community activists who are facing trumped up political charges on the federal level. Peppy has been locked up since they were indicted in June of 2023. Krystal is out on pretrial conditions.
Jury trial set for September 9th at the federal courthouse in Pittsburgh, PA.
Case Summary
In the early hours of May 19th, 2023, heavily-armed agents raided the home of two Pittsburgh community members, Brian “Peppy” DiPippa and Krystal DiPippa. Nearly a month and a half later, they were both federally indicted, and on June 30th, they surrendered to the court. Krystal, who was released on probation the same day, faces charges of (1) conspiracy and (2) obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder. Peppy was detained and has remained imprisoned at the time of this writing (March 2024). He faces charges of (1) conspiracy, (2) obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder, and (3) use of explosive to commit a federal felony. Peppy is incarcerated at a facility that does not provide any outdoor space whatsoever.
Because of the complicated nature of federal sentencing guidelines, we can’t know what the actual legal consequences are for these charges. Since our friends are being charged with conspiracy as co-defendants, they could face equal amounts of prison time in a range that could very well go beyond 10 years. We’ve been told that if convicted, Krystal’s sentence will probably be lower than Peppy’s.
The case against Peppy and Krystal (US v. DiPippa et al.) arose out of an April 18, 2023, demonstration against a University of Pittsburgh-sanctioned event promoting hatred toward transgender people and communities, featuring notorious transphobes Brad Polumbo and Michael Knowles on the question “should transgenderism be regulated by law?” The government alleges that in the protests outside the event, a “civil disorder” occurred, when one commercially available firework and two homemade “smoke bombs” were discharged. This “civil disorder” forms the context in which Krystal and Pep are charged. Click here for more specifics on the timeline and legal situation.
Analysis
The federal government’s targeting of Krystal and Peppy is political, plain and simple.
Even before the April 18th protest, FBI agents secretly followed our friends and used tactics straight out of the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) playbook to manufacture justification for the May 19th raid. Amongst other stalking schemes, federal agents performed a warrantless search of Peppy and Krystal’s garbage, in which they allegedly found a discarded pamphlet about the movement to Stop Cop City. Direct from the government’s search warrant affidavit: “the “Defend the Atlanta Forest” movement has been active since approximately April 2021 and involves protesters unlawfully occupying a wooded area of land where the city plans to build a police training facility.” In the unwarranted trash search, federal agencies allegedly found “a printed zine… discussing anarchist ideology.” It is important to note that in the affidavit for a search warrant, the FBI described their following of Peppy and Krystal beginning a week before the April 18th protest – that is, a week before any allegation of any law being broken. The FBI’s use of a Stop Cop City pamphlet to justify an aggressive raid on alleged Pittsburgh political activists draws a direct line from the federal crackdown on Atlanta-area organizers to the government’s national strategy of repression.
In its prosecution, the feds have continued trying to criminalize alleged political beliefs, retaliate for alleged participation in the April 18th protest, and intimidate others from protesting and/or supporting the rights and existence of transgender people. During court proceedings, the prosecution has continued to dramatize the political dimension of the case, and the judge cited these arguments in his Novemeber ruling to keep Peppy in pre-trial imprisonment with no possibility of bail. Specific criminal wrongdoing played a minimal role at that hearing: rather than dwelling on the state’s circumstantial evidence, the prosecution castigated Peppy for “a strongly held belief system that embraces anarchism” and for feeling “a sense of community, among anarchists.” The judge cited “sentiments supporting anarchism” as a key component to justify continued detention.
This political focus, which was already evident in the state’s earlier written filings and their use of the problematic acronym “AGAAVE” (anti-government and anti-authority violent extremist), continues a legacy of repression against perceived dissidents while showing anxiety about the strength of their evidence of criminal wrongdoing in this particular case.
Case Timeline and Details
Timeline (we will keep this updated as the case develops)
4/18/23: Transphobes speak at Pitt, community members protest.
5/19/23: With guns drawn, FBI agents along with police from various local agencies raid Peppy and Krystal’s home in the early morning. They were detained for several hours before being told they were free to leave.
6/29/23: Krystal and Peppy are notified by their lawyers that they are being federally indicted and are to turn themselves in the next day.
6/30/23: Krystal and Peppy surrender. They are held in custody until appearing before the magistrate to enter not guilty pleas. Peppy is ordered to remain in pretrial detention and taken to Butler County Prison. Krystal is granted pretrial release with conditions.
7/3/23: Hearing before the magistrate appealing the detention order. The appeal is denied and Peppy remains in custody.
10/26/23: Judge denies Peppy’s release from pretrial detention, with no bail option.
2/1/24: Counsel for Krystal and Peppy file extensive pre-trial motions requesting to review potential evidence, and for the court to discuss the case due to government misconduct and misapplication of statutes.
2/23/24: Judge grants the prosecution an extension and sets a revised timeline:
3/4/24: Government response to defense’s pre-trial motions due
3/11/24: Defense reply due
4/10/24: Decision from court
5/31/24: Rule 16 discovery and requested expert disclosures due
7/1/24: Expert Reports due
8/9/24: Government’s trial exhibits, exhibit list, witness list, and proposed jury instructions and verdict slip all due by
8/16/24: Objections and motions in limine due
8/23/24: responses to motions in limine due by
8/26/24: Rule 404(b) and Rule 609 material due
9/4/24: Pretrial Conference is set for
9/9/24: Jury Selection and Trial are set to begin on
Legal pre-trial arguments- Peppy
Peppy’s case, number 2:23-cr-00146-NR-1 (docket here), charges him with three counts: (1) 18 U.S.C. 371 conspiracy; (2) 18 U.S.C. 2 & 231(a)(3) obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder; and (3) 18 U.S.C. 844(h)(1) use of explosive to commit a federal felony. He has filed two motions to dismiss.
2/1/24: The motion to dismiss the entire case due to Selective Prosecution states that prosecutors made the decision on the basis of alleged political beliefs and associations that are statutorily and constitutionally protected.The prosecution’s theory is that Mr. DiPippa holds “AGAAVE” (anti-government and anti-authority violent extremist) beliefs that merit prosecution. The FBI applies its “AGAAVE” acronym to people with ideological agendas derived from anti-government or anti-authority sentiment, including opposition to perceived economic, social, or racial hierarchies; or perceived government overreach, negligence, or illegitimacy.
The FBI defines Anarchist Violent Extremists as people “who oppose all forms of capitalism, globalization, and governing institutions which are perceived as harmful to society.”[1]
Peppy’s motion to Dismiss Count 2 (obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder) argues that the civil disorder statute is overbroad and unconstitutionally vague because it’s imprecise; its subjective standards fail to provide fair notice to the public as to what is constitutionally protected and what criminalized; and it creates significant risk of arbitrary enforcement. The motion argues that statute’s phrasing is so broad and indefinite that it may interfere with and criminalize First Amendment protected speech and expressive activities.
Peppy also filed numerous motions related to discovery (the process of gathering and exchange of evidence). These include:· Moving to suppress electronic evidence or return of property seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment.· Asking the judge to order the government to reveal confidential informant(s) and any favorable treatment they have received from the government.· Asking the court to order federal and state investigative and law enforcement agents to produce: their notes; materials covered by Rule 16, such as surveillance (mail cover, electronic, photographic, mechanical, visual, aural or any other type) and all documents, photographs, and recordings; written or oral statements covered by the Jencks act[2]; evidence contemplated in Rule 404 and 609 covering acts of misconduct other than those specified in the indictment; and exculpatory evidence that could assist with the defense (otherwise known as Brady material).
Legal pre-trial arguments – Krystal
Krystal’s case, charges her with (1) 18 U.S.C. 371 conspiracy; and (2) 18 U.S.C. 2 & 231(a)(3) obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder.
Krystal asked the court for all the motions Peppy filed to apply to her. Additionally, Krystal’s filings:
· Moved to dismiss the indictment, (need a direct url to court listener filing once it is showing on court listener -there were technical issues) arguing that the “obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder” statute charges exceed the authority given to Congress. Congressional power is limited to regulating commerce between states and other things “necessary and proper” to executing that power.[3] Here, the motion alleges that the civil disorder statute impermissibly allows for federal criminal prosecution of intrastate, noneconomic activity, which is outside the limited scope of congressional authority to regulate commerce between the states.· Argued that the statute is impermissibly over-broad and criminalizes activities protected by the First Amendment.[4]· Asked for a bill of particulars to defend against the civil disorder charge. The purpose of this is to “inform the defendant of the charge against him (sic) with sufficient precision to allow him (sic) to prepare his (sic) defense.” The motion alleges that “[N]either the indictment or the indictment memorandum sufficiently states the government’s accusation as to the necessary element of interstate commerce, the element which would confer jurisdiction.” The motion asks the Court to require the government to explain how the allegations relate to interstate commerce, which is a requirement for jurisdiction to prosecute the case. · Filed a standard motion to know what evidence of her “character” the prosecution might use.[5]
The judge ordered the government to respond by 2/23/24, the defendants to respond by 3/1/24, and the court to respond by 3/30/24. Trial is likely to follow in the spring or summer of 2024. Note: the government asked for, and received, and extension for their response. See revised timeline.
[1] See, Department of Justice, Office of Inspector General Audit of the Department of Justice’s Strategy to Address the Domestic Violent Extremist Threat released in June 2023. Refer to Page 3, Figure 1.[2] More information on the Jencks Act is here.[3] Even though the conduct alleged does not seem to involve interstate commercial activity, the Commerce Clause is the legal basis for the statutes selected by the prosecutor. In reaction to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1968 congressional conservatives demanded a reciprocal but conservative corollary and passed Section 231(a)(3) as a reactionary measure to punish protestors. Krystal’s filing questions the scope of Congress’s statutory ability to criminalize people who engage in protest. [4] For more context on how prosecutors have been using civil disturbance statutes from the Wounded Knee Occupation of 1973 to the George Floyd uprisings in 2020, see The Federal Government’s Aggressive Prosecution of Protestors, Lawfare, July 13, 2020.[5] This motion is pursuant to Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b), which is the federal rule detailing to the admissibility of evidence related to a defendant’s “character” at trial.
Write to Peppy
Let’s make sure Peppy knows just how much support he has from all over the country and all over the world! Whether you sit down and write him one evening or get together with friends and all send him letters of support and solidarity! Never forget just how much each and every letter will mean day after day, week after week!
To write to Peppy, address the mail to:
Butler County Prison
c/o Brian DiPippa
#42322 PO Box 9156
Seminole, FL 33775-9156(All mail sent to the Butler County Prison has to get sent to that Florida spot where it’ll get scanned and then prisoners at Butler read it on a screen.)
