Readers of this tweet need to remember that "good trouble" is a stock phrase, not some impish creation of Weintraub's. It's serious. As Grok tells us: "good trouble" was used by John Lewis, the civil rights leader and Congressman, to describe his experience participating in protests and civil disobedience.Received a letter from POTUS today purporting to remove me as Commissioner & Chair of @FEC. There’s a legal way to replace FEC commissioners-this isn’t it. I’ve been lucky to serve the American people & stir up some good trouble along the way. That’s not changing anytime soon. pic.twitter.com/7voecN2vpj
— Ellen L. Weintraub (@ellenlweintraub.bsky.social) (@EllenLWeintraub) February 6, 2025
৭ ফেব্রুয়ারী, ২০২৫
"Good trouble."
২ মে, ২০২৪
"Despite a violent clash with police in Madison on Wednesday, pro-Palestinian encampments continued Thursday..."
৩০ এপ্রিল, ২০২৪
"There is a long and honorable history of civil disobedience in the United States, but true civil disobedience ultimately honors and respects the rule of law."
Writes David French, in "Colleges Have Gone off the Deep End. There Is a Way Out" (NYT).
২ এপ্রিল, ২০২৪
J.K. Rowling's powerful defense of free speech in Scotland — #ArrestMe.
Here's what she did.It's hard to overstate how important - and strategically brilliant - @jk_rowling's power move was today, a first-move checkmate that effectively
— The Heretical Liberal 🇨🇦🏳️🌈 (@Rob_ThaBuilder) April 2, 2024
neutered Scotland's dangerous new #HateCrimeBill. By openly and unambiguously breaking this law - on a massive public platform - on… https://t.co/dWKhCSERud
২০ জুলাই, ২০২২
"The vast majority of people here are pro-choice. And the very vast majority of people here think that these protesters have gotten out of control."
Last Wednesday, officers indicated protesters were edging closer to being arrested. Demonstrators take strong exception to the reactions, saying that to whatever extent they disrupt tranquility, it is part of a much more important message — bringing attention to how a number of justices altered the lives of millions — and a message could be even stronger with the residents’ participation. As they chanted recently: “Out of your houses and into the streets!”
১৩ জুলাই, ২০২২
"Tattooing is perfectly safe. The real reason it was made illegal was that people associate tattoos with undesirable types."
Said Spider Webb, AKA Joseph O'Sullivan, quoted in "Spider Webb, Tattoo Artist With a Defiant Streak, Dies at 78/Part of a generation that brought serious art credentials to tattooing, he campaigned to overturn a ban in New York and helped the form gain acceptance" (NYT).
১৮ জানুয়ারী, ২০২২
"My sense is that a law or regulation is at best an opening bid. Is it binding, legally or morally? Maybe..."
১০ সেপ্টেম্বর, ২০২১
"Every Republican in the country — especially those running to the right in primaries — is salivating over Joe Biden [igniting] the vax debate. Republicans think that he's made even pro-vax conservatives into 'anti-vax mandate' Americans."
Top Republicans are calling for a public uprising to protest President Biden's broad vaccine mandates, eight months after more than 500 people stormed the U.S. Capitol to try to overturn the election.
Why it matters: It has been decades since America has witnessed such blatant and sustained calls for mass civil disobedience against the U.S. government.See what he did there? He conflated civil disorder and civil disobedience! Civil disobedience is protest that takes the form of not following the rule that you oppose. Here, that would mean you don't get the vaccine. That's nothing like storming the Capitol.
৯ আগস্ট, ২০২১
"In a wild rant posted to Twitter Sunday, the Kentucky senator — speaking direct-to-camera before a dark blue backdrop — railed against the 'petty tyrants and bureaucrats' implementing new mandates."
That's how Mediaite characterizes it.
Judge for yourself:
I'd say he's making a standard activist point: If people resist in huge numbers, they can't be stopped. That's America's great civil disobedience tradition. Those who are in the position to announce new mandates know this and must take it into account. The potential for mass resistance is a built-in safeguard. One of 2 forces will stop them. Either they will self-regulate, or they will uncover the inherent limit to their power.We are at a moment of truth and a crossroads. Will we allow these people to use fear and propaganda to do further harm to our society, economy, and children?
— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) August 8, 2021
Or will we stand together and say, absolutely not. Not this time. I choose freedom. pic.twitter.com/XrI2tjdAHW
১৪ এপ্রিল, ২০২১
If you love Thoreau and are irritated by interlocutors who assert "He was just a self-centered misanthrope"...
