Megan Erickson’s article on techo-fixes for education (“Edutopia“) in the March issue of Jacobin is an excellent critique of corporate-driven education “reform” efforts like those of the Gates Foundation and IDEO. As a critique of attempts to build an alternative educational model around decentralizing technology in general, it’s… not so excellent. The immediate object of…

In the 1997 Simpsons episode “Homer’s Enemy” viewers meet Frank Grimes, a man who has never caught a break. He has had to work hard, if not outright struggle, for everything he has in life. Grimes is hired to work at the nuclear power plant alongside Homer Simpson, who is very much the opposite of…

“You call yourself free? Your dominant thought I want to hear, and not that you have escaped from a yoke. Are you one of those who had the right to escape from a yoke? There are some who threw away their last value when they threw away their servitude. Free from what? As if that mattered to Zarathustra! But…

The L.A. Times recently reported on the U.S. Navy’s training of dolphins and sea lions as part of its seemingly limitless global war strategy. The Navy hopes that these animals’ biological capabilities will allow them to find underwater enemy mines and swimmers in “restricted areas”, on whom the sea lions would attach “bite plates”. While the Navy…

According to the received version of “interest group pluralism” in J.K. Galbraith’s book American Capitalism, there’s supposed to be a sort of check-and-balance system (Galbraith called it “countervailing power”) between big business, government regulatory agencies and organized labor. But what usually happens in the real world, when the allegedly “opposing” centers of power are so…

At the height of anti-NSA furor in January 2014, The New Republic (TNR) published a hit piece on Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald that criticized their anti-government beliefs, portraying the leakers as “paranoid libertarians” and traitors to progressive government ideas. Said TNR: By exposing the secrets of the government, they claim to have revealed…

Glen Canyon is one of the great wonders of the American Southwest. The ravine is carved deep, with rugged walls of sandstone and rusted gorges. Rock formations spire towards the sun as cliffs paint the purple horizon and provide space for numerous grottoes and crooked, long trails. Aside from the inspiring geology, Glen Canyon is…

In 1890, anarchist feminist Voltairine de Cleyre published Sex Slavery, a short speech in defense of Moses Harman, a women’s rights supporter who was prosecuted under Comstock law for publishing allegedly obscene material. De Cleyre argued that in her society, women were viewed as the property of their husbands, and had little power over their…

Many thanks to the more than helpful edits of Kyler Dineen and Mike Moceri The “Left” in Left-Libertarian The goal of this paper isn’t to convince anyone of the benefits of anarchism or to convince anyone that they should be a left-libertarian. Instead, I’d like to help deepen our understanding of what the position entails and…

I keep resolving not to comment on any more of Alternet‘s by-the-numbers anti-libertarian puff pieces, but a recent one from David Masciotra (“You’re Not the Boss of Me: Why Libertarianism is a Childish Sham,” February 26) is in its own category of wretchedness. Masciotra’s commentary includes two seemingly contradictory lines of argument. In the first,…

Today, March 16th, marks Open Borders Day. On this day, people around the world seek to imagine a world radically different from the status quo. Whereas immigration restrictions curtail freedom of movement for the most trivial and discriminatory of reasons, such as the country an individual was born in, we envision a world where free…

Last Sunday was International Women’s Day, a day set aside to honor and celebrate the economic, cultural, scientific, and political achievements of women as well as celebrate the women in our lives. It is also a day to put extra emphasis on the issues that especially concern women. Two such issues are the related problems of…

On January 18, 2015, the body of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman was found in a pool of blood, with a shot to the temple, in the bathroom of his Buenos Aires apartment. The next day, he was scheduled to present his accusations against president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner for allegedly shielding Iranian officials from prosecution…

You can’t kill an idea. Ideas are bulletproof. They’re more powerful than guns. This is something we’ve all been told. But just because you can’t destroy an idea or an ideology, it doesn’t mean you can’t twist it and use it as an engine for your own purposes. It’s not controversial to suggest that much…

In an article I wrote several years ago (“Free Market Reforms and the Reduction of Statism,” The Freeman, Sept. 1, 2008), I stated some principles that are relevant to the current debate on “net neutrality”: Some forms of state intervention are primary. They involve the privileges, subsidies, and other structural bases of economic exploitation through…

The week before last, at the International Students For Liberty Conference (ISFLC), Ron Paul once again misgendered and deadnamed whistleblower and hero, to libertarians everywhere, Chelsea Manning in a speech. Though his words otherwise sounded supportive, they indicate someone who at best hasn’t paid attention to any news pertaining to her. More likely, he and…

With all the hub-bub surrounding the International Students for Liberty Conference, Ron Paul, and “second-wave libertarianism,” I am reminded of a passage in Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity about the “sub-man.” This is quite reflective of any of us who deal with ideologies, but those who specifically follow libertarianism and or anarchism may want…

If you’re outside the liberty movement social media universe, you might not have known that The Happening was absolutely happening last weekend. What was The Happening, you ask as I admire your ignorance of the affair? Well, the International Students For Liberty Conference (ISFLC) was kicking off with movement darlings Ron Paul and Andrew Napolitano….

One of the grievances of the so-called GamerGate movement last August was an article by Dan Golding titled “The End of Gamers” (August 28, 2014). The title referred, not to the literal extinction of gamers as individuals, but of the “gamer” cultural identity as it had previously existed. Golding argued that the previously dominant gamer…

In the November of 1859, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published, thus changing the way natural scientists viewed the world forever. In this text, Darwin describes the idea of descent with modification and brilliantly illustrates the concept of natural selection: The gradual process by which heritable traits express themselves, if at all,…