Please be careful what you include in your letter to Peppy. Since he’s pre-trial and all mail will be monitored please don’t ask him about the case. Discussing any aspect of the case could come back to haunt him at any stage while the case is open. But don’t be afraid to let him know about a hike you just went on or a meal you just made with friends! The details of such events will help him get away from the isolation that he faces every day!
NYC ABC has a page on their website that serves as a great intro for anyone who has not written to a political prisoner before. Check it out before writing to Peppy for some helpful hints! nycabc.wordpress.com/write-a-letter/
As your’re sitting down to write that first letter to Peppy please know he’s looking forward to hearing from any and all supporters! And if you’re wondering what to write make note that Peppy really likes skateboarding, comedy, and uplifting and heartwarming stories. Autumn is his favorite season, so beautiful descriptions of the changing colors we see in Pittsburgh or wherever you may be writing him from would really hit the spot. As for Pittsburgh specifically and the aesthetically pleasing aspects of this city, he’d love to hear about your favorite spots. Maybe it’s one of the bridges or the city steps that go up hillsides! Peppy also likes hearing about and learning about people and places all over the globe. So, feel free to reach out and connect on any of those topics!
Solidarity!
https://jerseycounterinfo.noblogs.org/free-peppy-and-krystal/
#42322 #Analysis #Anarchism #Antifascist #general #MutualAid #news #PrisonSupportPrisonAbolition #solidarity
-
As I think I mentioned recently (in my LispNYC talk?), McCarthy, at least by time of the standards, wanted there not to be any single dialect of Lisp that claimed the unadorned name Lisp. So there was syntactic room for dialects to compete.
There was discussion in design of EuLisp, an influence on ISLISP, about layers. EuLisp had 3 layers, I think. That layering didn't make it into ISLISP. I don't recall it being proposed for CL, though I might be forgetting at this point.
It was never clear to me, though I was not part of their community, whether the underlying language was a subset of, or just an implementation language for, the surface language.
My only very concrete memory was that someone wanted some transform T such that L1 = T(L0) to be applied at some point. Maybe this came up in the CL macros committee. I was pretty adamant that CL did not need macro "hygiene" like Scheme has.
The urgency of that is due to Scheme's choice of being what I called a Lisp1 (the names Lisp1 and Lisp2 in this context are no relation to versioning you referred to in reference to Lisp 1.5, but are abstract categories that address how many variable namespaces are in the language).
Various characteristics of CL, including but not limited to being a Lisp2, helped insulate it from name collisions in the macro system, so the macro system didn't need to have formal hygiene like in scheme, or so I claimed.
I don't think the CL community wanted to change its macro system. Indeed I'd go so far as to say the easy writing of macros is strongly correlated with the rapid success of the family of Lisps that became CL. Breaking something that was succeeding wildly seemed ill-advised, or at least that's how I perceived things. Obviously this was a community discussion.
The fact of a package system rather than a lexical module system was also relevant to this. It's a subtle issue, but important. Scheme is a language defined by its programs' texts. In Common Lisp, the language semantics is on objects.
Speaking only very approximately here for brevity, the compiler operates on lists made of conses and symbols, not text made of parens and alphanumeric tokens. So there need be no source text in CL. Gensyms can easily be created by macros for variable names in CL, something you can't do in Scheme without help of a hygienic macro system to do rewrites for you. The use of gensyms further insulates macros from name collisions that would be routine in scheme if it had a CL-style macro system.
I think the way in which the package system, the macro system, and the namespacing form a kind of ecosystem is ill-understood by most users, even though they're comfortable with the effect. It only matters to understand it if someone suggests changing one of these without changing the others.
It's sometimes hard for someone from the Scheme community to understand why macro hygiene isn't needed in CL if they don't get how packages are fundamentally different than lexical namespacing. So they propose isolated changes thinking it will solve a problem that isn't really there. It's also hard for them to get why CL users see such proposals as adding complexity rather than removing it.
Goung one level meta, it's worth observing that there are not good language features and bad language features, but good within a context or bad within a context. People sometimes get a feature they like and want to impose it on other languages, not seeing that's harmonious in some and not others.
Context matters in assessing abstracts like goodness. It's the harmony of the ecosystem that matters. Adopting change, even well-meaning change, can be very disruptive, sometimes causing unexpected cascade effects (and community cost in both dollars and happiness) one doesn't realize will be needed.
Some of this is covered in the paper Gabriel and I wrote called Technical Issues of Separation in Function Cells and Value Cells. We were tasked by X3J13 to write such a thing because we disagreed on how things should go and between the two of us would likely hit all the issues. :) If you read carefully, you'll see the paper is a kind of debate between us where one would say something and the other would say "yeah, but.." and inject counterpoint. (This is the origin of the namespacing categories Lisp1/Lisp2. Also, the original paper, titled just Issues of Separation in Function Cells and Value Cells was longer and more X3J13-specific. We tightened it up for journal publication, mostly at Gabriel's insistence, as "Technical Issues..." to emphasize some dropped politics.) https://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Technical-Issues.html
I may be far afield and I have no idea if that answers your question or just creates more questions, so I'll stop. :)
#CommonLisp #EuLisp #ISLISP #Lisp #Macros #HygienicMacros #LanguageDesign #Standardization
-
As I think I mentioned recently (in my LispNYC talk?), McCarthy, at least by time of the standards, wanted there not to be any single dialect of Lisp that claimed the unadorned name Lisp. So there was syntactic room for dialects to compete.
There was discussion in design of EuLisp, an influence on ISLISP, about layers. EuLisp had 3 layers, I think. That layering didn't make it into ISLISP. I don't recall it being proposed for CL, though I might be forgetting at this point.
It was never clear to me, though I was not part of their community, whether the underlying language was a subset of, or just an implementation language for, the surface language.
My only very concrete memory was that someone wanted some transform T such that L1 = T(L0) to be applied at some point. Maybe this came up in the CL macros committee. I was pretty adamant that CL did not need macro "hygiene" like Scheme has.
The urgency of that is due to Scheme's choice of being what I called a Lisp1 (the names Lisp1 and Lisp2 in this context are no relation to versioning you referred to in reference to Lisp 1.5, but are abstract categories that address how many variable namespaces are in the language).
Various characteristics of CL, including but not limited to being a Lisp2, helped insulate it from name collisions in the macro system, so the macro system didn't need to have formal hygiene like in scheme, or so I claimed.
I don't think the CL community wanted to change its macro system. Indeed I'd go so far as to say the easy writing of macros is strongly correlated with the rapid success of the family of Lisps that became CL. Breaking something that was succeeding wildly seemed ill-advised, or at least that's how I perceived things. Obviously this was a community discussion.
The fact of a package system rather than a lexical module system was also relevant to this. It's a subtle issue, but important. Scheme is a language defined by its programs' texts. In Common Lisp, the language semantics is on objects.
Speaking only very approximately here for brevity, the compiler operates on lists made of conses and symbols, not text made of parens and alphanumeric tokens. So there need be no source text in CL. Gensyms can easily be created by macros for variable names in CL, something you can't do in Scheme without help of a hygienic macro system to do rewrites for you. The use of gensyms further insulates macros from name collisions that would be routine in scheme if it had a CL-style macro system.
I think the way in which the package system, the macro system, and the namespacing form a kind of ecosystem is ill-understood by most users, even though they're comfortable with the effect. It only matters to understand it if someone suggests changing one of these without changing the others.
It's sometimes hard for someone from the Scheme community to understand why macro hygiene isn't needed in CL if they don't get how packages are fundamentally different than lexical namespacing. So they propose isolated changes thinking it will solve a problem that isn't really there. It's also hard for them to get why CL users see such proposals as adding complexity rather than removing it.
Goung one level meta, it's worth observing that there are not good language features and bad language features, but good within a context or bad within a context. People sometimes get a feature they like and want to impose it on other languages, not seeing that's harmonious in some and not others.
Context matters in assessing abstracts like goodness. It's the harmony of the ecosystem that matters. Adopting change, even well-meaning change, can be very disruptive, sometimes causing unexpected cascade effects (and community cost in both dollars and happiness) one doesn't realize will be needed.
Some of this is covered in the paper Gabriel and I wrote called Technical Issues of Separation in Function Cells and Value Cells. We were tasked by X3J13 to write such a thing because we disagreed on how things should go and between the two of us would likely hit all the issues. :) If you read carefully, you'll see the paper is a kind of debate between us where one would say something and the other would say "yeah, but.." and inject counterpoint. (This is the origin of the namespacing categories Lisp1/Lisp2. Also, the original paper, titled just Issues of Separation in Function Cells and Value Cells was longer and more X3J13-specific. We tightened it up for journal publication, mostly at Gabriel's insistence, as "Technical Issues..." to emphasize some dropped politics.) https://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Technical-Issues.html
I may be far afield and I have no idea if that answers your question or just creates more questions, so I'll stop. :)
#CommonLisp #EuLisp #ISLISP #Lisp #Macros #HygienicMacros #LanguageDesign #Standardization
-
As I think I mentioned recently (in my LispNYC talk?), McCarthy, at least by time of the standards, wanted there not to be any single dialect of Lisp that claimed the unadorned name Lisp. So there was syntactic room for dialects to compete.
There was discussion in design of EuLisp, an influence on ISLISP, about layers. EuLisp had 3 layers, I think. That layering didn't make it into ISLISP. I don't recall it being proposed for CL, though I might be forgetting at this point.
It was never clear to me, though I was not part of their community, whether the underlying language was a subset of, or just an implementation language for, the surface language.
My only very concrete memory was that someone wanted some transform T such that L1 = T(L0) to be applied at some point. Maybe this came up in the CL macros committee. I was pretty adamant that CL did not need macro "hygiene" like Scheme has.
The urgency of that is due to Scheme's choice of being what I called a Lisp1 (the names Lisp1 and Lisp2 in this context are no relation to versioning you referred to in reference to Lisp 1.5, but are abstract categories that address how many variable namespaces are in the language).
Various characteristics of CL, including but not limited to being a Lisp2, helped insulate it from name collisions in the macro system, so the macro system didn't need to have formal hygiene like in scheme, or so I claimed.
I don't think the CL community wanted to change its macro system. Indeed I'd go so far as to say the easy writing of macros is strongly correlated with the rapid success of the family of Lisps that became CL. Breaking something that was succeeding wildly seemed ill-advised, or at least that's how I perceived things. Obviously this was a community discussion.
The fact of a package system rather than a lexical module system was also relevant to this. It's a subtle issue, but important. Scheme is a language defined by its programs' texts. In Common Lisp, the language semantics is on objects.