Here: Peter Bagge makes the pro-Thoreau argument in comic book style (Reason).
FROM THE EMAIL: Balfegor writes:
Isn't the characterisation of Thoreau's critics in that comic a bit of a straw man? I had heard that he was a self-centred misanthrope, yes, but mostly I hear people mocking him for play-acting at self-sufficiency while his mother was still doing his laundry. He strikes me as a recognisable type: the 19th century equivalent of a trust fund socialist.
১১ সেপ্টেম্বর, ২০১৮
"Serena Williams has part of it right. There is a huge double standard..."
Writes Martina Navratilova in a NYT op-ed. According to Navratilova, Williams was being coached, whether she knew it or not, and once she'd been given a warning, it "couldn't be dismissed retroactively," smashing the racket was "an automatic violation," and the umpire "had no choice but to dock her a point."
If, in fact, the guys are treated with a different measuring stick for the same transgressions, this needs to be thoroughly examined and must be fixed. But we cannot measure ourselves by what we think we should also be able to get away with... [B]ut it is also on individual players to conduct themselves with respect for the sport we love so dearly....I don't love tennis. Do you? Quite aside from matters of ethics and character, I should think that people who are invested in the sport — whether they "love [it] so dearly" or just have a big money stake in it — should pay some attention to how spectators and potential spectators feel about it. They should want people to love them.
Is it a sport full of jerks? I don't believe that good sportsmanship is genuinely about lofty values. It's more of a con, isn't it? Like "civility" bullshit in politics.
If throwing tantrums on the court and getting melodramatic with umpires is what draws spectators, then they'll do it won't they? But maybe some people like to watch players who are polite and stoical and concentrate on demonstrating athletic prowess. I don't know. I'm not going to start watching tennis either way.
ADDED: I asked "Is it a sport full of jerks?" but I should also ask: Do we like jerks? I mean, Donald Trump is President. Let's stop being so prissy about what we like and don't like. What are we watching and what are we voting for? Let's stop lying about ourselves.
২৬ জুন, ২০১৮
"For these members of his Cabinet who remain and try to defend [Trump], they’re not going to be able to go to a restaurant, they’re not going to be able to stop at a gas station, they’re not going to be able to shop [at] a department store."
Waters's comments have been roundly denounced, including by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and some will argue she's a fringe figure in the party who doesn't speak for most Democrats. But what she said is a logical extension of the debate and the questions raised over the Red Hen incident. Plenty cheered such harassment of Nielsen and Miller, such was their anger over the family-separation policy. When passions run as strongly as they do with a story like this, actions will be ratcheted up.Civil disobedience?!! Somebody needs to look up the definition of terms! "Civil disobedience" doesn't have to do with harassing individuals and shaming or scaring them out of appearing in public. Civil disobedience is declining to obey an unjust law. It's governing your own behavior in observance of a higher morality than the government's law. It has nothing to do with violating just norms — such as rules of etiquette or the legal protection from threats and physical violence — to hurt other people when those other people offend your moral standards!
Which means Democrats and Trump opponents as a whole need to decide where their line is for civil disobedience (or, in Waters's case, possibly going beyond civil disobedience)....
Some historical background on the idea from Wikipedia:
One of the oldest depictions of civil disobedience is in Sophocles' play Antigone, in which Antigone... defies Creon, the current King of Thebes, who is trying to stop her from giving her brother Polynices a proper burial. She gives a stirring speech in which she tells him that she must obey her conscience rather than human law...Civil disobedience is an important tradition in American history. Don't mix it up with bad behavior that has had — and deserves — no veneration.
Thoreau's 1849 essay Civil Disobedience, originally titled "Resistance to Civil Government"... [argued] that citizens are morally responsible for their support of aggressors, even when such support is required by law. In the essay, Thoreau explained his reasons for having refused to pay taxes as an act of protest against slavery and against the Mexican–American War....
By the 1850s, a range of minority groups in the United States: Blacks, Jews, Seventh Day Baptists, Catholics, anti-prohibitionists, racial egalitarians, and others—employed civil disobedience to combat a range of legal measures and public practices that to them promoted ethnic, religious, and racial discrimination....
১৫ আগস্ট, ২০১৭
Scott Adams — wearing his Pope hat to make a moral ruling — says that the Confederate statues should come down.
Scott Adams tells talks about racist statues https://t.co/3bpiyhxZdQ
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) August 15, 2017
He didn't really need his Pope hat for that, because he's not talking about his own moral vision. He's taking a businesslike, corporate view, discussing a branded product called America and noticing the moral opinions of the consumers of the product.
