Last week, I talked about Sirius XM’s decision to fire shock jock Anthony Cumia.

Along with the other Sirius XM listeners who hadn’t cancelled their subscription over this, I anxiously waited for Monday’s O&A show, which featured a dejected-sounding Opie and Jim not only lamenting their co-host’s firing, but the predictable fan and media reaction.

According to Opie, the main issue with the tweets was timing; they came before a holiday weekend and an upcoming planned hiatus. “If we could’ve got back on the radio, me, Anthony and Jimmy, we would’ve figured our way out of this one. Easily. Because the jokes would’ve been there.”

They also criticized the Washington Post’s op-eds, along with other publications’ similar knee-jerk reactions.

Whenever a political correctness crisis like this happens, passages like this are standard:

“Some supporters cite First Amendment rights, as they always do in such cases, until someone helpfully points out that freedom of speech does not mean freedom of speech without consequences. You have the right to say or Tweet whatever you want and others have the right to object and be offended. Depending on what the contract says, your employer has the right to forgive or fire. I know few people who could insult colleagues or toss a string of vile invective at potential clients and come into work the next day as though nothing had happened.”

Embarrassing, isn’t it? Because judging by the way Opie, Anthony and Jim talk to their fans and people who call into the show, Sirius XM should have pulled the plug a long time ago if that’s how their contracts work; the same contracts that lock the remaining jocks into a show they barely want to be part of anymore. It’s astounding how so much of the media response reflects an outright misunderstanding of not only Anthony’s motives in the infamous tweets, but O&A’s entire brand.

Was the “black friend” tweet all part of Anthony’s “shock” routine? Probably. This writer’s reasoning is so skewed that the comments on the article make more sense.

Commenter Mcaff has a more articulate (read: less expletive-ridden; “debating” free speech often seems akin to banging your head against a wall) response than I would’ve come up with on the fly:

“I have listened to Opie and Anthony and I strongly disagree with almost everything Anthony Cumia says. He’s usually wrong on a range of topics from gun control to race relations. His co-hosts are a bit to the left on most issues and the debate makes for lively, entertaining radio. I strongly disagree with Cumia, but I WANT TO HEAR EVERY WORD OF IT. In my opinion, Reverend Al Sharpton has made far more inflammatory remarks on his television program but I WANT TO HEAR HIM TOO. They both have the right to voice their opinion and I have the right to hear them.”

This type of response also underscores the points that Jeremy Weiland makes in his essay that I linked to last week.

If PC shills at the Washington Post really wanted to end racism, they wouldn’t waste netspace on articles like this, and would talk incessantly about prison demographics, poverty statistics and the drug war instead.

Leftist academic, Corey Robin, recently commented on what he sees as the radicalism of the young CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). He quotes David Montgomery to the effect that at its annual convention: the CIO called for:

continuation of government controls over prices and the allocation of production materials, “development of atomic energy for civilian purposes under United Nations auspices,” government sponsorship of housing to offset the failures of the market to provide for workers’ urgent needs, and expansion of social security to encompass all agricultural, domestic, and maritime workers and to include health protection.

There is nothing particularly radical about the above. Government is a very old institution and so is the hierarchy that is inherent to it. Its use of aggressive force, violence, coercion, and compulsion to gets its way is nothing new in human history either. The non-anarchist or non-libertarian left often seems to want to replace corporate capitalist hierarchy with government hierarchy. That is the meaning of central planning of prices and allocation of productive resources. A monopolistic government controlling the allocation of production or prices would certainly qualify as a violent hierarchical central planner.

In contrast, left-libertarian market anarchism seeks a world of horizontalism where hierarchies have been maximally flattened – if they exist at all. The kind of things mentioned above would require a high degree of hierarchy to effectuate through government. That ancient institution enmeshed in power and violence. One can only struggle to identify at least the radicalism of means in certain parts of the above and in toto on others.

Radical leftism is preferably about rejecting hierarchical aggressively coercive power structures wherever they are found. Not in merely lessening the aggressively coercive character of said institutions. Many non-anarchist or non-libertarian leftists have admirably contributed to restraining the aggressive power of government, but the radical solution is to abolish it. Its use of any and all aggressive coercion is one the major root problems with it.

It’s not surprising that another hierarchical aggressively coercive structure of power like capitalism is so tied up with government. The history of extensive corporate welfare is indicative of this, but the main point to be made here is that seeking the abolition of government doesn’t have to mean giving a free pass to capitalism. It can in fact be an integral part of doing away with both aggressively coercive oppressive structures of power. Let’s get started on it!

Since Nathan Goodman has asked me to fill in for him this week on The Weekly Abolitionist, I’d like to focus on something important to radical political struggles that isn’t talked about much: fiction.

As prison abolitionists, we can talk at length about the ways that prisons as such encourage abuse, add to recidivism, interlock with other oppressive systems like white supremacy, and are inherently unjust. Yet, for some people to really “get it,” something more is required.

At the time I’m writing this, I’ve finished about a season and a half of Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, which is set in a women’s prison and loosely based around the real-life Piper Kerman’s prison memoir of the same title. Though it does not take an abolitionist outlook toward the prison system, it is a perfect example of the kinds of stories that need to be told. (It’s not for nothing that the show has even received praise from Angela Davis.)

Most significantly, Orange Is the New Black humanizes prisoners. Rich character development is one of the show’s strong-suits, and that helps to remind viewers that those suffering behind bars are real, flesh and blood people.

By showing flashbacks to their lives on the outside, we see that prison inmates are usually nothing like the caged monsters that are typically imagined in popular discourse surrounding them. They are often much like us, and it becomes difficult to sanction their sentences in good conscience.

Both on the outside and in prison, we seem them capable of compassion, meaningful human bonds, and all sorts of impressive achievements. For most of them, we see otherwise normal women who made one big mistake, not ongoing threats who need to be physically removed from the outside society.

Furthermore, we see that the condition of prison does not rehabilitate these women, but instead hardens them. Women who would normally never even think of hitting another person come close to murder, because of the situation created for them by the prison.

The show’s strong character development is present not only in the inmates, but also the staff, which further helps the show’s utility for abolitionists. This is because when we look at the staff of the show’s prison, we (mostly) don’t see sociopaths. We see ordinary people whose positions of power either require them or bring them to do extraordinarily awful things.

It’s not enough to just change out the people running the prison, because it would still end up looking roughly the same. The problems are structural, not personal.

It is difficult to imagine any situation (at least in the contemporary United States) where one person has as much near total control over another person and their life as a prison guard has over a prisoner. As we should expect, this brings out the worst in those given free rein to do whatever they want with or to others.

For example, in everyday life, one man’s homophobia may be unlikely to ever actually materialize as actual violence. But that same man, when given the power to do so, thinks nothing of sending a prisoner to solitary as part of his temper tantrum against her attraction to women. He feels entitled to do so precisely because of how sharply subordinate prisoners are to the staff.