Speaking only very approximately here for brevity, the compiler operates on lists made of conses and symbols, not text made of parens and alphanumeric tokens. So there need be no source text in CL. Gensyms can easily be created by macros for variable names in CL, something you can't do in Scheme without help of a hygienic macro system to do rewrites for you. The use of gensyms further insulates macros from name collisions that would be routine in scheme if it had a CL-style macro system.
I think the way in which the package system, the macro system, and the namespacing form a kind of ecosystem is ill-understood by most users, even though they're comfortable with the effect. It only matters to understand it if someone suggests changing one of these without changing the others.
It's sometimes hard for someone from the Scheme community to understand why macro hygiene isn't needed in CL if they don't get how packages are fundamentally different than lexical namespacing. So they propose isolated changes thinking it will solve a problem that isn't really there. It's also hard for them to get why CL users see such proposals as adding complexity rather than removing it.
Goung one level meta, it's worth observing that there are not good language features and bad language features, but good within a context or bad within a context. People sometimes get a feature they like and want to impose it on other languages, not seeing that's harmonious in some and not others.
Context matters in assessing abstracts like goodness. It's the harmony of the ecosystem that matters. Adopting change, even well-meaning change, can be very disruptive, sometimes causing unexpected cascade effects (and community cost in both dollars and happiness) one doesn't realize will be needed.
Some of this is covered in the paper Gabriel and I wrote called Technical Issues of Separation in Function Cells and Value Cells. We were tasked by X3J13 to write such a thing because we disagreed on how things should go and between the two of us would likely hit all the issues. :) If you read carefully, you'll see the paper is a kind of debate between us where one would say something and the other would say "yeah, but.." and inject counterpoint. (This is the origin of the namespacing categories Lisp1/Lisp2. Also, the original paper, titled just Issues of Separation in Function Cells and Value Cells was longer and more X3J13-specific. We tightened it up for journal publication, mostly at Gabriel's insistence, as "Technical Issues..." to emphasize some dropped politics.) https://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Technical-Issues.html
I may be far afield and I have no idea if that answers your question or just creates more questions, so I'll stop. :)
#CommonLisp #EuLisp #ISLISP #Lisp #Macros #HygienicMacros #LanguageDesign #Standardization
-
As I think I mentioned recently (in my LispNYC talk?), McCarthy, at least by time of the standards, wanted there not to be any single dialect of Lisp that claimed the unadorned name Lisp. So there was syntactic room for dialects to compete.
There was discussion in design of EuLisp, an influence on ISLISP, about layers. EuLisp had 3 layers, I think. That layering didn't make it into ISLISP. I don't recall it being proposed for CL, though I might be forgetting at this point.
It was never clear to me, though I was not part of their community, whether the underlying language was a subset of, or just an implementation language for, the surface language.
My only very concrete memory was that someone wanted some transform T such that L1 = T(L0) to be applied at some point. Maybe this came up in the CL macros committee. I was pretty adamant that CL did not need macro "hygiene" like Scheme has.
The urgency of that is due to Scheme's choice of being what I called a Lisp1 (the names Lisp1 and Lisp2 in this context are no relation to versioning you referred to in reference to Lisp 1.5, but are abstract categories that address how many variable namespaces are in the language).
Various characteristics of CL, including but not limited to being a Lisp2, helped insulate it from name collisions in the macro system, so the macro system didn't need to have formal hygiene like in scheme, or so I claimed.
I don't think the CL community wanted to change its macro system. Indeed I'd go so far as to say the easy writing of macros is strongly correlated with the rapid success of the family of Lisps that became CL. Breaking something that was succeeding wildly seemed ill-advised, or at least that's how I perceived things. Obviously this was a community discussion.
The fact of a package system rather than a lexical module system was also relevant to this. It's a subtle issue, but important. Scheme is a language defined by its programs' texts. In Common Lisp, the language semantics is on objects.
Speaking only very approximately here for brevity, the compiler operates on lists made of conses and symbols, not text made of parens and alphanumeric tokens. So there need be no source text in CL. Gensyms can easily be created by macros for variable names in CL, something you can't do in Scheme without help of a hygienic macro system to do rewrites for you. The use of gensyms further insulates macros from name collisions that would be routine in scheme if it had a CL-style macro system.
I think the way in which the package system, the macro system, and the namespacing form a kind of ecosystem is ill-understood by most users, even though they're comfortable with the effect. It only matters to understand it if someone suggests changing one of these without changing the others.
It's sometimes hard for someone from the Scheme community to understand why macro hygiene isn't needed in CL if they don't get how packages are fundamentally different than lexical namespacing. So they propose isolated changes thinking it will solve a problem that isn't really there. It's also hard for them to get why CL users see such proposals as adding complexity rather than removing it.
Goung one level meta, it's worth observing that there are not good language features and bad language features, but good within a context or bad within a context. People sometimes get a feature they like and want to impose it on other languages, not seeing that's harmonious in some and not others.
Context matters in assessing abstracts like goodness. It's the harmony of the ecosystem that matters. Adopting change, even well-meaning change, can be very disruptive, sometimes causing unexpected cascade effects (and community cost in both dollars and happiness) one doesn't realize will be needed.
Some of this is covered in the paper Gabriel and I wrote called Technical Issues of Separation in Function Cells and Value Cells. We were tasked by X3J13 to write such a thing because we disagreed on how things should go and between the two of us would likely hit all the issues. :) If you read carefully, you'll see the paper is a kind of debate between us where one would say something and the other would say "yeah, but.." and inject counterpoint. (This is the origin of the namespacing categories Lisp1/Lisp2. Also, the original paper, titled just Issues of Separation in Function Cells and Value Cells was longer and more X3J13-specific. We tightened it up for journal publication, mostly at Gabriel's insistence, as "Technical Issues..." to emphasize some dropped politics.) https://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Technical-Issues.html
I may be far afield and I have no idea if that answers your question or just creates more questions, so I'll stop. :)
#CommonLisp #EuLisp #ISLISP #Lisp #Macros #HygienicMacros #LanguageDesign #Standardization
-
As I think I mentioned recently (in my LispNYC talk?), McCarthy, at least by time of the standards, wanted there not to be any single dialect of Lisp that claimed the unadorned name Lisp. So there was syntactic room for dialects to compete.
There was discussion in design of EuLisp, an influence on ISLISP, about layers. EuLisp had 3 layers, I think. That layering didn't make it into ISLISP. I don't recall it being proposed for CL, though I might be forgetting at this point.
It was never clear to me, though I was not part of their community, whether the underlying language was a subset of, or just an implementation language for, the surface language.
My only very concrete memory was that someone wanted some transform T such that L1 = T(L0) to be applied at some point. Maybe this came up in the CL macros committee. I was pretty adamant that CL did not need macro "hygiene" like Scheme has.
The urgency of that is due to Scheme's choice of being what I called a Lisp1 (the names Lisp1 and Lisp2 in this context are no relation to versioning you referred to in reference to Lisp 1.5, but are abstract categories that address how many variable namespaces are in the language).
Various characteristics of CL, including but not limited to being a Lisp2, helped insulate it from name collisions in the macro system, so the macro system didn't need to have formal hygiene like in scheme, or so I claimed.
I don't think the CL community wanted to change its macro system. Indeed I'd go so far as to say the easy writing of macros is strongly correlated with the rapid success of the family of Lisps that became CL. Breaking something that was succeeding wildly seemed ill-advised, or at least that's how I perceived things. Obviously this was a community discussion.
The fact of a package system rather than a lexical module system was also relevant to this. It's a subtle issue, but important. Scheme is a language defined by its programs' texts. In Common Lisp, the language semantics is on objects.
Speaking only very approximately here for brevity, the compiler operates on lists made of conses and symbols, not text made of parens and alphanumeric tokens. So there need be no source text in CL. Gensyms can easily be created by macros for variable names in CL, something you can't do in Scheme without help of a hygienic macro system to do rewrites for you. The use of gensyms further insulates macros from name collisions that would be routine in scheme if it had a CL-style macro system.
I think the way in which the package system, the macro system, and the namespacing form a kind of ecosystem is ill-understood by most users, even though they're comfortable with the effect. It only matters to understand it if someone suggests changing one of these without changing the others.
It's sometimes hard for someone from the Scheme community to understand why macro hygiene isn't needed in CL if they don't get how packages are fundamentally different than lexical namespacing. So they propose isolated changes thinking it will solve a problem that isn't really there. It's also hard for them to get why CL users see such proposals as adding complexity rather than removing it.
Goung one level meta, it's worth observing that there are not good language features and bad language features, but good within a context or bad within a context. People sometimes get a feature they like and want to impose it on other languages, not seeing that's harmonious in some and not others.
Context matters in assessing abstracts like goodness. It's the harmony of the ecosystem that matters. Adopting change, even well-meaning change, can be very disruptive, sometimes causing unexpected cascade effects (and community cost in both dollars and happiness) one doesn't realize will be needed.
Some of this is covered in the paper Gabriel and I wrote called Technical Issues of Separation in Function Cells and Value Cells. We were tasked by X3J13 to write such a thing because we disagreed on how things should go and between the two of us would likely hit all the issues. :) If you read carefully, you'll see the paper is a kind of debate between us where one would say something and the other would say "yeah, but.." and inject counterpoint. (This is the origin of the namespacing categories Lisp1/Lisp2. Also, the original paper, titled just Issues of Separation in Function Cells and Value Cells was longer and more X3J13-specific. We tightened it up for journal publication, mostly at Gabriel's insistence, as "Technical Issues..." to emphasize some dropped politics.) https://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Technical-Issues.html
I may be far afield and I have no idea if that answers your question or just creates more questions, so I'll stop. :)
#CommonLisp #EuLisp #ISLISP #Lisp #Macros #HygienicMacros #LanguageDesign #Standardization
-
Staring Evil in the Face: Some Thoughts on Hanson’s “The Other Greeks”
Victor Davis Hanson, The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (The Free Press: New York, 1995)
I hold then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labour of the other. Broad and general as is this assertion, it is fully borne out by history. This is not the proper occasion, but, if it were, it would not be difficult to trace the various devices by which the wealth of all civilized communities has been so unequally divided, and to show by what means so small a share has been allotted to those by whose labour it was produced, and so large a share given to the non-producing classes. The devices are almost innumerable, from the brute force and gross superstition of ancient times, to the subtle and artful fiscal contrivances of modern.
