Again Trump has it backwards. According to NATO’s internal logic, the US should pay the members — not the other way around — for providing services to the empire and a tripwire for war. The empire doesn’t protect, it provokes and endangers. Who would willingly pay for that? As Andrew Levine, drawing on Andrew Bacevich,…

It’s convention time again and that means a large influx of fanatics dressed their best gather with some of the biggest names in the nation for a weekend of ceremonies, announcements, and a large show of support for what people believe truly matters in this country. Yes, I’m talking about San Diego ComicCon where every…

In “An Anarchist FAQ after 20 years” (Anarchist Writers, July 18), the FAQ’s principal author Iain McKay — writing as Anarcho — provides an engaging retrospective on that document. It’s an anniversary worth celebrating for me because An Anarchist FAQ played a major formative role in my development as an anarchist. I began thinking of…

There’s an old saying that someone who kills a man is a murderer but one who kills a million is a conqueror and killing them all makes you god. If you add the words “unintentionally” and add loaded terminology that is supposed to passively excuse murder, then you get the current US foreign policy. In…

The shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile have laid bare modern statism for the entire world to see. At its core, the state is not an instrument of dialogue. It does not retain power through mere persuasion. In disputes, it does not agree to disagree. No, the state is a regional monopoly on violence,…

There are a lot of tropes in our political culture for obscuring the real nature of what happens in cases like Baton Rouge, and before it in a long string of cases going back to Ferguson, the Rodney King beating, and on into the mists of the past. What they all obscure is the structural…

On July 7th, 2016 a gunman named Micah Johnson fired on police officers using a sniper rifle during a peaceful protest in Dallas, Texas, killing five officers. The protest was centered around the recent acts of police brutality involving Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota. An earlier version of a CNN article…

Britain is polarised following a referendum where the people were asked to choose between two unpleasant options. The vanilla-flavoured turd is the status quo where the nation state continues its affiliation to the European Union, a big cog in the machine of globalised neoliberalism — a situation that would likely continue to centralise power in…

At Reason, Nick Gillespie (“The Scandal of K-12 Education — and How to Fix It,” June 5) points to the sorry state of education and — once again — proposes charter schools as the solution. The amazing thing is that the repeated right-libertarian shilling for charter schools — at Reason and elsewhere — comes from…

The horrifying thing about Trump’s recent remarks about Saddam Hussein is not that he expressed admiration for the late Iraqi dictator — in fact Trump called him a “bad guy” three times. What is horrifying is that Trump seemed envious that Saddam could “kill terrorists” without due process — the most important element of which…

Recently two US soldiers were arrested attempting to smuggling undocumented Mexicans over the border. Marco Nava, Jr. and Joseph Cleveland had successfully done this once before and when arrested during their second run, they opted to snitch on the entire operation. It seems that either only a few facts are known or the details of…

On June 28th 2016 history was made when not only one but two openly transgender candidates won their respective congressional primaries. The victories were even more momentous given the current climate and opinions about the way that trans folks should live their lives. Whether it is about which restrooms they use, the protections they do…

A common assumption among many people, included many of those who describe themselves as libertarians, is that we live in a free market world. That the market is free and dominated by freely exchanging actors seems a given. Every “market failure” is commonly seen as a market flaw that needs be corrected by the action…

The injustice of developing countries having to pay back extortionate rates of interest that emanate from sovereign debt with colonial-era roots is often rightly made due to the oppressive nature of imperialistic regimes of the time. However, one may wonder why such colonial-era debt cannot be feasibly defaulted upon? The standard argument suggests that this…

The “sharing economy” is all the rage these days ever since the likes of Uber, Lyft, AirBnb, and others took the market by storm. Sharing economy style apps and services are slowly beginning to pop up for more and more services from food sharing to tool lending and now apparently policing. Recent budget cuts to…

Is Brexit a move toward British independence? Some Leave and Remain partisans may believe so, differing only over whether that’s good or bad. But, as usual, things are more complicated. We should hope that, in one respect, Britain’s exit from the EU will create a kind of dependence that did not exist while it was…

I see there’s another upcoming installment in The Purge series of films — a franchise whose basic premise is that there’s one night each year in which all crime is legal and police and rescue services are unavailable, setting the scene for lots of dramatic action footage of terrified people barricading themselves in their houses…

On Monday, June 20, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that evidence police find during illegal stops is admissible in court. As long as the officer can find some outstanding warrant in your name, the court will excuse the officer’s illegal stop. The Supreme Court’s decision would be disappointing if you expected the Supreme Court to…

I woke up on the morning of June 12th in Portland, Oregon, feeling well and content that I was able to spend some time with my family visiting from the East Coast after finishing school at Portland State University. After I received the news of the shooting at a gay bar in Orlando, killing at…

The New York Times recently reported that the Senate has voted to require women to register for the draft, with few Senators in opposition. This bill comes as no surprise given the military has been increasingly opening its doors to women. This culminated in last December when “…Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said in December…