There's also some interesting discussion in there about the internment of persons of Japanese descent during WWII and whether statues of FDR should come down. If I understand Adams's standard correctly, if 20% of Americans are offended — based on serious reasons — then Americans as a group should want to update the American brand and remove the monument, which is just decoration.
ALSO: Pope-hatted Adams makes the moral ruling that the mob's pulling down of a statue of a Confederate soldier is "a moral gray area." There was no violence against persons, only property, and it "comes very close to free speech." It's destructive, but only of "a racist symbol." I'll give this post the "civil disobedience" tag. Adams doesn't use that term, but he briefly acknowledges that the destruction is against the law and that the protesters probably need to be arrested and prosecuted and given a light sentence. In standard civil disobedience thought, the disobeyers accept the legal consequences.
AND: Adams is very funny talking about the notion of gathering America's Confederate statues in a museum: "It would be the world's worst museum." You'd be saying "There's a statue of Robert E. Lee" and then "There's a statue of Robert E. Lee," etc. I'd just note that the sculpture was designed to fit in a park, so how about something outdoors, something like Grūtas Park (AKA "Stalin's World)(discussed in this post of mine from last May (about the removal of the Jefferson Davis statue in New Orleans)).
AND: Let me repeat something from that May post, this image "The Sons of Liberty pulling down the statue of George III of the United Kingdom on Bowling Green (New York City), 1776":
১৩ জুলাই, ২০১৭
"I heard everybody saying it needs to be cut, it needs to be cut. Why doesn't someone get a mower and cut it?"
A sign outside the cemetery asks people not to mow. City officials want to keep the native wildflowers and prairie grasses on the graves like they would have been during the Civil War. The area is an official designated natural area and the municipality wants to keep it that way. But a Veterans group thinks the vegetation shows neglect. In April WISN 12 News reported on how The Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War is suing the city for not taking care of the graves.Here's an article from back in April about the lawsuit:
Under Wisconsin law, veterans' graves must "receive proper and decent care" from cemetery owners. The lawsuit filed in Waukesha County Circuit Court Tuesday is seeking a declaratory judgment on whether the way Muskego is caring for the cemetery is proper and decent....
"We'd like them to clean it up and honor these veterans' graves. [Homer Clark and Jonathan W. Smiley] died in battle. Their bodies were embalmed and shipped back home and buried there and we believe this is a desecration of their graves," [said Bob Koenecke, [leader of the Wind Lake chapter of Sons of Union Veterans]....
Muskego has never mowed the grass at the cemetery since taking it over in the mid-1960s; the land is considered a natural area that features Big Bluestem Prairie Grass, Indiangrass, Culver's Root, White Wild Indigo and Shooting Star wildflowers, Muskego city forester Tom Zagar said. To move the plants to another green area in the city would not be the same because it's a remnant prairie and not reconstructed prairie....
"It's unfortunate that they couldn't understand the important context of the historic vegetation around them. To wear the uniform was a tribute, the guns were a tribute, (and) we felt the plants were a tribute," [Muskego city forester Tom] Zagar said.
ADDED: The cemetery is smaller than you may be picturing. Here are 2 pictures of the site I made using Google Street View from 2 different points of view:


AND: Poll results:
২৯ মে, ২০১৭
"Strange to see Althouse on-board with AnCaps/libertarians about the right of businesses to discriminate as much as they like."
In blogging the controversy, I quite consciously chose to ignore the legal issue. Not everything has to be approached from a legal perspective. There are many paths into a subject, and opting for law talk can foreclose other interesting insights. Teaching law school classes, I would often begin a discussion of a case with the question whether we (or anybody) should want a particular matter controlled by a legal restriction, monitored by the government. It can be more enlightening to open up that inquiry before you get to a discussion of whether what was done in fact violated a statute and whether a constitutional right trumps the statute. It can help you think about how broadly to interpret that statute and that constitutional right.
I didn't want to talk about the law yet. Other bloggers have announced flatly that what the theaters are doing is against the law, and I acknowledge that those laws exist and should be taken seriously. The theaters are exposing themselves to legal proceedings. I can see some plausible defenses. We could talk about freedom of association cases like Boy Scouts v. Dale. This isn't like a restaurant wanting to exclude a particular type of person. The exclusion has to do with the expression of ideas. But I'm not the movie theater's lawyer, and I haven't worked out the argument.
In any case, there's a such thing as civil disobedience. I don't know if the freedom of women to assemble in a public space and watch a super-hero movie without men in the room is the sort of thing that's worth risking the consequences that are part of civil disobedience, but it's one way to behave in this world and sometimes good things ensue. For example — to get back to the aspect of the controversy I forefronted — PR.