That incident brings us to another important feature of the show. While its portrayal of prison in general is clearly not pleasant, it reveals solitary confinement for what it is: Hell. Solitary confinement is nothing short of torture, and it is difficult to say otherwise when watching the scenes that take place there.

A character cries out to herself in pain, and a soft voice answers back on the other side of the wall. Even this small amount of human interaction is a godsend, and she nervously asks “are you real?” The reply is chilling: “I don’t know.”

That is where the cramped isolation and dehumanization of solitary confinement leads, and the viewer can see it more clearly than they’d ever want to.

Viewers often assume that the show’s introduction – a sequence of eyes and mouths set to Regina Spektor’s “You’ve Got Time” – is made up of extreme close-ups of the show’s cast. The reality is that all of those faces are the faces of actual formerly incarcerated women.

This serves as a reminder that even for those events in the show that are entirely fictional, something like that has happened to someone, and something like that will happen to someone in the future (at least as long as we have prisons). It is just that sort of reminder that reveals the show’s real value.

By capturing our empathy, Orange Is the New Black forces us to acknowledge that when we accept the prison system, these are the women we are condemning to that life. It refuses to let us lazily fall back into the impersonal justifications we’ve rehearsed for as long as we’ve known about prisons.

We cannot just look away from the people we cage as we talk about why we cage them. We must look them in the eyes as we say it.

Art stirs people’s basic human sympathies toward action, and action is desperately needed to rid ourselves of the prison state. It is for this reason that we need more shows like Orange Is the New Black.

Market anarchism is grounded in the sovereignty of each individual and the simple idea that all relationships between adults ought to be voluntary and consensual, permitting everyone the freedom to do anything she wishes, as long as she respects the identical right of all others. The “market” in market anarchism refers to the fact that under such a system of equal freedom, individuals could cooperate and exchange in any and all ways nonviolent and non-fraudulent.

The “anarchism” comes from the insight that a society of strict nonaggression is ipso facto incompatible with the existence of the state. Since the state, both in theory and practice, is defined in terms of aggression against innocents, a truly free society cannot endure such an institution. Where, though, does immigration fit into all this theoretical ideation?

Free and open movement is the natural, unconditional right of every single individual, a prerogative that precedes governments and their arbitrary borders and policies. Confronted with this fact, even some self-styled libertarians will cavil and complain, puling that open borders actually amount to “forced integration,” that a free society is in fact one of exclusion and static populations disallowed from free movement simply by facts of “private property.”

And of course these facts and the relationships they implicate are never to be called into question. Never are we to ask what kinds of results and patterns legitimate property rights, properly based on some notion of homesteading, would create if actually developed and held to. Given the limits on the circumstances under which such forms of private property would be regarded as legitimate in a hypothetical freed market, it strains credulity to think that the fear-mongering of anti-immigration “libertarians” is well-founded.

Furthermore, arguments that see open borders as “forced integration” are especially spurious and unconvincing within the context we’re presented today, where governments themselves own and administer most of the land and the rest has been doled out to political favorites under a process in which proper homesteading has never been a real or important consideration. In their essence, anti-immigration arguments come to the laughable contention that merely due to accidents of birth which place some lucky group in one favored locale and others somewhere else, the fortunate group ought to be able to control and impede the movement of others.

We must therefore ask how and on what basis? Stripped of intricate apologies for the status quo, the answers presented are simply, “using force, deadly if necessary” and “because sovereign states have the right to protect their borders.” But even if we grant the premise that the United States ought to be able to protect its borders — itself an enormously controversial one which, as anarchist, I challenge — we must then wonder: Protect them from what? As economist Bryan Caplan observes, leaving out the moral questions implicated by the immigration debate, “even a random illiterate peasant” represents an economic benefit to his new country.

“Immigration laws,” Caplan shows, “trap people in countries where workers produce far below their potential.” When allowed the opportunity to work and produce to their potential, immigrants fill important economic needs and increase the overall wealth in society.

In terms of both basic economic and humanitarian considerations, completely free immigration and open borders are the soundest way forward for the United States and the whole world. Arbitrary, aggressive restrictions on people’s movement trample individual rights, divide families, and hurt the economy. It’s time to end the global apartheid of invented national boundaries and embrace the market anarchist solution of free movement, free exchange and free people.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the growing lack of support for the Iraqi prime minister, Maliki.

Kevin Carson discusses whether government is just things we do together.

Lawrence Wright discusses the savage strategy of ISIS in Iraq.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses why we need an enlightened citizenry invested in liberty.

Ajamu Baraka discusses Western policy on Iraq.

Rannie Amiri discusses ISIS and the Gulf Cooperation Council.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the great unraveling of Iraq.

Chris Hedges discusses Iraq.

Michael Schwartz discusses the new oil wars in Iraq.

Ed Krayewski discusses why interventionism is a bigger threat than the Iraqi civil war.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the cracking of Iraq.

Gilbert Mercier discusses ISIS.

Jonathan Cook discusses the occupation.

Doug Bandow discusses why the U.S. should stay out of Iraq.

James Bovard discusses freedom vs medals of freedom.

Conor Friedersdorf discusses the recent release of a memo on extrajudicial killings.

Jameel Jaffer discusses the newly released drone memo.

Gene Healy discusses how both Democrats and Republicans are to blame for Iraq.

Stephen Kinzer discusses blowback in Iraq.

David Swanson discusses the drone memo.

Clancy Sigal discusses the role of armed resistance in the Civil Rights Movement.

Peter Van Buren discusses 10 reasons not to launch airstrikes in Iraq.

Steve Clemons discusses Saudi Arabia’s policy in Syria.

Dan Sanchez discusses the total state.

Shamus Cooke discusses Iraq.

Robert Fantina discusses how racism is alive and well in Israel.

Laurence M. Vance discusses why libertarians are right about drugs.

Sheldon Richman discusses U.S. aid to the Egyptian government.

Pal Benko plays a fantastic game against Israel Albert Horowitz.

Pal Benko defeats Duncan Suttles.

Guest Blog by Irfan Khawaja

In a recent post at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, “Hang Tough, Israel,” Fernando Tesón takes issue with those of his “libertarian friends” who are “relentless” in their criticisms of Israel, and responds to them by translating a longish passage from Spanish by the Argentinian writer Marcos Aguinis. What follows are four remarkably ignorant and offensive paragraphs on the Israel/Palestine dispute which I’m assuming that Tesón endorses. The post is too short to deserve a very long response, but I think it deserves more criticism than (with some notable exceptions) it’s so far gotten. Since I assume that Tesón endorses Aguinis’s claims, I’ll refer mostly to “Tesón” rather than “Aguinis”; if Tesón doesn’t endorse Aguinis’s claims, I have no objection to his publicly disowning as many of them as he now decides to reject.