– John C. Calhoun, “Slavery a Positive Good,” 6 February 1837 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Slavery_a_Positive_Good
I finally read The Other Greeks by Victor Davis Hanson in summer 2018. This book, published in 1995, contains an argument that farmers working 9- to 13-acre (20-30 3 to 5 hectare) plots were key to Greek culture wrapped in two rants about the decline of the American family farm and the decadence of American academics. Victor Davis Hanson’s writings on ancient agrarianism are less famous than his political columns and his ideas about Greek warfare, but I enjoyed working through this book. Farming is obviously a topic that Hanson cares deeply about, and because he put so much care into this book I can tell that he sees some of the implications of his argument.
The ancient history in this book is interwoven with the story of a 40 acre farm near Selma, California which the Hansons have held for five generations (only three generations were able to make a living from it, his parents got jobs in town and he tried to keep the farm going after his grandfather retired but found that the only way was to use his salary and royalties from teaching and punditry to subsidize the farm). In his view, both classical Greek and modern US culture were at the best while society was dominated by rural small farmers, and any threat to this class is a threat to freedom and democracy.
To my knowledge, Victor Davis Hanson has never written about why his Swedish great great grandparents were able to take a share of “the richest farmland in the world” for a token price in 1875, just like Wikipedia estimates that the indigenous population of the San Joaquin Valley fell 93% from 1850 to 1900 but falls silent on what exactly happened (today all the nations of the Yokuts are a few thousand strong, about as many as one of the little farming towns Hanson loves).
There is a debate about what share of the population belonged to the traditional property-owning, hoplite-fighting, speaking-in-the-assembly class. If you read this book quickly, you will see that the families with 10 acres or so of land who he calls yeomen made up “half to a third” or “a near majority” of the free male population (pp. 207, 208, 459 et passim). At first that seems like a large proportion, but his yeomen have “small farms for a family and a slave or two” (pp. 207, 208, 459). He estimates 80-100,000 adult citizens, 10,000? adult metics, 80-150,000 slaves, total “perhaps nearly 200,000 adult residents of Attica” in the fifth century BCE (p. 209), and 12,000 hoplites out of 60-000-70,000 adult residents of Boeotia. So Hanson believes that there was a glorious age of freedom as long as Greece was run by “yeomen” farmers, and believes that his “yeomen” families made up 15-22% of the population of Attica and 13,000-25,000 adult men.
Many other experts think this is too high. In “The Myth of the Middle-Class Army” (p. 54), Hans Van Wees estimates that they comprised 9 to 30% of the citizens of Athens (between 3,000 and 10,000 adult men). In another article he argues that there were three slaves for every free person in Athens a few years after the death of Alexander (“Athens’ property classes and population in and before 317 BC: Demetrius and Draco,” Journal of Hellenic Studies (2011) 131 pp. 95-114.) In Men of Bronze, Lin Foxhall argued that there is no sign of a dense network of medium-sized farms in the archaeological record until the end of the sixth century BCE. Part of the dispute is technical issues such as whether half the grain fields were left uncultivated in a given year: Hanson’s “yeomen farms” are smaller than van Wees zeugitai farms because he thinks they could get more from a smaller piece of land, and Hanson relies mostly on literature whereas Foxhall focused on archaeology. But I want to focus on what Hanson is arguing, not whether he is correct.
If you read The Other Greeks carefully, you see that “a third to one half” of the citizens being yeomen farmers translates to a fifth or a sixth of the population. And while Hanson says again and again that he does not like big estates worked by gangs of slaves, in a footnote on page 457 he tells you how these one or two slaves fit into the lives of his yeoman farmers with 10 or 12 acres:
Agricultural slavery, even more than homestead residence, made intensive agriculture possible. It prevented the spread of helotage. It sharply defined the independence and freedom of the rising Greek yeoman in a way not found elsewhere.
And he also admires the way Greek colonists gave each other equal plots of land in a beautiful grid designed with Greek geometrical science (pp. 194-196). He does not have a lot to say about whose land it was before they arrived, but readers of The Western Way of War or Carnage and Culture can get the general idea. When Macedonian or Persian barbarians threaten to conquer “westerners” Hanson launches into a flow of eloquent speech about freedom and slavery, but when “westerners” are about to conquer and murder or enslave foreigners he slips into a flat descriptive mode or just drops the subject. And he is very frank about the tyranny of ancient and modern farmers over their wives (pp. 130-135).
So when you look closely, The Other Greeks is arguing that its wonderful balanced regimes of homesteaders were ruled by about 15-20% of the population. We hear about a widow spinning for piece-work pay in the Iliad, and male and female labourers hired by the year in Hesiod’s Works and Days, but Hanson seems to think it was important for Greek freedom that these lowly free workers were replaced with slaves: he describes the poor Athenians who accepted pay for jury service as “the mob on the dole” (p. 5) and hired farm workers as “shiftless” (p. 70). And he thinks that slaves may well have formed the majority of the population of Attica in this period. That kind of argument that slavery is a positive good and necessary for anyone to live a civilized life was last current before the American Civil War, although Hanson does not approve of large plantations or race-based slavery.
“Agricultural slavery … sharply defined the independence and freedom of the rising Greek yeoman”? I think Hanson has read and understood the ideas of thinkers like Samuel Johnson (“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”) or Edmund Morgan (American Slavery, American Freedom) who observe that people who talk about freedom often mean the freedom to dominate and enslave. He just does not find that kind of freedom despicable.
Underlying and fundamental to our most basic philosophy is our concern and respect for the dignity of the individual. … Upon reflection, it is easy for us to realize that our conception of the dignity of the individual could have originated only in Christianity. … the Christian religion, born on the border of East and West, found its acceptance in the West, and became a part of the heritage and culture of the West, as contrasted to the East of the Orientals. … There are also those in this world who are the devisees of a totally different heritage and with whom we have no identity in either antiquity or modern times…. Our society may well be said to be… the exemplification of the maximum development of the Western civilization…. At the opposite extreme exists the Eastern heritage, different in every essential, not necessarily in a way that it is inferior, but different…. The chasm of difference between the two… is in heritage, the force that shapes the man to form unchangeable, except, if at all, by the infinite passage of time…. Oriental and Hawaiian groups constitute in excess of 70% of Hawaii’s population. This large segment of the population has a heritage… in a word, Eastern…. There is serious doubt in my mind as to whether the Hawaiian people would not be seriously handicapped, possibly even precluded, in defending themselves from such as the communist-dominated Longshoremans Union by the imposition upon them of Western institutions of government, since their heritage has not equipped them to comprehend the philosophy essential to the effective operation of these institutions. … There is even greater doubt in my mind that the Hawaiian people could contribute to the degree of harmony remaining in the conduct of affairs of our Federated Republic…. An abandonment of the United States of America in favor of a United States of America and Pacific— precedenting a United States of the World— would actually benefit no one but toll the death-knell of our Federated Republic…
– US Senator (for South Carolina) Strom Thurmond, a prominent opponent of the Civil Rights Act and supporter of racial segregation who angrily denied that he was a racist, “Against Hawaii Statehood” (1959) https://delong.typepad.com/files/thurmond-hawaii.pdf
In sum, the Greek agrarian city-state had been able to fashion an unusually egalitarian social, political, and military system, but one (like many modern liberal states) closed to the larger, ever-present (and growing) world of have-nots surrounding the polis, the other who desperately wanted the economic and social advantages of polis life. Herein lay the dilemma. To open up the discriminatory gates of polis citizenship was- as modern states have often discovered- to corrupt the carefully constructed equilibrium and the unifying agricultural heritage that had evolved over two centuries of agrarianism. For the Greek geôrgoi to refashion the traditional polis for all residents might just as likely lose it for everyone.
– Victor Davis Hanson, The Other Greeks (1995), p. 364
-To Hanson (and Thurmond) creating the good community for some requires holding others outside or keeping them as hewers of wood and drawers of water. And at some point, whether you define those others in terms of race, “heritage,” religion, or culture is an academic quibble. Most people look, talk, and worship like their parents and schoolmates, so talking about race, culture, or religion lets you exclude the same people. As Roel Konijnendijk has written, Hanson’s vision of the good society is white supremacist in practice, even though he firmly rejects racial theories. If you poke around in the darker corners of the internet, you can find open racists like F. Roger Devlin lecturing him for lacking the courage to push his arguments as far as they can go or begging him to contribute to their journals (both links are to the Wayback Machine- ed.)
One of the reasons for the primacy of violence is that, unlike the industrial world, in the agrarian world wealth can generally be acquired more easily and quickly through coercion and predation than through production. Consequently ‘specialists in violence are generally endowed with a rank higher than that of specialists in production.’
– Moshe Berent, “Anthropology and the Classics: War, Violence, and the Stateless Polis,” The Classical Quarterly 50.1 (2000), p. 258 (thanks Josho Brouwers)
If you know some world history or ethnography, you know that there are plenty of societies where most families have about the same size of house, the same quality of diet, and bury their dead with the same things as most people of the same age and gender (and yes Mr. Thurmond, there were millions of Christians in Egypt, Ethiopia, Syria, and India before the first white Anglo-Saxon Protestant arrived). Those societies were not always organized around patriarchy and private land ownership, and sometimes they even let women work in the fields, but they didn’t leave a lot of writing because until recently the materials were too expensive (and because settler states in the 19th and 20th century often destroyed their records, or just declared them irrelevant so that eventually someone threw out grandpa’s box of old books to make room for a new television). If civilization, however defined, is going to survive this century, I think that self-organized communities of equals committed to humane values are more likely to save it than Hanson’s violent farmers who care about nothing more than passing on the farm better than their father left it to them (and there is a lot of inspiration for those communities in classical Greek texts, just not the bits of those texts which are cited in this book). I think we need to look forward to the way we can make a changing world as consistent with our values as possible, not pump ourselves up with stories of a vanished golden age and higher cultures erasing lower ones. (And The Other Greeks sort of agrees, there is praise for Parent-Teacher Associations and farmers’ co-ops alongside the warnings that political action is useless, your neighbours will steal your water and your vine-props, and the family farm in the United States is doomed). But I think it is important to be frank that our disagreements are not just about what the ancient world was like, but about what kinds of social order are worth defending, and that you can’t divide Hanson’s books into some that describe the past and others which try to change the present.
This blog is not funded by a public-sector pension or The National Review Online, just by my gentle readers
This post was written in ?2018? and edited and scheduled at the beginning of 2020 before the present tragic situation in Europe. I delayed it from its scheduled publication date of 21 March.
