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Guess who wins a government award, from the Ministry of Cultural Exchange in this secessionist republic of one, for the most attractive ALL local outreach logo?

The answer is Shawn Wilbur, of the Northwest Alliance of the Libertarian Left, with his call for ALLiance in Occupied Cascadia:

Sure beats my photoshop defacements of tourist traps and paint company logos, anyway. Congrats, Shawn!

Now, then. Do you know any individualist anarchists, agorists, mutualists, left-Rothbardians or others on the libertarian left in or nearby any of the following metropolitan areas, who might be interested in getting involved, or getting more involved, in local activism and organizing? (If that description matches you yourself, that’s good enough, too.)

• New York City
• Baltimore
• Omaha, Nebraska
• Tulsa, Oklahoma
• County Wexford, Ireland

If so, please drop me a line with their contact information. I have some requests from prospective local organizers who are looking for people to start locals for the Alliance of the Libertarian Left. I would love to be able to put them in touch with anyone locally who might be interested.

On the subject of the Organizing Committee website, I’ve been getting some very good suggestions from other ALLies about materials to make available up there, and sketching out a few ideas of my own on paper. Most of these I hope to be adding over the next several days.

The main one that is now available, more or less live, is a feature to provide contact pages specific to each location where the Organizing Committee has gotten inquiries (click through on the links to each city above — for example, Baltimore — to see what it looks like). The main point is to have a landing-pad for each place we get an inquiry from, and to give prospective ALLies more information about how many people are interested in getting organized. Right now, this consists of a landing page, a map with one or more pins representing inquiring ALLies, and a quick count of the number who have inquired. My hope is to make this somewhat more sophisticated over time (right now, it’s mainly just some pretty wrapper over an e-mail form; I hope to add some features to find, e.g., how many people are interested in a particular state, possibly some sort of public Wall feature, etc.). But this will do for a start.

What I’d like to work on for the next few days is adding advice on getting started, on organizing, on ideas for activism, and so on. I’ll be incorporating some of the suggestions I’ve gotten already, and I’d like to put together some pages specifically on:

1. A step-by-step guide to starting a new ALL local (along the lines of guides like Seven Steps To Starting A Food Not Bombs Group);

2. Some advice focusing on organizing locals on college campuses, in particular;

3. A sampler platter of actions and projects that existing ALLs have worked on, with an eye to giving people ideas for what they can do to kick off their ALL local, and what they might do as they get themselves established.

Which leads me to ask you all, gentle readers:

1. If you have any suggestions, either for particular ideas or pieces of advice to add, or for focused sections that you think would be particularly useful, let me know. Let’s discuss in comments. And…

2. If you were to pick out a sampler of four or five actions or projects that your own ALL local has worked on, or that some ALLies you know about have worked on, which you would like to add as suggestions for ALL organizers trying to make plans for a new ALL local, what would you pick? Let’s discuss in comments.

Onward.

See also:

• GT 2008-09-15: ALL you need to know about organizing is what you can learn on the web

In medicine, the terms iatrogenesis refers to a condition in which symptoms or complications are themselves caused by attempted medical treatment or the conditions under which it is administered.

John Perceval, a member of a prominent English family and the son of a former Prime Minister, resigned a military commission in 1830, underwent a conversion to an unconventional Christian sect, and had a break-down while traveling in Scotland and Ireland. His older brother, then a Member of Parliament, took him back to England and had him locked away, against his will, in two private asylums, first in Bristol and then in Sussex. Here are a couple things that he had to say about what he observed during his confinement, as noted by Thomas Szasz in The Manufacture of Madness.

I will be bound to say that the greatest part of the violence that occurs in lunatic asylums is to be attributed to the conduct of those who are dealing with the disease, not to the disease itself; and that the behavior which is usually pointed out by the doctor to the visitors as the symptoms of the complaint for which the patient is confined, is generally more or less reasonable, and certainly a natural result, of that confinement, and its particular refinements in cruelty; for all have their select and exquisite moral and mental, if not bodily tortures.

—John Perceval, Perceval’s Narrative: A Patient’s Account of His Psychosis, 1830–1832. Edited by G. Bateson. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1961. 114. Quoted in Thomas Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. 129.

And:

But when the lunatic doctors say that the presence of friends is hurtful to lunatic patients, they are not aware of the fact—at any rate do not acknowledge it—that the violent emotions and disturbance of spirit, which takes place on their sudden meeting with them MAY arise from their being overcome by a sense of their relations’ conduct toward them, in neglecting and abandoning them to the care and control of strangers, and from the treatment of the doctors themselves. The doctors naturally do not acknowledge this, for if they are acting from stupidity, their pride refuses correction, and will not admit the suspicion of being wrong; if they are acting with duplicity and hypocrisy, they necessarily preserve their character, and cannot in consistency confess that there is any error on their part—who can expect it of them? You cannot gather grapes from thorns. Nevertheless, it is true.

—John Perceval, Perceval’s Narrative: A Patient’s Account of His Psychosis, 1830–1832. Edited by G. Bateson. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1961. 218. Quoted in Thomas Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. 129–130.

After he gained his freedom in 1834, Perceval wrote two narrative accounts of his treatment in the asylums. After being released, he spent the remaining four decades of his life campaigning for the liberty of people labeled as mentally ill, notably founding an Alleged Lunatics Friends Society and leading a petition campaign against the Lunacy Act, which allowed for involuntary commitment and denied involuntary patients the right to challenge their imprisonment in court.

Please note that, today, the shrinks and their flunkies, who continue to inflict on unwilling patients every sort of isolation, restraint, confinement, physical torture, and emotional trauma that the mad doctors of Perceval’s day inflicted — the shrinks and their flunkies who continue to march forward with the same invincible ignorance, using the same involuntary commitments and the same hellhole prison-camp asylums, — the shrinks and their flunkies who, in spite of the lessons clearly taught by men like Perceval, still continue to display exactly no self-awareness or critical insight whatsoever into either the history of their own discipline or the possibility that the phenomena they supposedly study and correct may be at least partially the results of their own coercive treatments — those shrinks and their flunkies, I say, now have the supreme gall to turn around and claim John Perceval, the man who their forebearer as pioneer … for the mental health advocacy movement.

See also:

• GT 2008-06-24: Medicated madness
• GT 2008-05-05: Texas psychoprisons
• GT 2007-10-29: For her own good
• GT 2006-03-18: Over My Shoulder #15: Robert Whitaker (2002), Mad in America

It’s about time I found a good excuse to post on beer. It’s a beverage which — particularly in the form of the great American microbrew — holds a special place in my heart and, needless to say, American culture. Unlike water or wine, beer walks the delicate line between common appeal and refinement. It is [...]

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