Much of Tesón’s post involves generalizations about the moral character of Palestinians, and Palestinian youth in particular. Here’s a particularly offensive one:

In our postmodern times it is increasingly irrelevant where the good and the bad reside. Does it matter that the Israeli youth dream with being inventors and scientists, while the youth of Hezbollah and Hamas dream with being martytrs? Apparently not. Does it matter that in Israel children are not taught to hate the Arabs, while among the Arabs, the Protocols of Zion and Mein Kampf are best sellers, and that the Egyptian TV broadcast a repulsive series where the Jews would extract children’s blood for their rituals? Apparently this doesn’t matter either.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Tesón that if you’re going to describe “Israeli youth” in one clause of a sentence, the contrasting clause should make reference to “Palestinian youth,” not “the youth of Hamas or Hezbollah,” as though Palestinian youth were, as a whole, reducible to a faceless mass of terrorist fanatics, among whom the very essence of “badness” resides.

More fundamentally, I’d ask Tesón pointblank how much face time he’s ever had with Palestinian youth (or Palestinians generally), and if he hasn’t had very much (as I’d surmise), what conceivable basis he could have for a generalization of the sort he endorses in that post. How fluent, for example, is his Arabic? Evidently not fluent enough to list on his CV. But then, how can a person who speaks no Arabic know what Palestinian youth are like? Imagine generalizing about American youth but being unable to string together a sentence in English. That’s the caliber of the discussion he’s initiated, and which he regards as a serious contribution to the debate. (For the record: my Arabic is very rudimentary, and I have no facility at all with Hebrew, but then, I’m not inclined to make wild generalizations about either Palestinians or Israelis, as Tesón is.)

Last summer, I spent some time in the West Bank, and in particular in the city of Hebron and the village of Beit Umar. One contrast that I observed between Israeli and Palestinian youth was instructive: In Beit Umar, I watched youthful Israeli soldiers (in their 20’s) taking physical control of the village by force of arms – machine guns, tear gas, armed vehicles – blocking its roads so that settlers could help themselves to its resources. Meanwhile, unarmed Palestinian youth confronted them and remonstrated with them by discourse.¹ This is an everyday occurrence in Beit Umar and the West Bank generally, though not one typically reported in our media or current in our discourse. It doesn’t exactly square with Tesón’s picture of terroristic Palestinian youth.

Meanwhile, just a few miles away, in the town of Abu Dis, my friend Munir Nusseibeh runs the Human Rights Clinic at Al Quds University, specializing in property rights claims – a kind of Palestinian version of the Institute for Justice. Munir leads a group of non-violent activists in property rights litigation against a military occupation whose bureaucrats literally enforce their whims and those of the settlers they protect, at gunpoint. After a few intense hours of conversations with him, it occurred to me that he had a better grasp of the nature and value of property rights than most political philosophers I know – and certainly better than Tesón himself who, despite his official rejection of collectivist conceptions of property ownership has nothing to say about the explicitly collectivist and expropriative character of Israeli land use policy. (For more details on Israeli land use policy, see Oren Yiftachel’s excellent book, Ethnocracy.) None of this squares with Tesón’s picture, either.

And then there is Lucy Nusseibeh, a one-woman powerhouse who runs MEND, an institute for non-violent protest and democracy.² Her message? She wants to “demilitarize our minds” – not exactly the stuff of Hamas or Hezbullah. The non-violent nature of her activities has not, of course, prevented her from being raided and shut down by the Israeli authorities – the same authorities whom Tesón advises to “hang tough” as they hunt down such threatening Islamist figures as Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Ernie, and Bert.

Excuse me, but who is operating by the pen here and who is operating by the sword? And my anecdotes merely scratch the surface of the work that Palestinians are doing to create the basis of a non-violent civil society in the West Bank. In mentioning these anecdotes, I don’t intend them as data for generalizations about the depravity of “Israeli youth” or the heroism of “Palestinian youth,” but as data against facile generalizations of the kind Tesón takes for granted.

There’s no doubt that Palestinian political culture has its deformities, some of them deeply grotesque, unjust, and irrational. I have no qualms about saying that to anyone anywhere, as I have for decades – whether in The New York Times in 1987, or in front of an irritable West Bank audience in 2013.³ (Feel free to do a search on “Irfan Khawaja” in this book for some more documentation.) But Tesón writes as though the cultural deformities were all or uniquely Palestinian. As it happens, the falsity of this claim is becoming increasingly obvious, and has been obvious for decades. This past Friday’s New York Times has a story that makes explicit what most informed Israelis probably take for granted:

Tamir Lion, an anthropologist who studies youth, said he was troubled by the changing attitudes among Israel’s young people. For many years, Mr. Lion interviewed soldiers about why they chose to enter combat units. “The answers,” he said on Israel Radio, “were always about the challenge, to show I could make it, the prestige involved.”

That began to change in 2000, he said. “I started to get answers – not a lot, but some – like: ‘To kill Arabs.’ The first time I heard it, it was at the time of the large terror attacks, and since then it has not stopped.”

A generation has grown up in a period of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with suicide bombs and military incursions, rocket fire and airstrikes. Young people on both sides may think about the other more as an enemy than as a neighbor.

Mr. Lion, head of research at the Ethos Institute, said he was troubled. “Today I can say, and everyone who works with youth will say it, Jewish youth in Israel hate Arabs without connection to their parents or their own party affiliation and their own political opinions.” (“Killing of Palestinian Youth Puts an Israeli Focus on Extremism”).

Those tempted to excuse these attitudes as a justified or understandable response to Palestinian suicide bombings may want to remember that such inferences run both ways: if it’s understandable that terrorism-traumatized Israelis should want to kill Arabs, it ought to be equally understandable that occupation-traumatized Palestinians should want to kill Israelis. It also ought to be rather obvious that a forty-seven-year long military occupation offers more than its share of opportunities for Israeli depredations. The inferences can only run asymmetrically if we assume either that Israelis have intrinsically greater moral weight than Palestinians, or that Palestinians are always the aggressors and Israelis always the defenders against their aggression. Neither assumption is true, and neither issue is adequately addressed by Tesón’s post. (Israeli rights violations are systematically documented by such organizations as B’Tselem, Al Haq, and the Human Rights Clinic at Al Quds University. I don’t necessarily agree with everything that they say or do, but their work is generally admirable and indispensable for understanding the realities of life under Israeli rule.)

I can’t literally replicate the reality of Palestinian life under military occupation in a short essay like this one, but You Tube offers a useful supplement to the written word. In offering the videos in this essay as evidence for my claims, let me stress that I am not making global generalizations about Israelis or Jews as such, much less making claims about their heritable traits. I’m pointing to well-established socio-political trends within Israel, trends that are the predictable result of its occupation and settlement of the West Bank, and of Zionist ideological assumptions generally.