Anyway, thanks for the challenge, James. I had to look up "AnCaps."
Anarcho-capitalists hold that, in the absence of statute (law by centralized decrees and legislation), society tends to contractually self-regulate and civilize through the discipline of the free market (in what its proponents describe as a "voluntary society").You know, I'm not the type.
১০ এপ্রিল, ২০১৭
"A man on an overbooked United Airlines flight was forcibly removed from his seat and dragged through the aisle on Sunday..."
That's the NYT report. Here's something in the WaPo report that isn't in the Times:
“He says, ‘Nope. I’m not getting off the flight. I’m a doctor and have to see patients tomorrow morning,’” [said Tyler Bridges, the passenger who made the video, about the man who refused to leave]...I can't bring myself to look at the video, but I'm not as sympathetic to this person as most people seem to be. I don't like the bumping of passengers, but if it's going to happen, and if the airline uses some random method to select the ones to bump, I don't see how the chosen person should be allowed to avoid the bad luck by refusing to leave.
The man became angry as the manager persisted, Bridges said, eventually yelling. “He said, more or less, ‘I’m being selected because I’m Chinese.’”
Obviously, choosing people by race would be unacceptable, but this man seems to have resorted to that accusation only after his go-to I'm-a-doctor argument failed. That is, at first he argued in favor of discrimination, that he should get a special doctor privilege. That amounts to an argument that people with less important jobs should be discriminated against — class discrimination.
Maybe it would be a good idea for the airline to have a policy of giving doctors a special privilege over other passengers, but if it hasn't, I don't see why the doctor should get a different outcome through civil disobedience tactics, physically resisting. If the airline actually had a race discrimination policy, I would support resistance, but I don't believe that accusation. I think this was someone who, like everybody else who didn't volunteer to leave, wanted to stay on the flight. Should everyone willing to resist get to stay and the burden of the bumping fall on the people who are too polite and unselfish to go into resistance mode? I just don't understand how caving into people like this will work.
And, again, I don't like bumping, but my understanding is that airline fares are kept low by overbooking and bumping when needed. Doesn't everyone know they are exposed to that risk when they buy an airline ticket?
ADDED: This post already had a "hypocrisy" tag (aimed at the doctor), so check me for hypocristy by reading what I wrote back in 2004 about a bumping incident involving my sons:
৪ মে, ২০১৬
It's the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jane Jacobs, author of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."
2. The Guardian: "Washington Square Park anchored the Village, offering 10 acres of green space to a steadily changing set of neighbours, from Edith Wharton to Bob Dylan. In 1880, Henry James wrote in Washington Square of its 'rural and accessible appearance' – a quality that had not entirely dimmed by the 1950s. Moses, however, upon looking at the park, was convinced that the amenity it most sorely lacked was a four-lane road through its centre." Below: "An artist’s sketch from 1959 of the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, a 10-lane highway through SoHo and Little Italy that required the demolition of 416 buildings."

3. HuffPo: "Even though Jacobs had no training in the field (let alone a college degree), she turned urban planning upside down and led cities to embrace mixed use development such as what transformed Baltimore’s Inner Harbor from urban decay to a major tourist attraction. Just as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 raised awareness over the misuse of pesticides and sparked the beginning of the ecological movement in the U.S., Jacobs’ book fueled the New Urbanism movement."
4. Treehugger: "Jane Jacobs did her research just by looking around and watching the sidewalk ballet, but others are now using more sophisticated methods to show that she was right. [Marco De Nadai] at the University of Trento and his team have examined six cities in Italy to test Jacobs' four conditions of multiple functions, small blocks, mixed age and relatively high density. Instead of eyes on the street, they used big data...."
5. Tech Insider: "6 ways the ‘Mother of Urban Design’ has transformed American cities.... 100 years after her birth, many urban dwellers are living in the kind of American cities she imagined and fought for."
6. Vox: "Her fight with [Robert] Moses has been turned into an opera called A Marvelous Order, drawn from a Jacobs passage about the logic under the chaos of urban life: 'Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city.'"
7. Slate: "Bulldoze Jane Jacobs/The celebrated urban thinker wrote the blueprint for how we revitalize cities. It’s time to stop glorifying her theories.... Thinking through how to make cities truly equitable is harder than uncritically reaffirming a small selection of the work of Jacobs. If Jacobs remains an almost-deific figure in urban planning, the profession will end up perpetuating what Jacobs fought so hard against: doing things to cities simply because they replicate the ways they’ve been done in the past. If we want to celebrate Jacobs, it’s time to move beyond her."
