Please pardon our absence! As you can probably guess, the pandemic and related stresses led to a bump in our production schedule. But now, we’re back on track — and have two fresh episodes to boot…
First, check out our interview with Libertarian Party presidential hopeful Vermin Supreme. You might know Vermin as the candidate from the last few election cycles who ran on a platform of free ponies and mandatory tooth brushing, or you might just know him as that guy with a boot on his head. But this year, he’s running a slightly different campaign.
Rather than his usual dog and free pony show, he’s seriously promoting left libertarian and anarchist ideas such as mutual aid and non-domination to the largely right libertarian audience in the LP. In this interview, we discuss this campaign, as well as the use of humor as a de-escalation tactic at tense protests, his history of activism within anarchist communities, and where he sees himself standing within anarchism ideologically.
Next up is C4SS fellow Jason Lee Byas. Jason is also a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Michigan and his academic work focuses on punishment (and its alternatives), rights theory, and justice beyond the state. Today, we discussed some recent work he’s been doing on “methodological anarchist” approaches to political philosophy as well as the nature of violence and its relation to a theory of just property rights and distributive justice.
The first part of this conversation centers on a bias a lot of analytic political philosophers have of myopically focusing on the realm of justice applying to the state and what political theory and discourse would look like if we adopted a “methodological anarchist” framework that sees the nexus of justice as existing in social norms writ large rather than just official institutions. The second part goes into a libertarian theory of violence that, when combined with normative presumptions against violence, can accommodate and generate property rights claims. We then tried to work through the implications of this theory for intellectual property, absentee landownership, and the relations of such rights claims to concerns about equity.
As always, this podcast is made possible by support from our listeners on Patreon. Thank you so much for allowing us to continue this project. If you’re not a supporter yet, subscriptions start at $2 per month, and you’ll get access to bonus content, including roundtable episodes, as well as books, zines, stickers, and more from the C4SS online store. If you’re already a supporter, feel free to let us know what kind of content you’d like to see more of, or any other feedback you have for the show!