This seven minute video provides a disheartening account of Anti-Arab sentiment in Israel (though I think Uri Davis understates the degree of anti-Semitism on the Arab side). This ten minute video candidly discusses “Israel’s New Generation of Racists.” This eight minute video offers a rather unflattering picture of attitudes among Israeli youth and of specifically American complicity in those attitudes. While you watch it, imagine a comparable scene involving thousands of white American youth with anti-black attitudes marching triumphantly and gleefully through a historically black neighborhood (in drunken throngs, at 3 am) – be it Harlem, Watts, Newark, or Detroit – while expressing themselves as these Israelis do. For a glimpse at life in Beit Umar, watch this video. For an ordinary day in Hebron, try this one. While watching these videos – and you can find hundreds more like them online – you might ask yourself how long Palestinians are supposed to endure behavior of the kind depicted in them without taking it upon themselves to engage in retaliatory self-help. You might try to put yourself in the place of the Palestinian victims in these video, a heuristic familiar to most grade school children but notably absent from Tesón’s post.

I’ve saved the best and most topical video for last. It doesn’t need much in the way of comment, at least if you’ve been following recent events in Israel. As you watch the video, try repeating the following Tesónite mantras to yourself and observing how they affect your ability to process what you’re watching:

Does it matter that the Israeli youth dream with being inventors and scientists, while the youth of Hezbollah and Hamas dream with being martytrs?

Already several generations of stoic Israeli citizens have defended the country with one hand while working with the other.

Does it matter to Tesón that the Israeli youth depicted in this video are not dreaming of being inventors or scientists, but of revenge fantasies which they’re enacting in real life? Does it matter to him that what we see here are not “Stoic Israeli citizens” defending the country with one hand while working with the other, but overwrought Israeli soldiers beating a child with their hands and feet in broad daylight?

I said I would focus here on Tesón, but I should perhaps say a word about Marcos Aguinis. I don’t know a great deal about his work, but if what I’ve read is any indication of his knowledge of the region and its issues, he’s little more than a crude propagandist at the level of Joan Peters, from whom he seems to have gotten a good part of his rhetorical playbook. To quote from an article of Aguinis’s:

No me gusta ser apologista, pero hay hechos demasiado evidentes que se tratan de negar falazmente.
[Rough translation: I don’t like having to function as an apologist, but there are facts that are sufficiently evident yet are gratuitously denied [and require a response].]

Delete the “No” and the whole second clause of this sentence, and you have a good summary of the agenda involved here. Twenty-two years after Rodney King and the LA riots, American readers ought to know better than to accept rhetoric of this nature about a whole ethnicity – and frankly, deserve better in the way of reading material on Israel/Palestine from supposedly eminent experts on the ethics of international relations. That Tesón should offer this post in all seriousness to a supposedly serious audience suggests that as far as attitudes about Palestinians and Arabs are concerned, we have a long way to go before we achieve even minimal decency in discussing the subject.

The bottom line is that Israel is a country that has operated a nearly fifty-year long military occupation and militarized settlement campaign at the expense of the millions of Palestinians who live under its rule. It claims to fear Palestinian terrorists, and has built a “security wall” to keep them “out,” but then insists on placing its own population on both sides of the wall, nullifying the point of having a wall, and erasing the “inside/outside” distinction which gives the wall whatever point it was supposed to have. Unfortunately, this desire to have things all ways at once is the classic hallmark of pro-Israeli discourse today, especially in its militant right-wing variety, which, regardless of his intentions, is the variety that Tesón’s post exemplifies. Israel may in many respects be a liberal democracy as Tesón and Co. claim, but unfortunately, the occupation proves that you can’t have your liberalism and eat it, too. That, I’m afraid, is the unintended but actual message of Fernando Tesón’s post.

Irfan Khawaja
Dept. of Philosophy
Felician College

 
Notes

[1] This is what force looks like when it confronts discourse, by the way. So where is the closed area, exactly? Is it just wherever the soldier’s tear gas happens to float? It turns out that one can’t ask IDF soldiers simple questions like this when they’re mad and on patrol – qualities that seem to go together a lot. Their rather non-responsive answers to simple questions often seem to take the form of dirty looks, lots of yelling in Hebrew, angry spitting on the ground, and the gratuitous firing of tear gas rounds. But I don’t regard any of that as an answer. Actually, I have a feeling they don’t, either.

[2] Lucy Nusseibeh and Munir Nusseibeh are not related, but Lucy Nusseibeh is married to Sari Nusseibeh, the well-known Palestinian intellectual. Coincidentally, she’s also the daughter of the philosopher J.L. Austin.

[3] I signed the 1987 letter with my middle name rather than my last name after my father took exception to it. I was a minor at the time, and living under his roof.

Sirius XM celebrated Independence Day this year by giving Anthony Cumia, one half of shock jock team Opie and Anthony, the boot.

Anthony had tweeted one of his racist rants about a black woman who punched him in the face in Times Square when she thought he was taking a picture of her. Social media is pretty inextricably linked to public figures, especially radio personalities who promote their Twitter pages on the air, so the argument that it was his “personal” twitter doesn’t hold much water. Did Sirius XM have every right to fire him? Of course. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t make an awful move.

Now whether or not the woman was justified in assaulting Anthony, whether or not he was creeping on her, is irrelevant. Opie and Anthony have been on the air for twenty years, and before they were with SiriusXM, they raised hell on terrestrial airwaves with stunts like Whip ‘em Out Wednesdays, Homeless Charlie and several other deliberately crass radio bits with abject disregard for political correctness, especially on Cumia’s part.

Basically, I’m not sure what Sirius XM was expecting when they allowed O&A on their airwaves. Those two aren’t known to put their tails between their legs. The company’s official statement, as posted on Rolling Stone said:

“SiriusXM has terminated its relationship with Anthony Cumia of the Opie & Anthony channel. The decision was made, and Cumia informed, late Thursday, July 3 after careful consideration of his racially-charged and hate-filled remarks on social media,” Sirius XM said in a statement. “Those remarks and postings are abhorrent to SiriusXM, and his behavior is wholly inconsistent with what SiriusXM represents.”

It’s pretty easy to condemn defenders of Anthony as awful, insensitive racists, and granted some of them are. It’s not like he claims to be some great humanitarian, but you would think that Americans would understand the first amendment at this point. Anyone who would circlejerk about how offended they are would also probably change the station if they heard O&A.

Furthermore, Sirius XM’s decision comes down to an institutional interest in protecting political correctness. Cancelling Opie and Anthony may be bad for business in the short-term, especially since the program is available live only to customers who pay for extra channels, but as Jeremy Weiland’s 2012 essay critiquing political correctness says:

“Yes, saying racist shit sucks — it is hurtful to social conviviality as well as certain individuals, and it has the potential to perpetuate narratives and prejudices that hold us all back. But given that the channels of media are controlled by an elite few corporations, the piling on and blacklisting that follows such an utterance is out of proportion with what the organic social sanction would entail. While we may not care about the feelings of the bigot, we may not immediately see how the media’s use of these incidents serves their interests — programming, articles, interviews, and other opportunities for increased attention and advertising revenue — over our interests, which involve genuine healing, understanding, and contrition.”