Further Reading: If you want works on early agriculture by someone who believes that early Greek and Roman small farmers achieved something special but doesn’t argue that slavery was a positive good, check out the works of Geoffrey Kron (although I am a bit concerned to read a 33 page article on the classical Greek economy which focused on “equality” but does not mention slaves in Greece at all and only mentions serfs in Greece once). Two Oxen Ahead by Paul Halstead sounds fun and describes actual Greek farmers raising staple crops. And if you want a direct attack on this kind of politics, check out Gwynne Dyer’s Waiting for the Canadian Hordes (2004) or Gabriel Schoenfeld’s Sophistry in the Service of Evil (2019).
If I ever publish these ideas in print, I may track down and talk about a passage on “whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically?” in “Editorial: Why the South Must Prevail,” William F. Buckley Jr. ‘s The National Review, 24 August 1957
Edit 2020-04-29: Corrected the figure in hectares (although I don’t have a paper copy of the book available to check)
Edit 2021-04-16: For another statement by a far-right American that the ideal government would be run by the richest 20%, see David Forbes, “The Secret Authoritarian History of Science Fiction” https://www.vice.com/en/article/9ak7y5/the-secret-authoritarian-history-of-science-fiction “In ‘Constitution for Utopia,’ written in 1961, (editor and crank John W.) Campbell (Jr.) argued outright that the best possible government would only allow the wealthy—specifically the wealthiest fifth of the population—to vote.” This essay was reprinted by other hard-right science fiction writers like Jerry Pournelle.
Edit 2021-09-28: converted to block editor after migrating to self-hosted wordpress
Edit 2021-10-21: fixed links which were broken when WordPress introduced the block editor
Edit 2014-08-24: some more threads to pull on the relationship between Greek slavery and Greek freedom
This invites comparison to the frequently noted relationship between the growth of both personal freedom and civic rights, on the one hand, and chattel slavery, on the other, in Greek poleis: these two trends not merely coincided but reinforced each other (Finley (1981), (1998); O. Patterson (1991)).
Walter Scheidel, “Monogamy and Polygyny,” in Beryl Rawson, ed., A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Wiley 2010) pp. 112, 113
#ancient #bookReview #earlyGreekWarfare #modern #settlerColonialism #slavery #victorDavisHanson
-
Staring Evil in the Face: Some Thoughts on Hanson’s “The Other Greeks”
Victor Davis Hanson, The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (The Free Press: New York, 1995)
I hold then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labour of the other. Broad and general as is this assertion, it is fully borne out by history. This is not the proper occasion, but, if it were, it would not be difficult to trace the various devices by which the wealth of all civilized communities has been so unequally divided, and to show by what means so small a share has been allotted to those by whose labour it was produced, and so large a share given to the non-producing classes. The devices are almost innumerable, from the brute force and gross superstition of ancient times, to the subtle and artful fiscal contrivances of modern.
– John C. Calhoun, “Slavery a Positive Good,” 6 February 1837 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Slavery_a_Positive_Good
I finally read The Other Greeks by Victor Davis Hanson in summer 2018. This book, published in 1995, contains an argument that farmers working 9- to 13-acre (20-30 3 to 5 hectare) plots were key to Greek culture wrapped in two rants about the decline of the American family farm and the decadence of American academics. Victor Davis Hanson’s writings on ancient agrarianism are less famous than his political columns and his ideas about Greek warfare, but I enjoyed working through this book. Farming is obviously a topic that Hanson cares deeply about, and because he put so much care into this book I can tell that he sees some of the implications of his argument.
The ancient history in this book is interwoven with the story of a 40 acre farm near Selma, California which the Hansons have held for five generations (only three generations were able to make a living from it, his parents got jobs in town and he tried to keep the farm going after his grandfather retired but found that the only way was to use his salary and royalties from teaching and punditry to subsidize the farm). In his view, both classical Greek and modern US culture were at the best while society was dominated by rural small farmers, and any threat to this class is a threat to freedom and democracy.
To my knowledge, Victor Davis Hanson has never written about why his Swedish great great grandparents were able to take a share of “the richest farmland in the world” for a token price in 1875, just like Wikipedia estimates that the indigenous population of the San Joaquin Valley fell 93% from 1850 to 1900 but falls silent on what exactly happened (today all the nations of the Yokuts are a few thousand strong, about as many as one of the little farming towns Hanson loves).
There is a debate about what share of the population belonged to the traditional property-owning, hoplite-fighting, speaking-in-the-assembly class. If you read this book quickly, you will see that the families with 10 acres or so of land who he calls yeomen made up “half to a third” or “a near majority” of the free male population (pp. 207, 208, 459 et passim). At first that seems like a large proportion, but his yeomen have “small farms for a family and a slave or two” (pp. 207, 208, 459). He estimates 80-100,000 adult citizens, 10,000? adult metics, 80-150,000 slaves, total “perhaps nearly 200,000 adult residents of Attica” in the fifth century BCE (p. 209), and 12,000 hoplites out of 60-000-70,000 adult residents of Boeotia. So Hanson believes that there was a glorious age of freedom as long as Greece was run by “yeomen” farmers, and believes that his “yeomen” families made up 15-22% of the population of Attica and 13,000-25,000 adult men.
Many other experts think this is too high. In “The Myth of the Middle-Class Army” (p. 54), Hans Van Wees estimates that they comprised 9 to 30% of the citizens of Athens (between 3,000 and 10,000 adult men). In another article he argues that there were three slaves for every free person in Athens a few years after the death of Alexander (“Athens’ property classes and population in and before 317 BC: Demetrius and Draco,” Journal of Hellenic Studies (2011) 131 pp. 95-114.) In Men of Bronze, Lin Foxhall argued that there is no sign of a dense network of medium-sized farms in the archaeological record until the end of the sixth century BCE. Part of the dispute is technical issues such as whether half the grain fields were left uncultivated in a given year: Hanson’s “yeomen farms” are smaller than van Wees zeugitai farms because he thinks they could get more from a smaller piece of land, and Hanson relies mostly on literature whereas Foxhall focused on archaeology. But I want to focus on what Hanson is arguing, not whether he is correct.
If you read The Other Greeks carefully, you see that “a third to one half” of the citizens being yeomen farmers translates to a fifth or a sixth of the population. And while Hanson says again and again that he does not like big estates worked by gangs of slaves, in a footnote on page 457 he tells you how these one or two slaves fit into the lives of his yeoman farmers with 10 or 12 acres:
Agricultural slavery, even more than homestead residence, made intensive agriculture possible. It prevented the spread of helotage. It sharply defined the independence and freedom of the rising Greek yeoman in a way not found elsewhere.
And he also admires the way Greek colonists gave each other equal plots of land in a beautiful grid designed with Greek geometrical science (pp. 194-196). He does not have a lot to say about whose land it was before they arrived, but readers of The Western Way of War or Carnage and Culture can get the general idea. When Macedonian or Persian barbarians threaten to conquer “westerners” Hanson launches into a flow of eloquent speech about freedom and slavery, but when “westerners” are about to conquer and murder or enslave foreigners he slips into a flat descriptive mode or just drops the subject. And he is very frank about the tyranny of ancient and modern farmers over their wives (pp. 130-135).
So when you look closely, The Other Greeks is arguing that its wonderful balanced regimes of homesteaders were ruled by about 15-20% of the population. We hear about a widow spinning for piece-work pay in the Iliad, and male and female labourers hired by the year in Hesiod’s Works and Days, but Hanson seems to think it was important for Greek freedom that these lowly free workers were replaced with slaves: he describes the poor Athenians who accepted pay for jury service as “the mob on the dole” (p. 5) and hired farm workers as “shiftless” (p. 70). And he thinks that slaves may well have formed the majority of the population of Attica in this period. That kind of argument that slavery is a positive good and necessary for anyone to live a civilized life was last current before the American Civil War, although Hanson does not approve of large plantations or race-based slavery.
“Agricultural slavery … sharply defined the independence and freedom of the rising Greek yeoman”? I think Hanson has read and understood the ideas of thinkers like Samuel Johnson (“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”) or Edmund Morgan (American Slavery, American Freedom) who observe that people who talk about freedom often mean the freedom to dominate and enslave. He just does not find that kind of freedom despicable.
Underlying and fundamental to our most basic philosophy is our concern and respect for the dignity of the individual. … Upon reflection, it is easy for us to realize that our conception of the dignity of the individual could have originated only in Christianity. … the Christian religion, born on the border of East and West, found its acceptance in the West, and became a part of the heritage and culture of the West, as contrasted to the East of the Orientals. … There are also those in this world who are the devisees of a totally different heritage and with whom we have no identity in either antiquity or modern times…. Our society may well be said to be… the exemplification of the maximum development of the Western civilization…. At the opposite extreme exists the Eastern heritage, different in every essential, not necessarily in a way that it is inferior, but different…. The chasm of difference between the two… is in heritage, the force that shapes the man to form unchangeable, except, if at all, by the infinite passage of time…. Oriental and Hawaiian groups constitute in excess of 70% of Hawaii’s population. This large segment of the population has a heritage… in a word, Eastern…. There is serious doubt in my mind as to whether the Hawaiian people would not be seriously handicapped, possibly even precluded, in defending themselves from such as the communist-dominated Longshoremans Union by the imposition upon them of Western institutions of government, since their heritage has not equipped them to comprehend the philosophy essential to the effective operation of these institutions. … There is even greater doubt in my mind that the Hawaiian people could contribute to the degree of harmony remaining in the conduct of affairs of our Federated Republic…. An abandonment of the United States of America in favor of a United States of America and Pacific— precedenting a United States of the World— would actually benefit no one but toll the death-knell of our Federated Republic…
– US Senator (for South Carolina) Strom Thurmond, a prominent opponent of the Civil Rights Act and supporter of racial segregation who angrily denied that he was a racist, “Against Hawaii Statehood” (1959) https://delong.typepad.com/files/thurmond-hawaii.pdf
In sum, the Greek agrarian city-state had been able to fashion an unusually egalitarian social, political, and military system, but one (like many modern liberal states) closed to the larger, ever-present (and growing) world of have-nots surrounding the polis, the other who desperately wanted the economic and social advantages of polis life. Herein lay the dilemma. To open up the discriminatory gates of polis citizenship was- as modern states have often discovered- to corrupt the carefully constructed equilibrium and the unifying agricultural heritage that had evolved over two centuries of agrarianism. For the Greek geôrgoi to refashion the traditional polis for all residents might just as likely lose it for everyone.
– Victor Davis Hanson, The Other Greeks (1995), p. 364
To Hanson (and Thurmond) creating the good community for some requires holding others outside or keeping them as hewers of wood and drawers of water. And at some point, whether you define those others in terms of race, “heritage,” religion, or culture is an academic quibble. Most people look, talk, and worship like their parents and schoolmates, so talking about race, culture, or religion lets you exclude the same people. As Roel Konijnendijk has written, Hanson’s vision of the good society is white supremacist in practice, even though he firmly rejects racial theories. If you poke around in the darker corners of the internet, you can find open racists like F. Roger Devlin lecturing him for lacking the courage to push his arguments as far as they can go or begging him to contribute to their journals (both links are to the Wayback Machine- ed.)
