A hot topic among the left right now is the issue of gun control. While  radical leftists have traditionally been in favor of gun rights, some have begun to justify gun control measures in the hope that it might de-fang white supremacist movements and end gun violence against marginalized communities. Many groups, including Dream Defenders…

This piece was co-authored with the late Syd Eastman. Rest in power Syd.  The War on Drugs is a failure. This seems more and more to be the modern consensus among the population as incarceration rates skyrocket only to line the pockets of a few greedy corporations feeding off of cheap prison slave labor. The…

Authoritarian regimes are brutal and untrustworthy. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, an agreement between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in effect from 1939 to 1941, shows how dangerous the schemes of authoritarians can be to people who live within their reach. The Pact helped Hitler launch the racial war he sought, helped Stalin launch his own…

When looking to solve the issue of climate change and other forms of environmental damage, people tend to look at two kinds of solutions: those targeting the individual, such as recycling, turning off your lights, bicycling, and unplugging your electronics when not in use, or more statist solutions, such as banning plastic straws, carbon taxes,…

The cages are rattling again all across the nation. Today marks the launch of yet another nationwide prison strike. Following the wave of strikes this year, from the MLK Day strike to the Juneteenth strike, prisoners are once more organizing to have their demands heard and things only look to get louder and more organized…

“Project Fear,” a strategy used by anti-Brexit forces in the UK, was an attempt to save the status quo by appealing to fears, worst-case scenarios, and the gravest predictions. It’s a common tactic for resisting change. In June, a wave of similarly dark headlines struck a fledgling area of science that could otherwise become the…

I am disabled. According to the conventional world and medical world, I am highly disabled. I am a C6 incomplete quadriplegic. I feel nothing from the chest down. My right side has tricep, bicep, wrist function, and limited hand function (as I type this with one finger); my left side has bicep, a sliver of…

Libertarians and leftists do not speak the same language when it comes to “free trade” but I think there’s something to be said for what both parties are getting at. I’m going to try to do a bit of translating between them that I think might frustrate both teams, hopefully in a good way. When…

Perhaps one of the more striking attacks against libertarian thought is the claim that it, like all other political insights, is just another variation of authority. This argument is exemplified by Engels’ “On Authority” in which he argues that revolution and organization in the anarcho-syndicalist/communist tradition is authoritarian. Revolt is construed into just another assertion…

When facing the walls, fences, and guards that corralled them into the concentration camps and human slaughterhouses of the past century, do you think the victims regretted how impolite they’d been to their captors before finding themselves here? Since the spread of the industrial revolution across the world, our lives have consistently been more and…

The following is republished from the author’s site. I’m sure I don’t have to tell anyone it’s Pride Month. It’s been advertised everywhere from Google to Twitter. A coming out party for the wholesale corporate appropriation of an underground movement. It’s not even Queer Pride Month anymore, that title has become too politically incorrect, it…

Promises, as a pledge of one’s efforts and other resources for another, represent the pinnacle of humans’ moral commitments. Yet a promise reveals our deep commitments most clearly when uncoerced and freely discharged. Thinking of social institutions as standing promises simultaneously highlights the desirable aspects of institutions and yet provides the grounds for their criticism….

Progressive and conservative critics of open migration frequently dismiss calls for freedom of movement as rooted in narrowly economic concerns. Proponents of freedom point out that, despite what you might hear on TV, immigration yields widespread benefits for both the societies to which immigrants go and those from which they come. And they emphasize the…

Elon Musk is trolling on twitter. A celebrity billionaire wasting his time making inane provocations would hardly be worthy of note but in the process Musk has declared that his politics are in line with Iain Banks’ anarcho-transhumanist utopia and that he aspires to see a world of direct democracy. There’s few spectacles like a…

Just recently, on May 31st, Judge Robert Morin dismissed charges against one group of J20 defendants on the basis of prosecutorial misconduct. This is, of course, excellent news, but this isn’t what I’m interested in. See, this is the first time that I’ve seen the J20 victims in the news since January 20, when there…

Last Friday, the people of the Republic of Ireland voted decisively to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution. Such a vote was historic; ‘the Eighth’ as the amendment had increasingly become known equated the life of the mother with that of the unborn, effectively preventing any form of abortion – including in cases…

Recently, there has been a myriad of news stories where racial bias lead to the police being called on innocent black people. It’s important that these stories be heard, and that the black men and women who lived through them are given the opportunity to tell them. Additionally, it’s imperative moving forward that we, as…

C4SS Director William Gillis recently gave this talk in Austin, TX using the lenses of sociology, psychology, and information theory to explore the fundamental limitations of organizations. In other words, it’s a thorough explanation of why meetings suck. Gillis presents a compelling explanation for the ineffectiveness of many political organizations, focused on some of the…

In the last three decades, we’ve seen a resurgence in the popularity of left wing, non-market approaches to economic organizing. The rise results from a confluence of factors, one part of the story being that the economic left has largely been freed of material reality since the ubiquity of capitalism after the fall of the…

One week from the moment I am writing this, the 91st anniversary of the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell will come and pass. Ninety-one is admittedly not the nicest or roundest number for a remembrance, but this is not exactly the nicest subject matter, so perhaps it is fitting. I feel that there…