There we go. One of the underlying tenets of Opie and Anthony’s messages to the public is that political correctness is a charade, and while it sucks that Anthony needed to be kicked off the air to prove that point, it’s still solidly proven.

Like I said a few weeks ago, radio is one of the best venues for unpopular opinions, but Sirius XM really dropped the ball with this one. They won’t end racism, but they will set a precedent that their company is an enemy of free speech.

This 2011 Live from the Compound bit, is an interesting twist of foreshadowing.

On July 7th, Molly Knefel published a great piece on jury nullification in The Nation. Knefel opens by discussing the trial of Cecily McMillan, an Occupy Wall Street protester who was convicted of “assaulting” a police officer who had assaulted her, and sentenced to a prison term that most of the jurors who convicted her deemed disproportionate and unjust. The jurors had been instructed not to research the punishment McMillan would face.

Knefel discusses the various norms that bias jurors in favor of conviction, from legal norms that prohibit lawyers from mentioning jury nullification in court to an authoritarian bias that inclines jurors to defer to police and prosecutors. She then describes nullification’s history, from its origins in 1670 to its use in the trial of the Camden 28, a group of peace activists who broke into a draft board office in protest of the Vietnam War.

The article’s conclusion is excellent:

People must know their rights before they get called to jury duty. Telling a sitting juror about nullification can be considered illegal tampering. But ensuring that all potential jurors know about nullification is not only legal but critical to the administration of justice. “When people start to understand the power they can exercise as jurors, I think that makes them more enthusiastic about jury service,” Butler says. And in an era of mass incarceration, harsh sentencing, racial profiling and police repression, the jury box is arguably the most powerful spot in the courtroom.

Now this is what I’m talking about!

Late last month I presented alongside Kirsten Tynan of the Fully Informed Jury Association on how jury nullification can be used as a tactic against a growing and brutal prison state. Kirsten discussed much of the history that Knefel covers in her piece. I mostly focused on the abuse that occurs inside American prisons, and why jurors should be aware of this as they consider whether someone should be convicted of a crime.

I’ve considered jury nullification a key part of any prison abolitionist toolkit for a while. About a year ago, in my op-ed Prison Abolition Is Practical, I mentioned jury nullification as one tactic for restraining the prison state, writing:

Resist the prison growth industry. Organize against construction of any new prisons, jails, and detention centers. Divest from banks that profit off prisons, such as Wells Fargo, and urge others to do the same. Expose prison profiteers like Jane Marquardt and undermine their political influence. Film cops, finance legal defenses, and promote jury nullification, so fewer people are sent to prison.

But this perspective on jury nullification has in my experience been too often absent from leftist movements against mass incarceration. The Fully Informed Jury Association does amazing work for jury nullification, but has mostly been heard by the libertarian right. So when left-wing publications like The Nation bring up jury nullification explicitly as a tactic against mass incarceration, this gives me hope and suggests I’m not alone. Let’s fight against mass incarceration, disproportionate punishment, and abusive power on all fronts, with juror education and jury nullification as one key tactic.

Andy Piascik discusses how war is everywhere.

Anthony Papa discusses the stories of drug war prisoners.

Timothy Karr discusses crony capitalists in Congress.

Kevin Carson discusses so called “free trade” agreements.

Jesse Walker discusses why the U.S. should stay out of Iraq.

Andrew Levine discusses imperial stupidity.

Sheldon Richman discusses the effects of imperialism in the Middle East.

Justin Raimondo discusses how the U.S. government is intervening again in Iraq.

Patrick Cockburn discusses how U.S. attacks will hurt but not defeat jihadists.

The ninth part of George H. Smith’s series on Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine.

Eric Alterman discusses the revisionism of neocons on Iraq.

Robert Parry discusses the surge in Iraq.

Seumas Milne discusses how more U.S. bombs and drones will only add to Iraq’s horror.

Shireen T. Hunter discusses the real culprits in Iraq.

Dahlia S. Wasfi discusses trusting Iraqis with Iraq.

Rob Urie discusses Iraq and the persistence of American hegemony.

Lawrence Davidson discusses the mess in Iraq.

David Swanson discusses the Democratic Party push to bomb Iraq again.

Pepe Escobar discusses the jihadists in Iraq.

Renee Parsons discusses the current situation in Iraq.

John Eskow discusses sending boots to Iraq.

Cory Massimino discusses why Hilary Clinton is a terrorist.

Ariel Dorfman discusses a tale of torture.

Missy Comley Beattie discusses Iraq.

David Gordon reviews Lew Rockwell’s new book on anarcho-capitalism. I am not an ancap, but I find the review interesting.

Eric Margolis discusses the coming American defeat in Iraq.

Ronald Bailey reviews Nicholas Wade’s, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History.

Nebojsa Malic discusses a new forum designed to stop a new Cold War.

Alexander Alekhine defeats K. Iskaov.

Alexander Alekhine beats Fred Dewhirst Yates.

Primeiramente, gostaria de pedir desculpas para todos os leitores e doadores do C4SS pelo atraso na publicação do relatório do mês passado da Coordenação de Mídias em português, que ocorreu por problemas pessoais.

Neste mês, tivemos 107 republicações de nossos textos em diversos veículos e nossa página do Facebook saltou para 1206 curtidas, partindo de 873.

Publicamos 24 textos. Valdenor Júnior escreveu quatro deles e eu escrevi outros quatro. Os outros 16 foram textos traduzidos do inglês.

Mostrando o crescimento do C4SS em português, estamos prestes a formar três grupos no Brasil do Estudantes por uma Sociedade Sem Estado (Students for a Stateless Society – S4SS). Para dar suporte a suas atividades, pretendemos colocar no ar um blog e um boletim mensal.

Para isso, contamos com sua doação e seu apoio!

Erick Vasconcelos
Coordenador de Mídias
Centro por uma Sociedade Sem Estado

Portuguese Media Coordinator Update: June 2014

First of all, I’d like to apologise for the late media report for C4SS activities in Portuguese, due to personal issues.

In June, we had 107 pickups from several news outlets and our Facebook page jumped from 873 likes to 1206.

We published 24 articles in the month, four of them written by myself, other four by Valdenor Júnior. English translations comprised the remaining 16.

The growth of C4SS’s presence in Portuguese has also been proven by the fact that we’re about to set up three Students for a Stateless Society (S4SS) groups. To support their activities, we should be setting up a blog as well as a newsletter.

And for that, as always, we need your support and donation!

Erick Vasconcelos
Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society

As Charles Johnson has noted, July 4th is the anniversary of the death of an existing tyrannical government. Anarchists can therefore ironically appropriate the holiday for their own purposes. Let us celebrate the death of British colonial rule rather than the creation of a new nation-state. Both British imperialism and American nationalism deserve to be criticized. They both exalt and create division among the people of the world. Both lead to sanctifying a collectivist identity based on blood and soil. This encourages the use of aggressive violence to sustain an irrational collective unit.

