We in the US have a gun problem. This isn’t at all to say the problem is as simple as “there are too many” or “it’s too easy to obtain them legally,” but the presence of a distinct problem localized here in this country is undeniable, and it’s been getting worse. One might argue the…

The Utah legislature just passed a law that makes “inhibiting or impeding the operation of a critical infrastructure facility” — a category that includes oil and gas facilities, power plants, and railroads — a felony punishable by five years to life in prison. Another law passed along with it makes a person who “interferes with…

For years, right libertarians have loved to throw around the “World population living in extreme poverty” metric, which shows extreme poverty shrinking steadily as a share of the population from 1815 on, and then in absolute terms since about 1980. The problem is that “extreme poverty” is defined in monetary terms, as living on less…

At Slate, Edward Ongweso Jr. treats the Silicon Valley Bank failure as “emblematic of a startup ecosystem and venture-capital apparatus that are too unstable, too risky, and too unmoored from reality to be left in charge of something as important as the direction of our technological development.” It’s fair to say there’s a considerable gap…

The terms “woke” and “wokeism” have been ubiquitous on the right for the past year or so. Charlatans like Chris Rufo, James Lindsay, and Jordan Peterson regularly rail against this or that alleged manifestation of it, Robby Soave’s main shtick at Reason is recounting the latest incident of some paragon of scholarly reasonableness who was…

The drama of the so-called “culture wars” picked up recently with Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene calling for a “national divorce” over supposed entrenched cultural issues. Setting aside how this would be a terrible deal for red states, how fundamentally unworkable the idea is (what happens to blue cities inside red states), or how bad a…

In the early morning hours of February 6, 2023, Turkey and northern Syria were shaken by two major earthquakes in quick succession. Eleven cities in Southern and Eastern Anatolia and Syrian Kurdistan, home to around 3.5 million people, were severely affected by the earthquakes. The fact that the disaster struck in the early hours of…

The Norfolk Southern disaster in East Palestine has raised numerous issues of corporate malfeasance, and how it is enabled by corporate collusion with the state. Some of that, as we saw in December, is the federal government’s protection of the railroad industry from labor action against its intolerable work hours and lack of sick leave,…

All over the U.S. imperial core, the trumpets of war are being sounded against queer communities. More than that: reactionary forces are, to put it as bluntly as possible, planning to exterminate us. Consider the following: More than 300 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills have been filed in 2023 alone. It’s only March. Some of these bills include…

The fear and anxiety induced by earthquakes are often exacerbated by the challenges posed by capitalist societies, where individuals face significant obstacles in their efforts to modify their living conditions or relocate to safer regions. This creates a complex and concerning situation that demands urgent attention from scholars and policymakers alike.  It’s particularly concerning that…

Tyler Wright is a Twitter hustlebro whose handle is — predictably enough — @DefiningWealth. His bio is typical of the ilk, who prey on basically the same demographic of gullible young men as Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate: “$0 at 22. $1.5 Million and Retired from Corporate America at 28. Now I help people do…

The Panopticon model, proposed by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, is actually a mechanism of self-censorship. Prisoners in cells arranged in a ring with completely open fronts would have to control their own actions and not do anything wrong in order not to be punished, since they would not know when the guards in the…

The story of the scorpion and the frog is a classic animal fable cited with a frequency that threatens to dilute its message. To those unfamiliar, here’s a brief synopsis: a scorpion wants to cross a river, so it asks a frog to carry it over on his back; the frog is understandably afraid of being…

First off, let’s make something clear: this isn’t about you. This is still a message for you, and I sincerely hope you read this through, but I want to be clear: this discussion, this message, this issue of “masculinity” everyone’s so concerned about, it’s not about you. I know it feels like an indirect personal…

“I’ve been canceled!” laments the millionaire in their sixth TV interview (tenth if you count podcast episodes) since tweeting a racial slur as “a joke.” “What about free speech!” they yell freely in front of the camera(s) and microphone(s) meant just for them. I mean really: how “canceled” can someone be if they still have…

Lots of chatter here and there amongst supposedly anti-social residents of the imperial core; anarchists, goths, progressive Christians, tattoo artists, idealistic farmers, student revolutionaries. Do we want digital “anonymity” or not? Or, less dramatically, should we have Instagram? Should we have Facebook? Should we participate in the Matrix so readily? “Anonymity” is in quotes because…

Introduction Cryptocurrency, a digital currency in which transactions are verified and recorded by a decentralized system using cryptography, rather than by a centralized authority, is a controversial technology amongst anarchists, even though it is often used as a tool for undermining state power. The left generally sees cryptocurrency as a negative due to its function…

Karl Widerquist’s “A Dilemma for Libertarianism” deserves to be better known. It exposes a contradiction in natural rights libertarianism, a set of principles held by those who seek to build a capitalist political philosophy on the basis of property rights.  These principles typically include: That individuals can legitimately own property if the property was justly…

As the debate about AI art and writing took over the Internet, we at C4SS got to wondering: what does the AI itself think about all this? While it’s not yet possible for AI to give us opinions without some prompting, C4SS’s Evan Pierce sat down with ChatGPT to co-write some essays in favor of…

Libertarian authors often point to historical examples of societies (or aspects of societies) that putatively approximate their political ideals. Some popular examples of polycentric or quasi-polycentric legal regimes and/or decentralized property arrangements include Anglo-Saxon England,¹ ancient and medieval Ireland,² the American frontier,³ and Iceland’s Free Commonwealth period,⁴ among others. My purpose here is not to…