One of the reasons for the primacy of violence is that, unlike the industrial world, in the agrarian world wealth can generally be acquired more easily and quickly through coercion and predation than through production. Consequently ‘specialists in violence are generally endowed with a rank higher than that of specialists in production.’
– Moshe Berent, “Anthropology and the Classics: War, Violence, and the Stateless Polis,” The Classical Quarterly 50.1 (2000), p. 258 (thanks Josho Brouwers)
If you know some world history or ethnography, you know that there are plenty of societies where most families have about the same size of house, the same quality of diet, and bury their dead with the same things as most people of the same age and gender (and yes Mr. Thurmond, there were millions of Christians in Egypt, Ethiopia, Syria, and India before the first white Anglo-Saxon Protestant arrived). Those societies were not always organized around patriarchy and private land ownership, and sometimes they even let women work in the fields, but they didn’t leave a lot of writing because until recently the materials were too expensive (and because settler states in the 19th and 20th century often destroyed their records, or just declared them irrelevant so that eventually someone threw out grandpa’s box of old books to make room for a new television). If civilization, however defined, is going to survive this century, I think that self-organized communities of equals committed to humane values are more likely to save it than Hanson’s violent farmers who care about nothing more than passing on the farm better than their father left it to them (and there is a lot of inspiration for those communities in classical Greek texts, just not the bits of those texts which are cited in this book). I think we need to look forward to the way we can make a changing world as consistent with our values as possible, not pump ourselves up with stories of a vanished golden age and higher cultures erasing lower ones. (And The Other Greeks sort of agrees, there is praise for Parent-Teacher Associations and farmers’ co-ops alongside the warnings that political action is useless, your neighbours will steal your water and your vine-props, and the family farm in the United States is doomed). But I think it is important to be frank that our disagreements are not just about what the ancient world was like, but about what kinds of social order are worth defending, and that you can’t divide Hanson’s books into some that describe the past and others which try to change the present.
This blog is not funded by a public-sector pension or The National Review Online, just by my gentle readers
This post was written in ?2018? and edited and scheduled at the beginning of 2020 before the present tragic situation in Europe. I delayed it from its scheduled publication date of 21 March.
Further Reading: If you want works on early agriculture by someone who believes that early Greek and Roman small farmers achieved something special but doesn’t argue that slavery was a positive good, check out the works of Geoffrey Kron (although I am a bit concerned to read a 33 page article on the classical Greek economy which focused on “equality” but does not mention slaves in Greece at all and only mentions serfs in Greece once). Two Oxen Ahead by Paul Halstead sounds fun and describes actual Greek farmers raising staple crops. And if you want a direct attack on this kind of politics, check out Gwynne Dyer’s Waiting for the Canadian Hordes (2004) or Gabriel Schoenfeld’s Sophistry in the Service of Evil (2019).
If I ever publish these ideas in print, I may track down and talk about a passage on “whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically?” in “Editorial: Why the South Must Prevail,” William F. Buckley Jr. ‘s The National Review, 24 August 1957
Edit 2020-04-29: Corrected the figure in hectares (although I don’t have a paper copy of the book available to check)
Edit 2021-04-16: For another statement by a far-right American that the ideal government would be run by the richest 20%, see David Forbes, “The Secret Authoritarian History of Science Fiction” https://www.vice.com/en/article/9ak7y5/the-secret-authoritarian-history-of-science-fiction “In ‘Constitution for Utopia,’ written in 1961, (editor and crank John W.) Campbell (Jr.) argued outright that the best possible government would only allow the wealthy—specifically the wealthiest fifth of the population—to vote.” This essay was reprinted by other hard-right science fiction writers like Jerry Pournelle.
Edit 2021-09-28: converted to block editor after migrating to self-hosted wordpress
Edit 2021-10-21: fixed links which were broken when WordPress introduced the block editor
Edit 2014-08-24: some more threads to pull on the relationship between Greek slavery and Greek freedom
This invites comparison to the frequently noted relationship between the growth of both personal freedom and civic rights, on the one hand, and chattel slavery, on the other, in Greek poleis: these two trends not merely coincided but reinforced each other (Finley (1981), (1998); O. Patterson (1991)).
Walter Scheidel, “Monogamy and Polygyny,” in Beryl Rawson, ed., A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Wiley 2010) pp. 112, 113
#ancient #bookReview #earlyGreekWarfare #modern #settlerColonialism #slavery #victorDavisHanson
-
Staring Evil in the Face: Some Thoughts on Hanson’s “The Other Greeks”
Victor Davis Hanson, The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (The Free Press: New York, 1995)
I hold then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labour of the other. Broad and general as is this assertion, it is fully borne out by history. This is not the proper occasion, but, if it were, it would not be difficult to trace the various devices by which the wealth of all civilized communities has been so unequally divided, and to show by what means so small a share has been allotted to those by whose labour it was produced, and so large a share given to the non-producing classes. The devices are almost innumerable, from the brute force and gross superstition of ancient times, to the subtle and artful fiscal contrivances of modern.
– John C. Calhoun, “Slavery a Positive Good,” 6 February 1837 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Slavery_a_Positive_Good
I finally read The Other Greeks by Victor Davis Hanson in summer 2018. This book, published in 1995, contains an argument that farmers working 9- to 13-acre (20-30 3 to 5 hectare) plots were key to Greek culture wrapped in two rants about the decline of the American family farm and the decadence of American academics. Victor Davis Hanson’s writings on ancient agrarianism are less famous than his political columns and his ideas about Greek warfare, but I enjoyed working through this book. Farming is obviously a topic that Hanson cares deeply about, and because he put so much care into this book I can tell that he sees some of the implications of his argument.
The ancient history in this book is interwoven with the story of a 40 acre farm near Selma, California which the Hansons have held for five generations (only three generations were able to make a living from it, his parents got jobs in town and he tried to keep the farm going after his grandfather retired but found that the only way was to use his salary and royalties from teaching and punditry to subsidize the farm). In his view, both classical Greek and modern US culture were at the best while society was dominated by rural small farmers, and any threat to this class is a threat to freedom and democracy.
To my knowledge, Victor Davis Hanson has never written about why his Swedish great great grandparents were able to take a share of “the richest farmland in the world” for a token price in 1875, just like Wikipedia estimates that the indigenous population of the San Joaquin Valley fell 93% from 1850 to 1900 but falls silent on what exactly happened (today all the nations of the Yokuts are a few thousand strong, about as many as one of the little farming towns Hanson loves).
There is a debate about what share of the population belonged to the traditional property-owning, hoplite-fighting, speaking-in-the-assembly class. If you read this book quickly, you will see that the families with 10 acres or so of land who he calls yeomen made up “half to a third” or “a near majority” of the free male population (pp. 207, 208, 459 et passim). At first that seems like a large proportion, but his yeomen have “small farms for a family and a slave or two” (pp. 207, 208, 459). He estimates 80-100,000 adult citizens, 10,000? adult metics, 80-150,000 slaves, total “perhaps nearly 200,000 adult residents of Attica” in the fifth century BCE (p. 209), and 12,000 hoplites out of 60-000-70,000 adult residents of Boeotia. So Hanson believes that there was a glorious age of freedom as long as Greece was run by “yeomen” farmers, and believes that his “yeomen” families made up 15-22% of the population of Attica and 13,000-25,000 adult men.
Many other experts think this is too high. In “The Myth of the Middle-Class Army” (p. 54), Hans Van Wees estimates that they comprised 9 to 30% of the citizens of Athens (between 3,000 and 10,000 adult men). In another article he argues that there were three slaves for every free person in Athens a few years after the death of Alexander (“Athens’ property classes and population in and before 317 BC: Demetrius and Draco,” Journal of Hellenic Studies (2011) 131 pp. 95-114.) In Men of Bronze, Lin Foxhall argued that there is no sign of a dense network of medium-sized farms in the archaeological record until the end of the sixth century BCE. Part of the dispute is technical issues such as whether half the grain fields were left uncultivated in a given year: Hanson’s “yeomen farms” are smaller than van Wees zeugitai farms because he thinks they could get more from a smaller piece of land, and Hanson relies mostly on literature whereas Foxhall focused on archaeology. But I want to focus on what Hanson is arguing, not whether he is correct.
If you read The Other Greeks carefully, you see that “a third to one half” of the citizens being yeomen farmers translates to a fifth or a sixth of the population. And while Hanson says again and again that he does not like big estates worked by gangs of slaves, in a footnote on page 457 he tells you how these one or two slaves fit into the lives of his yeoman farmers with 10 or 12 acres:
Agricultural slavery, even more than homestead residence, made intensive agriculture possible. It prevented the spread of helotage. It sharply defined the independence and freedom of the rising Greek yeoman in a way not found elsewhere.
And he also admires the way Greek colonists gave each other equal plots of land in a beautiful grid designed with Greek geometrical science (pp. 194-196). He does not have a lot to say about whose land it was before they arrived, but readers of The Western Way of War or Carnage and Culture can get the general idea. When Macedonian or Persian barbarians threaten to conquer “westerners” Hanson launches into a flow of eloquent speech about freedom and slavery, but when “westerners” are about to conquer and murder or enslave foreigners he slips into a flat descriptive mode or just drops the subject. And he is very frank about the tyranny of ancient and modern farmers over their wives (pp. 130-135).
So when you look closely, The Other Greeks is arguing that its wonderful balanced regimes of homesteaders were ruled by about 15-20% of the population. We hear about a widow spinning for piece-work pay in the Iliad, and male and female labourers hired by the year in Hesiod’s Works and Days, but Hanson seems to think it was important for Greek freedom that these lowly free workers were replaced with slaves: he describes the poor Athenians who accepted pay for jury service as “the mob on the dole” (p. 5) and hired farm workers as “shiftless” (p. 70). And he thinks that slaves may well have formed the majority of the population of Attica in this period. That kind of argument that slavery is a positive good and necessary for anyone to live a civilized life was last current before the American Civil War, although Hanson does not approve of large plantations or race-based slavery.
“Agricultural slavery … sharply defined the independence and freedom of the rising Greek yeoman”? I think Hanson has read and understood the ideas of thinkers like Samuel Johnson (“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”) or Edmund Morgan (American Slavery, American Freedom) who observe that people who talk about freedom often mean the freedom to dominate and enslave. He just does not find that kind of freedom despicable.