8. Gothamist: "Confirmed: Bob Dylan Did Co-Write Protest Song About Robert Moses With Jane Jacobs."
১৯ এপ্রিল, ২০১৬
"The history of our country is that nothing happens until people start putting their bodies on the line and risk getting arrested."
What were they protesting? I'm actually not sure! I read the material at their website, and I actually don't know:
Earlier today, our cofounders, Jerry Greenfield and Ben Cohen, along with hundreds of other activists, were arrested as part of Democracy Awakening’s direct action on the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building.They want more democracy? And they violated some law? Too vague. This isn't like sitting in at a lunch counter that's telling you they won't serve you because of race. If you're going to all the trouble to get arrested, could you also take the trouble to make sense and speak clearly?
৮ অক্টোবর, ২০১৫
"First rule of conceal carry is don't talk about conceal carry."
"I don't care if they make a law that says death penalty for anyone caught with a gun. I WILL BE ARMED! My life is more import than any law, rule, policy or ban."
Presented for discussion. I'm not commenting on that one way or another. Those are comments at Facebook on this image:

ADDED: Meanwhile, in Texas:
Economics professor emeritus Daniel Hamermesh will withdraw from his position next fall, citing concerns with campus carry legislation. The law will allow the concealed carry of guns in campus buildings beginning Aug. 1, 2016. Hamermesh said he is not comfortable with the risk of having a student shoot at him in class.Does that make sense? It will still be against the law to shoot at him in class. I guess the argument is that the decision to carry a gun into class is more deliberate. You plan ahead, and might be more rational in making the decision whether to break any laws. But the decision to pull out your gun and shoot the professor is more impulsive and thus less susceptible to contemplation of the legal consequences. So the ban on carrying a gun was protecting Hamermesh in ways that the ban on shooting the professor does not.
“My guess is somebody thinking about coming to Texas is going to think twice about being a professor here,” Hamermesh said. “It’s going to make it more difficult for Texas to compete in the market for faculty.”Spoken like an economics professor.
৮ সেপ্টেম্বর, ২০১৫
"Why isn’t undermining one’s job from the inside, in the service of a larger moral goal, an acceptable form of revolution?"
"Acceptable" is a weak word. It's not going to be acceptable to a court that has decided what the law is and ordered you to follow it, and Volokh isn't trying to say that it is. He's really only asking us to look at the Kim Davis problem from the perspective of those who think that the acceptance — there's that word again — of gay marriage is an evil on the scale of slavery or Nazi Germany.
Not that we have to agree with that view, but the question is whether the (possibly oath-based) proceduralist argument (“do your job or engage in revolution, but if you do that you have to quit, because OMG the oath”) should carry any logical weight with adherents of that view. While I think acceptable resistance against Nazis differs from acceptable resistance against liberal democratic governments, the reason I think that has nothing to do with oaths, and it’s not clear to me how an oath-based theory would successfully distinguish between the two situations.Also at Volokh Conspiracy and getting much more attention (ranking high on WaPo's most-read list), is Eugene Volokh's "When does your religion legally excuse you from doing part of your job?," which focuses on law as it is, as opposed to morality, revolution, and disobedience.
Bottom line: I’m fine continuing to criticize Davis on substantive moral grounds. And I’m fine showing why Davis’s actions are illegal under the positive law; but once you get to the point where you’re making the illegality serve a normative goal, you have to confront issues of legitimate disobedience, and I’m not sure that a purely procedural (“quit or do your job”) argument will work to exclude Davis’s “keep your job but follow your ideals” strategy of disobedience.
I'm using my tag "civil disobedience," even though Sasha Volokh eschews the adjective and speaks only of "disobedience." I think "civil" is inappropriate because Davis is not a citizen resisting the government. She's a government official. "Civil" denotes a connection to ordinary citizens. There's something much fishier about someone working within the government, not following the rules.
Should we accept (there's that word again) IRS agents resisting tax-exemption applications from groups that represent politics they think are evil? Think of resistance from the inside by police officers, teachers, judges, social workers, prison wardens, and the rest of the immense cast of characters that make up the government and against whom we, the citizens, assert our civil rights.
ADDED: For what it's worth, here's the (unlinkable) OED entry for "civil disobedience":
civil disobedience n. rebellion of the populace against a governing power; (in later use) spec. refusal to obey the laws, commands, etc., of a government or authority as part of an organized, non-violent political protest or campaign.