No one should raise the stars and stripes on the 4th. The proper flag to raise on the 4th of July is the black flag of anarchy. It’s far more revolutionary than the military colors of the U.S. government. This is especially true, because of the frequent aggressive military actions engaged in by the American state. The status quo has been statism and militarism for ages. A genuine revolution would overthrow both.

This appropriation of nominally statist holidays is a good way to reach the broader populace. People are more likely to respond to imagery related to what they are familiar with. This is the tactical relevance of reinventing these holidays. It allows the anarchist message to reach a greater number of people. This is important for the purpose of garnering mass support.

In garnering mass support through these means, anarchists are changing the culture from a state reverent one to an anti-state one.  A change in culture is essential for the success of political and economic liberty. The changing of holidays is a crucial part of our struggle against government.  Its help in cultural progress could be immense. It’s a chance not to be passed up.

A related subject pertains to whether we ought to make use of our own unique holidays as well. The answer is a resounding yes. There are anarchist themed holidays like May Day that should be preserved. It’s an integral part of our history as anarchists. The historical is not always worth keeping around, but this celebration is.

The fact that keeping around May Day is worth it raises the question of how we can make it even more anarchistic. We can emphasize the role of government in oppressing the working class. The use of military and police power to break strikes.  We can put an emphasis on how government redistributes wealth upward to a governing class. Let us begin to do this today!

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was ended a few years ago. Its repeal was celebrated by many mainstream liberals, but the radical leftist, Against Equality Collective, had a more critical take. There is merit on both sides of the argumentative aisle. As long as government militaries exist; the freedom of gay individuals who serve to reveal their sexual identity is important. They can otherwise be trapped in a hellish nightmare of inauthenticity. It’s also true that progress doesn’t consist of more people killing for government and wars of empire. The correct position is therefore to see the ending of the policy as ensuring a better environment for gay people in the present military while still criticizing it as part of an oppressive structure of power.

The danger lies in forgetting the evil of imperialism due to a greater inclusion of people participating in imperial violence. A more diverse band of killers for government is still a band of killers for government. Diversity is a useful value, but it isn’t the only value. This is especially true when we’re discussing the subject of militarism. Miliaristic force is among the worst evils known to humankind and remains so even with a greater variety of people involved. It’s imperative not to lose sight of this.

It’s also important not to lose sight of how militarism reinforces the notion of the other. A phenomenon that is especially deadly for marginalized individuals like LGBT people. An example of this is the fear of a Helot uprising in militaristic Sparta. It helped keep militarism going in that society. Homophobia itself is based on a fear of the other. It may not be inherently tied to militarism or empire, but it definitely has that trait in common.

Militarism tends to lead to the demonizing of the other, because it embraces an “us vs them” logic – one nation-group or group against another. It often leads to the total destruction of an enemy. There is no regard for civilian life. The inclusion of gay and lesbian individuals in this practice of “us vs them” war would be ironic. This is due to the status of gays and lesbians as marginalized people in American society.

Let us work towards abolishing homophobia, empire and militarism. A trinity of evils that deserves to be consigned to the dustbin of history. We anarchists can lead the way on this issue. It’s time to get started!

(Inspired by a comment from James Tuttle)

SCOTUS has been dancing its way down a “whatever it takes to keep things from collapsing under the weight of their own contradictions” tightrope with ACA.

First they affirmed its dubious constitutionality, now they’re carving out exceptions for entities which claim to be acting on orders of a boss in the sky.

They seem to have taken both decisions less on the merits than on a sort of assumption that the earth will explode if they don’t find a way to just keep things moving along in the direction they’re going.

For that matter, ACA itself is a strange hybrid — part primary intervention (massive corporate welfare), part secondary intervention (“affordable healthcare for all”) which seems to be failing as both and which the wheels are probably going to come completely off of sooner or later no matter what SCOTUS does.

I have trouble imagining ACA or anything that might happen with it as the specific spark of revolution, but I can definitely see people someday looking back on it in the same way that we now look back on Russians queuing up in line in front of state stores to get toilet paper or shoes.

For various reasons (well, mainly money), the fourth issue of the Molinari Institute’s left-libertarian publication The Industrial Radical has been delayed for nearly a year; but today it is finally at the printer. Issue I.4 features articles by William Anderson, B-psycho, Jason Byas, Kevin Carson, Nathan Goodman, Irfan Khawaja, Tom Knapp, Smári McCarthy, Grant Mincy, Anna Morgenstern, Sheldon Richman, Amir Taaki, Mattheus von Guttenberg, Darian Worden, and your humble correspondent, on topics ranging from the Manning / Snowden whistleblower cases, the protests in Brazil, deference to authority, America’s foreign policy morass, Obama’s war on the environment, and the myth of 19th-century laissez-faire to alternative currencies, identity politics and intersectionality, abortion opponents as rape apologists, the Trayvon Martin / George Zimmerman case, the inside scoop on PorcFest, and why anarcho-capitalism cannot be a form of capitalism.

Issue 2.1 will follow soon thereafter, and we’ll be on an accelerated schedule until we’re caught up.

With each new issue published, we post the immediately preceding issue online. Hence a free pdf file of our third issue (Spring 2013) is now available here. (See the first and second issues also.)

Want to write for The Industrial Radical? See our information for authors and copyright policy.

Want to subscribe to The Industrial Radical? Visit our online shop.

Want to give an additional donation to the Molinari Institute? Contribute to our General Fund.

A long, long time ago in 2007, Alysia Santo wrote an article for the Columbia Journalism Review on the incorporation of data security into journalism classes. Since then, we’ve had the Wikileaks debacle, Snowden’s leaks and Manning’s leaks, leading to worldwide state crackdown on journalism:

“I spoke with a number of journalism schools, to see how the growing issue of cyber-security was being handled, and found a range of approaches. I turned to my alma mater, Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, and spoke with Emily Bell, the director of Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, a dual master’s program in journalism and computer science, which is in its first year. She says that issues of cyber security bother her “immensely,” but at this point, most students aren’t receiving detailed instruction about it. The only cyber-security course being taught takes place within the computer science program, which is only offered to the students enrolled in the Tow Center’s double major. Bell says discussions are underway for how to introduce this more broadly to the curriculum.”

This is great, but not all journalism students want to (or have the means to) go on to graduate school, much less at Columbia, much much less as a double major. Everyone I’ve spoken to who’s taken undergraduate journalism or general communications classes said that data security wasn’t brought up in the classroom.