Underlying and fundamental to our most basic philosophy is our concern and respect for the dignity of the individual. … Upon reflection, it is easy for us to realize that our conception of the dignity of the individual could have originated only in Christianity. … the Christian religion, born on the border of East and West, found its acceptance in the West, and became a part of the heritage and culture of the West, as contrasted to the East of the Orientals. … There are also those in this world who are the devisees of a totally different heritage and with whom we have no identity in either antiquity or modern times…. Our society may well be said to be… the exemplification of the maximum development of the Western civilization…. At the opposite extreme exists the Eastern heritage, different in every essential, not necessarily in a way that it is inferior, but different…. The chasm of difference between the two… is in heritage, the force that shapes the man to form unchangeable, except, if at all, by the infinite passage of time…. Oriental and Hawaiian groups constitute in excess of 70% of Hawaii’s population. This large segment of the population has a heritage… in a word, Eastern…. There is serious doubt in my mind as to whether the Hawaiian people would not be seriously handicapped, possibly even precluded, in defending themselves from such as the communist-dominated Longshoremans Union by the imposition upon them of Western institutions of government, since their heritage has not equipped them to comprehend the philosophy essential to the effective operation of these institutions. … There is even greater doubt in my mind that the Hawaiian people could contribute to the degree of harmony remaining in the conduct of affairs of our Federated Republic…. An abandonment of the United States of America in favor of a United States of America and Pacific— precedenting a United States of the World— would actually benefit no one but toll the death-knell of our Federated Republic…
– US Senator (for South Carolina) Strom Thurmond, a prominent opponent of the Civil Rights Act and supporter of racial segregation who angrily denied that he was a racist, “Against Hawaii Statehood” (1959) https://delong.typepad.com/files/thurmond-hawaii.pdf
In sum, the Greek agrarian city-state had been able to fashion an unusually egalitarian social, political, and military system, but one (like many modern liberal states) closed to the larger, ever-present (and growing) world of have-nots surrounding the polis, the other who desperately wanted the economic and social advantages of polis life. Herein lay the dilemma. To open up the discriminatory gates of polis citizenship was- as modern states have often discovered- to corrupt the carefully constructed equilibrium and the unifying agricultural heritage that had evolved over two centuries of agrarianism. For the Greek geôrgoi to refashion the traditional polis for all residents might just as likely lose it for everyone.
– Victor Davis Hanson, The Other Greeks (1995), p. 364
-To Hanson (and Thurmond) creating the good community for some requires holding others outside or keeping them as hewers of wood and drawers of water. And at some point, whether you define those others in terms of race, “heritage,” religion, or culture is an academic quibble. Most people look, talk, and worship like their parents and schoolmates, so talking about race, culture, or religion lets you exclude the same people. As Roel Konijnendijk has written, Hanson’s vision of the good society is white supremacist in practice, even though he firmly rejects racial theories. If you poke around in the darker corners of the internet, you can find open racists like F. Roger Devlin lecturing him for lacking the courage to push his arguments as far as they can go or begging him to contribute to their journals (both links are to the Wayback Machine- ed.)
One of the reasons for the primacy of violence is that, unlike the industrial world, in the agrarian world wealth can generally be acquired more easily and quickly through coercion and predation than through production. Consequently ‘specialists in violence are generally endowed with a rank higher than that of specialists in production.’
– Moshe Berent, “Anthropology and the Classics: War, Violence, and the Stateless Polis,” The Classical Quarterly 50.1 (2000), p. 258 (thanks Josho Brouwers)
If you know some world history or ethnography, you know that there are plenty of societies where most families have about the same size of house, the same quality of diet, and bury their dead with the same things as most people of the same age and gender (and yes Mr. Thurmond, there were millions of Christians in Egypt, Ethiopia, Syria, and India before the first white Anglo-Saxon Protestant arrived). Those societies were not always organized around patriarchy and private land ownership, and sometimes they even let women work in the fields, but they didn’t leave a lot of writing because until recently the materials were too expensive (and because settler states in the 19th and 20th century often destroyed their records, or just declared them irrelevant so that eventually someone threw out grandpa’s box of old books to make room for a new television). If civilization, however defined, is going to survive this century, I think that self-organized communities of equals committed to humane values are more likely to save it than Hanson’s violent farmers who care about nothing more than passing on the farm better than their father left it to them (and there is a lot of inspiration for those communities in classical Greek texts, just not the bits of those texts which are cited in this book). I think we need to look forward to the way we can make a changing world as consistent with our values as possible, not pump ourselves up with stories of a vanished golden age and higher cultures erasing lower ones. (And The Other Greeks sort of agrees, there is praise for Parent-Teacher Associations and farmers’ co-ops alongside the warnings that political action is useless, your neighbours will steal your water and your vine-props, and the family farm in the United States is doomed). But I think it is important to be frank that our disagreements are not just about what the ancient world was like, but about what kinds of social order are worth defending, and that you can’t divide Hanson’s books into some that describe the past and others which try to change the present.
This blog is not funded by a public-sector pension or The National Review Online, just by my gentle readers
This post was written in ?2018? and edited and scheduled at the beginning of 2020 before the present tragic situation in Europe. I delayed it from its scheduled publication date of 21 March.
Further Reading: If you want works on early agriculture by someone who believes that early Greek and Roman small farmers achieved something special but doesn’t argue that slavery was a positive good, check out the works of Geoffrey Kron (although I am a bit concerned to read a 33 page article on the classical Greek economy which focused on “equality” but does not mention slaves in Greece at all and only mentions serfs in Greece once). Two Oxen Ahead by Paul Halstead sounds fun and describes actual Greek farmers raising staple crops. And if you want a direct attack on this kind of politics, check out Gwynne Dyer’s Waiting for the Canadian Hordes (2004) or Gabriel Schoenfeld’s Sophistry in the Service of Evil (2019).
If I ever publish these ideas in print, I may track down and talk about a passage on “whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically?” in “Editorial: Why the South Must Prevail,” William F. Buckley Jr. ‘s The National Review, 24 August 1957
Edit 2020-04-29: Corrected the figure in hectares (although I don’t have a paper copy of the book available to check)
Edit 2021-04-16: For another statement by a far-right American that the ideal government would be run by the richest 20%, see David Forbes, “The Secret Authoritarian History of Science Fiction” https://www.vice.com/en/article/9ak7y5/the-secret-authoritarian-history-of-science-fiction “In ‘Constitution for Utopia,’ written in 1961, (editor and crank John W.) Campbell (Jr.) argued outright that the best possible government would only allow the wealthy—specifically the wealthiest fifth of the population—to vote.” This essay was reprinted by other hard-right science fiction writers like Jerry Pournelle.
Edit 2021-09-28: converted to block editor after migrating to self-hosted wordpress
Edit 2021-10-21: fixed links which were broken when WordPress introduced the block editor
Edit 2014-08-24: some more threads to pull on the relationship between Greek slavery and Greek freedom
This invites comparison to the frequently noted relationship between the growth of both personal freedom and civic rights, on the one hand, and chattel slavery, on the other, in Greek poleis: these two trends not merely coincided but reinforced each other (Finley (1981), (1998); O. Patterson (1991)).
Walter Scheidel, “Monogamy and Polygyny,” in Beryl Rawson, ed., A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Wiley 2010) pp. 112, 113
#ancient #bookReview #earlyGreekWarfare #modern #settlerColonialism #slavery #victorDavisHanson
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Staring Evil in the Face: Some Thoughts on Hanson’s “The Other Greeks”
Victor Davis Hanson, The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (The Free Press: New York, 1995)
I hold then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labour of the other. Broad and general as is this assertion, it is fully borne out by history. This is not the proper occasion, but, if it were, it would not be difficult to trace the various devices by which the wealth of all civilized communities has been so unequally divided, and to show by what means so small a share has been allotted to those by whose labour it was produced, and so large a share given to the non-producing classes. The devices are almost innumerable, from the brute force and gross superstition of ancient times, to the subtle and artful fiscal contrivances of modern.
– John C. Calhoun, “Slavery a Positive Good,” 6 February 1837 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Slavery_a_Positive_Good
I finally read The Other Greeks by Victor Davis Hanson in summer 2018. This book, published in 1995, contains an argument that farmers working 9- to 13-acre (20-30 3 to 5 hectare) plots were key to Greek culture wrapped in two rants about the decline of the American family farm and the decadence of American academics. Victor Davis Hanson’s writings on ancient agrarianism are less famous than his political columns and his ideas about Greek warfare, but I enjoyed working through this book. Farming is obviously a topic that Hanson cares deeply about, and because he put so much care into this book I can tell that he sees some of the implications of his argument.
The ancient history in this book is interwoven with the story of a 40 acre farm near Selma, California which the Hansons have held for five generations (only three generations were able to make a living from it, his parents got jobs in town and he tried to keep the farm going after his grandfather retired but found that the only way was to use his salary and royalties from teaching and punditry to subsidize the farm). In his view, both classical Greek and modern US culture were at the best while society was dominated by rural small farmers, and any threat to this class is a threat to freedom and democracy.
To my knowledge, Victor Davis Hanson has never written about why his Swedish great great grandparents were able to take a share of “the richest farmland in the world” for a token price in 1875, just like Wikipedia estimates that the indigenous population of the San Joaquin Valley fell 93% from 1850 to 1900 but falls silent on what exactly happened (today all the nations of the Yokuts are a few thousand strong, about as many as one of the little farming towns Hanson loves).
There is a debate about what share of the population belonged to the traditional property-owning, hoplite-fighting, speaking-in-the-assembly class. If you read this book quickly, you will see that the families with 10 acres or so of land who he calls yeomen made up “half to a third” or “a near majority” of the free male population (pp. 207, 208, 459 et passim). At first that seems like a large proportion, but his yeomen have “small farms for a family and a slave or two” (pp. 207, 208, 459). He estimates 80-100,000 adult citizens, 10,000? adult metics, 80-150,000 slaves, total “perhaps nearly 200,000 adult residents of Attica” in the fifth century BCE (p. 209), and 12,000 hoplites out of 60-000-70,000 adult residents of Boeotia. So Hanson believes that there was a glorious age of freedom as long as Greece was run by “yeomen” farmers, and believes that his “yeomen” families made up 15-22% of the population of Attica and 13,000-25,000 adult men.
