This past October marked the 120th anniversary of Brazil’s biggest state-sponsored massacre. The War of Canudos took place between 1896 and 1897 and took the lives of 35,000 people, including men, women, and children. Amidst the civilians killed, at least 500 indigenous Kiriri died. According to the anthropologist Edwin Reesink (with whom I spoke over…

The prisoners are revolting again, folks. After the wave of strikes launched on the 45th anniversary of the Attica Prison riots and the August 19th strikes of this past year, inmates in Florida are planning another strike starting on January 15th, 2018 on Martin Luther King Day. On that day, in what has been dubbed…

The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson’s recent continuation of the Star Wars saga, has generated many new takes. Yet most focus on debates about aesthetics, storytelling, cinematography, fandom politics, and concerns with fantasy physics rather than the social and political commentary of the movie. Perhaps it’s because the main political messages of this installment were so…

Curating autobiographies, the Modernist movement, and the false promise of social media in the Trump era This essay was written during the days following the events in Charlottesville, Virginia. As a means of sorting through the benefits of social media in establishing a political stance in the Trump era, I found myself at an impasse….

San Gavino Monreale, in Sardinia, is my birth-town. It’s also the single biggest producer of the spice called saffron in Italy. We call it also red gold for its color and price. Saffron is a tradition that dates back centuries. The first bulbs (the spice is extracted from a flower) were cultivated around the XIII…

On October 24 a judge dismissed the charges levied against several protesters who burned the American flag at the Republican National Convention last year. The protesters weren’t technically charged with burning the flag because that might constitute a violation of free speech. The protesters were charged with one of the state’s many items in its…

If there’s one deep and profound disagreement with the left I have it’s a systematic privileging of collective stability or unity over individual free association. It’s a sad fact that leftist activists often hunger for community far more than they hunger for freedom. And one consequence of this is a persistent inability to deal with…

The Merchant Marine Act of 1920, better known as the Jones Act, is a classic example of a law that has remained on the books for decades, only attracting attention when it creates problems too big to ignore. This clearly happened this August, when it delayed shipments of aid to Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria….

Recently, Vishal Wilde advocated for a universal basic income (UBI) on the grounds that it promotes economic freedom and social justice. Indeed, UBI has long been attractive to libertarians of various stripes. However, this idea suffers from the problem that, to date, UBI proposals have generally relied on the state for a taxation and distribution…

Skin as Thick as Bark As asinine, cultish leaders fascistically toy with the notion of nuclear warfare, we are reminded yet again of the fragility of human life. That humans have advanced as far as we have is remarkable. It reminds me of the feeling of awe I have when realizing that we limited humans…

Anarchists take a hard stand against the prison system and carceral, punitive, and statist punishments schemas. As a result, we seek alternatives and tend to veer towards community and survivor-led accountability processes with a generally restorative and transformative intention. Restorative justice (RJ) is an approach towards dealing with harm done that focuses on repairing the…

After antifa clashed with right-wing protesters in Berkeley, Mayor Jesse Arreguin argued that California “should classify [Antifa] as a gang.” Later this month, juggalos – fans of the rap group Insane Clown Posse (ICP) – will protest their own federal gang classification in Washington, DC. Gang classification is commonly misunderstood. ICP themselves were originally amused…

In-group Preference and National Borders Fundamental to the danger of nation-states and borders are the paradigms of nationalism and in-group preference that exploit human quirks to justify violence. In-group preference is best understood in terms of the creation of teams through the dehumanization of an ‘other.’ In-group preference is mentally categorizing someone who is somehow…

Since the Bernie Sanders campaign, there has been an uptick in interest in the ideas of democratic socialism among leftists. This has played a role in radicalizing both progressives and former democrats and refocusing the left on movements for labor rights and social justice. Seeing this as an opportune moment, many social anarchists have started…

Anti-fascism comes in all shapes and forms. Whether it be the ultra-patriotic types harking back to the legacy of WWII, the III% who put that Identity Evropa kid in a chokehold in Texas, the black bloc protester who punched out Richard Spencer, the antifa rioters who trashed Milo’s events, the programmers who are letting us…

One of the most emotional and difficult topics in contemporary discourse is the history of slavery and its lingering legacy. A common proposal for addressing slavery is reparations, compensatory payments to the descendants of Africans who had been enslaved as part of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. The arguments for reparations are regularly met with two…

There is much debate in the current political climate over what to do about our broken healthcare system. Should we universalize it under a state monopoly? Should we provide a public option? Should we form health insurance cooperatives? Should we turn it over to crony corporations to reap a profit from our misfortune? No matter what…

Although Trump’s infrastructure agenda seems to be pretty much on the back burner — to the extent that it exists as as anything but a talking point — his public statements on it so far have mostly been about “public-private partnerships.” Hence, as you might expect, all the usual right-libertarian suspects are making happy noises…

Nearly everyone from across the political spectrum can agree that our current public education system in america is not ideal. Those on the statist left tend to fear that public education is under attack by private corporations and is completely underfunded. More progressive leftists go so far as to not only advocate for more funding…

As Computer Science, Information Technology, and the internet become increasingly important in, and vital to, the global economy, there are many concepts that will translate into significant political- and policy-relevance  in particular, for libertarians and anarchists. In the field of Algorithmic Game Theory and Mechanism Design, there is an important measure of inefficiency in a…