Now I’ll be honest, as an undergrad, I’m a bit lazy with my data. I’m not reporting on anything particularly hard-hitting or of national interest, so I’m not too worried that anything journalistic on my computer or iPhone is incriminating. Most of what I know about journalistic data security is from my own research and a seminar I attended at the national Society of Professional Journalism conference hosted at Boston College this past April. In only about an hour, the presenters explained TOR, encrypted messaging, email protection, and general data security measures journalists should know about like using burner phones. There’s no reason these skills shouldn’t be applied in every undergraduate journalism class. Since I’m not done with my degree program I’ll give my school the benefit of the doubt for now, but most students I talk to don’t even know what TOR is, and that’s extremely problematic for the future of this field.

A few years after Santo’s piece, NYU journalism professor Adam Penenberg had this gem of an excuse why not:

“… the NYU program didn’t require all students to learn comsec [communication security] for the same reason that they didn’t require all students to learn ‘how to line up ‘fixers’ in a war-ravaged nation or go undercover with a hidden camera. Only a fraction of students will ever need those skills.'”

Only a fraction of journalism students need to learn how to protect their information? It should be a no-brainer that any type of data, particularly email or phone correspondence, which journalists use most often, can potentially fall into the wrong hands and become incriminating. Not all students are techies, but modern journalism requires at least a base knowledge of technology, considering most of it is now on the internet. The days of meeting Deep Throat at a parking garage are long gone; although face-to-face conversation is still the most secure method of gaining information, this is not always possible as your sources may be halfway across the globe.

Susan McGregor, Columbia journalism professor offered the best rebuttal:

“As for the question, Does everyone have to learn this stuff? McGregor says, absolutely. Journalists have a collective responsibility; it’s as important as closing and locking the door behind you when you walk into your apartment building. ‘You may not be covering the NSA, but a colleague of yours might,’ says McGregor. ‘Unless you’re working really on your own, you have a responsibility to protect the person who is vulnerable or may be targeted within your organization by being responsible yourself. If you are not being responsible, you are exposing the people you work with, potentially.'”

Undergraduate journalism classes usually have a section on media law; my school has a whole required class on it. While of course it’s important to know how to deal with a lawsuit, wouldn’t it make sense to learn how to prevent one in the first place? There is concern over making students paranoid, but isn’t a healthy amount of paranoia necessary in the current security state?

McGregor is right – if you wouldn’t leave your apartment door unlocked, you wouldn’t leave all of your data out in the open fields of the web.

First, for any newcomers, a primer on my view of public government sector unions:

• I am staunchly pro-labor. At the same time, I oppose the existence of the state. A look at how workers have been treated by governments over time, and how regularly states back up capital in several ways, disproves the commonly peddled idea that the two are a contradiction.
• That said, there are some things that workers currently defined as government employees do that would not — indeed could not, on basic reality grounds — simply go *poof*. To oppose the government school is not to oppose education or educators, and trash disposal would still be necessary, for examples. To the extent an actual service is provided that is not predicated on force & intimidation, that would be sought out voluntarily in a post-state society, I’m with them on that.
• Much of the rage currently directed at government sector organizing that fits the above criteria (that is, NOT COP UNIONS) is based on a misreading of the total labor landscape: private sector labor power got thoroughly crushed first.

Why this is relevant is because today the ruling in Harris v Quinn came out from, from… what’s that group of people in the robes in the fancy building with a huge security zone around it called again? Right, the Supreme Court:

The Supreme Court dealt a blow to public sector unions Monday, ruling that thousands of home health care workers in Illinois cannot be required to pay fees that help cover the union’s costs of collective bargaining.

In a 5-4 split along ideological lines, the justices said the practice violates the First Amendment rights of nonmembers who disagree with the positions that unions take.

On principle I agree, no one should be able to force you to contribute to a cause you oppose. Yet there is a sleight of hand in how they describe what’s going on. See, the union is required to represent and bargain for non-members whether they pay or not, thanks to the organizing system imposed by the government. So what is portrayed as a matter of conscience and freedom of association is instead the mandating of a free rider problem. Why is it not the case that one can, if they for some reason oppose the union, cease dues paying while the union ceases the activity for them that the dues paying funds? Why is it not seen as equally injurious to free association to force providing free benefits?

Try to imagine if there were a law that said 7-11 had to give out free slurpies to people who prefer other convenience stores. Or free lottery tickets to people that opposed gambling. Ridiculous, no?

Such is the logic of the state. The most reasonable answer is never an option.

Couple other things about this:

Curiously, the group that won was made up mostly of people taking care of relatives using Medicaid funds. How that even counts for the purpose of this question as being employed by the state, I have no idea, ask Governor Quinn.

The following, from the article, could be used for a different type of argument:

The workers argue they are not government employees capable of being unionized in the traditional sense. They are different, they say, because they work in people’s homes, not on government property, and are not supervised by other state employees. (emphasis mine)

Cops barge into peoples homes, enter (violate) private property, and their conduct is evaluated (and generally excused) by other cops. Hmm…

Remember that this model of organizing labor — the bureaucratic form and the emphasis on traditional politics — is itself constructed by the ruling class. Now they think even that is too much. Time to throw out the rulebook.

Hi, everyone — time for a monthly update!

In June, I made a total of 48,508 submissions of C4SS op-eds to English-language publications worldwide.

So far I’ve identified 75 reprints of those op-eds in publications:

Not just across the US from west (California) to east (Rhode Island), north (Montana) to south (Florida) and in between (Iowa), but also in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Taiwan, Fiji, the Cayman Islands, Jamaica …

It took us 2 1/2 years to get our first thousand pickups. We’re ahead of the curve to hit one thousand this year. A year ago, I considered one pickup per weekday a reasonable goal. This month we did 2.5 pickups per days, seven days a week.

I’m not ready to declare “success” yet — what I really want is to see some states abolished! — but I do think it’s fair to say that C4SS has positioned itself as the global voice of the market anarchist movement and is coming into its own as a media center and “think tank” which can bring intellectual and philosophical influence to bear on world events in much the same way as its more statist counterparts.

As always, your support is key to continuing our work and expanding its influence. Thanks so much for all you do to make what WE do possible!

Best regards,
Tom Knapp
Senior News Analyst and English-Language Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society

Dylan Matthews recently published an article at Vox titled Prisons are terrible, and there’s finally a way to get rid of them. Matthews’ article starts out strong, beginning with an explanation of the horrific costs of prisons. He describes the appalling rates of physical and sexual assault, the data on systemic racism, and the costs to taxpayers for maintaining this violent system. He then notes the ostensible reasons for the prison system, such as deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitation of prisoners. However, he notes “prisons aren’t the only way to accomplish those goals.” His alternative approach is using GPS tracking in order to enforce house arrest.