Many other experts think this is too high. In “The Myth of the Middle-Class Army” (p. 54), Hans Van Wees estimates that they comprised 9 to 30% of the citizens of Athens (between 3,000 and 10,000 adult men). In another article he argues that there were three slaves for every free person in Athens a few years after the death of Alexander (“Athens’ property classes and population in and before 317 BC: Demetrius and Draco,” Journal of Hellenic Studies (2011) 131 pp. 95-114.) In Men of Bronze, Lin Foxhall argued that there is no sign of a dense network of medium-sized farms in the archaeological record until the end of the sixth century BCE. Part of the dispute is technical issues such as whether half the grain fields were left uncultivated in a given year: Hanson’s “yeomen farms” are smaller than van Wees zeugitai farms because he thinks they could get more from a smaller piece of land, and Hanson relies mostly on literature whereas Foxhall focused on archaeology. But I want to focus on what Hanson is arguing, not whether he is correct.
If you read The Other Greeks carefully, you see that “a third to one half” of the citizens being yeomen farmers translates to a fifth or a sixth of the population. And while Hanson says again and again that he does not like big estates worked by gangs of slaves, in a footnote on page 457 he tells you how these one or two slaves fit into the lives of his yeoman farmers with 10 or 12 acres:
Agricultural slavery, even more than homestead residence, made intensive agriculture possible. It prevented the spread of helotage. It sharply defined the independence and freedom of the rising Greek yeoman in a way not found elsewhere.
And he also admires the way Greek colonists gave each other equal plots of land in a beautiful grid designed with Greek geometrical science (pp. 194-196). He does not have a lot to say about whose land it was before they arrived, but readers of The Western Way of War or Carnage and Culture can get the general idea. When Macedonian or Persian barbarians threaten to conquer “westerners” Hanson launches into a flow of eloquent speech about freedom and slavery, but when “westerners” are about to conquer and murder or enslave foreigners he slips into a flat descriptive mode or just drops the subject. And he is very frank about the tyranny of ancient and modern farmers over their wives (pp. 130-135).
So when you look closely, The Other Greeks is arguing that its wonderful balanced regimes of homesteaders were ruled by about 15-20% of the population. We hear about a widow spinning for piece-work pay in the Iliad, and male and female labourers hired by the year in Hesiod’s Works and Days, but Hanson seems to think it was important for Greek freedom that these lowly free workers were replaced with slaves: he describes the poor Athenians who accepted pay for jury service as “the mob on the dole” (p. 5) and hired farm workers as “shiftless” (p. 70). And he thinks that slaves may well have formed the majority of the population of Attica in this period. That kind of argument that slavery is a positive good and necessary for anyone to live a civilized life was last current before the American Civil War, although Hanson does not approve of large plantations or race-based slavery.
“Agricultural slavery … sharply defined the independence and freedom of the rising Greek yeoman”? I think Hanson has read and understood the ideas of thinkers like Samuel Johnson (“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”) or Edmund Morgan (American Slavery, American Freedom) who observe that people who talk about freedom often mean the freedom to dominate and enslave. He just does not find that kind of freedom despicable.
Underlying and fundamental to our most basic philosophy is our concern and respect for the dignity of the individual. … Upon reflection, it is easy for us to realize that our conception of the dignity of the individual could have originated only in Christianity. … the Christian religion, born on the border of East and West, found its acceptance in the West, and became a part of the heritage and culture of the West, as contrasted to the East of the Orientals. … There are also those in this world who are the devisees of a totally different heritage and with whom we have no identity in either antiquity or modern times…. Our society may well be said to be… the exemplification of the maximum development of the Western civilization…. At the opposite extreme exists the Eastern heritage, different in every essential, not necessarily in a way that it is inferior, but different…. The chasm of difference between the two… is in heritage, the force that shapes the man to form unchangeable, except, if at all, by the infinite passage of time…. Oriental and Hawaiian groups constitute in excess of 70% of Hawaii’s population. This large segment of the population has a heritage… in a word, Eastern…. There is serious doubt in my mind as to whether the Hawaiian people would not be seriously handicapped, possibly even precluded, in defending themselves from such as the communist-dominated Longshoremans Union by the imposition upon them of Western institutions of government, since their heritage has not equipped them to comprehend the philosophy essential to the effective operation of these institutions. … There is even greater doubt in my mind that the Hawaiian people could contribute to the degree of harmony remaining in the conduct of affairs of our Federated Republic…. An abandonment of the United States of America in favor of a United States of America and Pacific— precedenting a United States of the World— would actually benefit no one but toll the death-knell of our Federated Republic…
– US Senator (for South Carolina) Strom Thurmond, a prominent opponent of the Civil Rights Act and supporter of racial segregation who angrily denied that he was a racist, “Against Hawaii Statehood” (1959) https://delong.typepad.com/files/thurmond-hawaii.pdf
In sum, the Greek agrarian city-state had been able to fashion an unusually egalitarian social, political, and military system, but one (like many modern liberal states) closed to the larger, ever-present (and growing) world of have-nots surrounding the polis, the other who desperately wanted the economic and social advantages of polis life. Herein lay the dilemma. To open up the discriminatory gates of polis citizenship was- as modern states have often discovered- to corrupt the carefully constructed equilibrium and the unifying agricultural heritage that had evolved over two centuries of agrarianism. For the Greek geôrgoi to refashion the traditional polis for all residents might just as likely lose it for everyone.
– Victor Davis Hanson, The Other Greeks (1995), p. 364
-To Hanson (and Thurmond) creating the good community for some requires holding others outside or keeping them as hewers of wood and drawers of water. And at some point, whether you define those others in terms of race, “heritage,” religion, or culture is an academic quibble. Most people look, talk, and worship like their parents and schoolmates, so talking about race, culture, or religion lets you exclude the same people. As Roel Konijnendijk has written, Hanson’s vision of the good society is white supremacist in practice, even though he firmly rejects racial theories. If you poke around in the darker corners of the internet, you can find open racists like F. Roger Devlin lecturing him for lacking the courage to push his arguments as far as they can go or begging him to contribute to their journals (both links are to the Wayback Machine- ed.)
One of the reasons for the primacy of violence is that, unlike the industrial world, in the agrarian world wealth can generally be acquired more easily and quickly through coercion and predation than through production. Consequently ‘specialists in violence are generally endowed with a rank higher than that of specialists in production.’
– Moshe Berent, “Anthropology and the Classics: War, Violence, and the Stateless Polis,” The Classical Quarterly 50.1 (2000), p. 258 (thanks Josho Brouwers)
If you know some world history or ethnography, you know that there are plenty of societies where most families have about the same size of house, the same quality of diet, and bury their dead with the same things as most people of the same age and gender (and yes Mr. Thurmond, there were millions of Christians in Egypt, Ethiopia, Syria, and India before the first white Anglo-Saxon Protestant arrived). Those societies were not always organized around patriarchy and private land ownership, and sometimes they even let women work in the fields, but they didn’t leave a lot of writing because until recently the materials were too expensive (and because settler states in the 19th and 20th century often destroyed their records, or just declared them irrelevant so that eventually someone threw out grandpa’s box of old books to make room for a new television). If civilization, however defined, is going to survive this century, I think that self-organized communities of equals committed to humane values are more likely to save it than Hanson’s violent farmers who care about nothing more than passing on the farm better than their father left it to them (and there is a lot of inspiration for those communities in classical Greek texts, just not the bits of those texts which are cited in this book). I think we need to look forward to the way we can make a changing world as consistent with our values as possible, not pump ourselves up with stories of a vanished golden age and higher cultures erasing lower ones. (And The Other Greeks sort of agrees, there is praise for Parent-Teacher Associations and farmers’ co-ops alongside the warnings that political action is useless, your neighbours will steal your water and your vine-props, and the family farm in the United States is doomed). But I think it is important to be frank that our disagreements are not just about what the ancient world was like, but about what kinds of social order are worth defending, and that you can’t divide Hanson’s books into some that describe the past and others which try to change the present.
This blog is not funded by a public-sector pension or The National Review Online, just by my gentle readers
This post was written in ?2018? and edited and scheduled at the beginning of 2020 before the present tragic situation in Europe. I delayed it from its scheduled publication date of 21 March.
Further Reading: If you want works on early agriculture by someone who believes that early Greek and Roman small farmers achieved something special but doesn’t argue that slavery was a positive good, check out the works of Geoffrey Kron (although I am a bit concerned to read a 33 page article on the classical Greek economy which focused on “equality” but does not mention slaves in Greece at all and only mentions serfs in Greece once). Two Oxen Ahead by Paul Halstead sounds fun and describes actual Greek farmers raising staple crops. And if you want a direct attack on this kind of politics, check out Gwynne Dyer’s Waiting for the Canadian Hordes (2004) or Gabriel Schoenfeld’s Sophistry in the Service of Evil (2019).
If I ever publish these ideas in print, I may track down and talk about a passage on “whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically?” in “Editorial: Why the South Must Prevail,” William F. Buckley Jr. ‘s The National Review, 24 August 1957
Edit 2020-04-29: Corrected the figure in hectares (although I don’t have a paper copy of the book available to check)
Edit 2021-04-16: For another statement by a far-right American that the ideal government would be run by the richest 20%, see David Forbes, “The Secret Authoritarian History of Science Fiction” https://www.vice.com/en/article/9ak7y5/the-secret-authoritarian-history-of-science-fiction “In ‘Constitution for Utopia,’ written in 1961, (editor and crank John W.) Campbell (Jr.) argued outright that the best possible government would only allow the wealthy—specifically the wealthiest fifth of the population—to vote.” This essay was reprinted by other hard-right science fiction writers like Jerry Pournelle.
Edit 2021-09-28: converted to block editor after migrating to self-hosted wordpress
Edit 2021-10-21: fixed links which were broken when WordPress introduced the block editor
Edit 2014-08-24: some more threads to pull on the relationship between Greek slavery and Greek freedom
This invites comparison to the frequently noted relationship between the growth of both personal freedom and civic rights, on the one hand, and chattel slavery, on the other, in Greek poleis: these two trends not merely coincided but reinforced each other (Finley (1981), (1998); O. Patterson (1991)).
Walter Scheidel, “Monogamy and Polygyny,” in Beryl Rawson, ed., A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Wiley 2010) pp. 112, 113
#ancient #bookReview #earlyGreekWarfare #modern #settlerColonialism #slavery #victorDavisHanson
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Queensland government marks seven years until the Brisbane Olympic and Paralympic Games
One of Queensland’s leading environmental scientists says with the “right controls”, the Fitzroy River in central Queensland will…
#NewsBeep #News #Headlines #2032brisbaneolmypicgames #brisbaneolympics #brisbaneparalympics #fitzroyriver #Rockhampton #rowing #rowingaustralia #rowingcourse #technicalassessment #TopNews #TopStories #worldrowing
https://www.newsbeep.com/au/15877/