Matthews cites various empirical studies that suggest GPS tracking is very effective compared to other methods of crime control. Most of the studies compare GPS tracking and house arrest to parole, probation, community service, and other options besides imprisonment. However, one study examined tracking technology when used as a direct alternative to imprisonment:

The most intriguing evidence comes from Argentina, where Harvard’s Rafael Di Tella and Torcuato Di Tella University’s Ernesto Schargrodsky found that electronic monitoring cuts recidivism nearly in half relative to a prison sentence. That raises the possibility that electronic monitoring could be more than merely a supplement to prisons. It could replace many of them. The program evaluated used something a bit less technologically sophisticated than GPS tracking. Offenders wore an ankle bracelet which transmitted a signal to a receptor in their home. If the signal is interrupted, or the device appears to be manipulated, or the vital signs of the individual are not being transmitted from the bracelet, then the receptor calls it in.

Di Tella and Schargrodsky’s evidence is particularly compelling because the decision of whether to give Argentinian arrestees house arrest or prison was made randomly. In most countries, electronic monitoring is offered to defendants judged to be less dangerous, so you’d expect those sentenced to it to reoffend less than those sent to prison. “If you show someone released into monitoring has lower recidivism, all you show is that the judge was successful and identified the person who was less dangerous,” Di Tella notes.

But in Argentina, judges are randomly assigned to cases, and strict and lenient judges differ wildly in their inclination to use electronic monitoring. The result was that extremely high risk people were sometimes given electronic monitoring and extremely low risk people were sometimes thrown into jail — it was just random. The leniency of some judges meant that there were “people accused for the second time of murder [who] were still given electronic monitoring,” Di Tella says. Di Tella and Schargrodsky had stumbled upon a true, randomized experiment, and the result was being monitored instead of imprisoned caused people to reoffend less.

These results suggest that GPS tracking and house arrest could be more effective than imprisonment at preventing criminals from reoffending.

However, while Matthews’ argument at first appears to be a prison abolitionist argument, it is in fact a reform proposal. In order to make sure people remain under house arrest, Matthews proposes “a guaranteed, immediate prison stay for those who violate its terms.” He also argues that for the most dangerous offenders, such as murderers and rapists, house arrest is still insufficiently secure to hold them. Matthews’ proposal would, however, entail locking dramatically fewer people in prison. As Matthews points out, “In 2011, only 2 percent were admitted for murder, 0.7 percent for negligent manslaughter, and 5.4 percent for rape or sexual assault. … The vast majority of the people getting locked up aren’t killers or rapists.”

If Matthews’ proposal were ever implemented, it would in some ways be a dramatic improvement over the American prison system. The very structure of prison makes inmates vulnerable to rape, murder, and other forms of violence in a way that seems unlikely with house arrest and ankle bracelets.

However, there are also substantial risks to expanding the use of house arrest, ankle bracelets, and GPS tracking. The ultimate risk is expanding the scope of criminalization and turning society into an open air prison. These technologies risk turning our homes into sites of surveillance, control, and punishment while making the world a constantly monitored panopticon.

Another problem is that political incentives would make a less punitive system like the one Matthews proposes unstable. As I’ve discussed previously, politicians have plenty of incentives to support ever more punitive policies. After any crisis, heinous crime, or moral panic passing new punitive statutes is politically advantageous for politicians. Politicians further gain from high profile enforcement of the laws they pass and prosecutors benefit from successfully prosecuting people, so a symbiotic relationship between politicians and prosecutors emerges. Prison guards gain concentrated benefits from incarcerating more people, while the costs of imprisonment are dispersed to taxpayers as a whole, and only concentrated upon those who are systematically disenfranchised. Moreover, the general public is rationally ignorant about politics, and polls and surveys indicate that the public overestimates the amount of crime in society, producing a bias in favor of more punitive policies.

So even if GPS tracking is a good replacement for prisons, political incentives mean that punitive prison policies would be reintroduced after GPS tracking was adopted as a supposed replacement. Ultimately, change needs to happen at the level of the institutions and incentives themselves. Change needs to happen at what economists like James Buchanan call the constitutional level, where the rules of the game are made. In my view, the necessary constitutional change is the abolition of the state. It’s good that pieces questioning the necessity of prisons are being published in mainstream liberal outlets like Vox, but a more radical challenge to the  political structure is necessary.

In this talk, Karl Hess discusses his break with the Right of America. The ethic of the Old Right as isolationist, anti-federal and anti-state was destroyed by the alignment against international communism. He surveys the struggles of the radical figures of the anticommunist right to connect their historical opposition to centralized power with a new philosophy which seemed to necessitate glorifying and reveling in it. With the rise of Nixon and Agnew, he sees the right-wing embrace of power fully realized, and that the Republican party had become nothing more than the American expression of Stalinism.

Hess gains no comfort from the centralist liberals of the day, whose ideas of police reform involve teaching cops only to shoot straighter. Hess instead embraces the slogan of Power to the People and connects this tendency within the New Left to the embrace of full anarchism. The Right had grown tired of individuals, of people, of communities, saw the only true attainment of its goals through the institution of the nation-state. Hess saw the aims of the Left and of social revolution to be for “the people to be great and for the nations to be nothing”

Ivan Eland discusses why there should be no more U.S. intervention in Iraq.

Sheldon Richman discusses how the non-interventionists told you so about the Iraq War.

Vijay Prashad discusses the ISIS folks in Iraq.

Charles Hugh Smith discusses why George W. Bush and Obama’s presidencies are the two most destructive in U.S. history.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses nation-building with a national-security state.

Robert Scheer discusses Bush’s horrific Iraqi legacy. It’s a bit too Obama friendly but still good.

Sami Gillette discusses the movie, Dirty Wars.

David S. D’Amato discusses why government is not just what we do together.

Roderick Long presents the abstract for a paper on left-libertarianism.

Simon Jenkins discusses further military intervention in Iraq.

Ivan Eland discusses the worst effect of the Afghan War.

Justin Raimondo discusses whether the neocons will get away with more military intervention in Iraq.

William Loren Katz discusses the forgotten fight against fascism.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the Baghdad fear index.

Marjorie Cohn discusses Obama on the brink of war or peace.

The Daily Take Team from The Thom Hartmann Program discusses why Cheney should be rotting at the Hague rather than writing editorials.

Stephen Cox discusses isolationism and Iraq. I am not an isolationist, but this has some good points.

Laurence Vance discusses the “libertarian” statism he sees behind the proposal for a basic income.

Matt Zwolinski discusses the libertarian case for a basic income. This is provided to provide a contrast to the position above. You can judge for yourself.

Nick Gillespie discusses whether anyone will really miss Eric Cantor.

Gene Healy discusses why don’t do stupid stuff is smart foreign policy advice.

Gina O’Neil-Santiago discusses what libertarian socialism is.

Dan Sanchez discusses how statism drove Iraqis into the arms of terrorists.

John Knefel discusses the War on Terror.

Corey Robin discusses feelings about humanitarian intervention, imperialism, and militarism.

William Pfaff discusses Iraq.

Justin Dolittle discusses Gitmo and liberals.

Patrick Cockburn discusses how Obama wants the Iraqi prime minister to leave.

Savielly Tartakower defeats Geza Maroczy.

Johannes Zukertort beats Joesph Henry Blackburne.