We had a few interesting Spanish-lang pickups between December 2013 and January 2014:

The translation for Sheldon Richman’s “The Pope Dabbles in Economics”, was picked up by El Librepensador, an independent online newspaper from Spain.

The same newspaper picked up the translation for Tom Knapp’s “Privacy 2014: The Fable of the Hoarder”, and “Privacy 2014: Scroogled?”.

These three pieces, as well as the translation for Tom Knapp’s “2013: One Era Ends, Another Begins” were also picked up by Before It’s News, which publishes our English-lang material quite regularly, so it’s interesting to see it publishing our Spanish translations too.

And last but not least, the blog of El Libertario, a prominent Venezuelan anarchist newspaper, published the translation for Kevin Carson’s ““Privatization” or Corporatism?”, as well as my “Patriarchy on Steroids: The Case of Venezuela’s Plastic Surgery Fever”.

We’re starting 2014 with a renewed effort in Spanish translation, with a commitment to post at least four translations of Op-ed pieces per month, and building a list of contacts of Spanish-lang mainstream media contacts that we will cultivate relationships with.

¡Apoya a C4SS!

¡Salud!

The Jacobin recently published a good piece by Peter Frase titled “The Left and the State.” In it he discusses a recent attack on Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange. This attack was published in the well known liberal magazine, The New Republic. He makes use of another good piece by libertarian, Will Wilkinson. Both he and Wilkinson deserve further consideration.

Peter Frase writes:

Wilkinson notes that theoretically, libertarianism is “an argument against the possibility of legitimate government.” This makes it clearly incompatible with most socialist or social democratic attempts to democratize the market or expropriate the means of production. Yet nevertheless, “it’s crazily illogical to reason that the actually existing state is justified on liberal terms just because the libertarian critique of the state is false, and a legitimate liberal state is possible.”

The key word here is “most”. A left-libertarian market anarchist transformation would involve a free market anti-capitalist or laissez faire socialist democratization of the market through freed market means. This could conceivably involve expropriation of state corporatist or state capitalist property. It’s thus clearly possible to accept the libertarian critique of the state as valid and still advocate revolutionary economic transformation. Our ideal is freed markets and not the existing “marketplace”.

Will Wilkinson writes:

Liberals and socialists often accuse libertarians, not without justice, of acting as unwitting apologists for plutocracy. Many free-marketeers do have a bad habit of confusing our unjustifiably rigged political economy with a very different laissez faire ideal, and their defenses of the actually-existing “free enterprise system” really do redound to the benefit of those the system is rigged to enrich. Likewise, liberals do have a bad habit of confusing actual, nominally liberal states with a very different liberal ideal, and their defenses of the actual “liberal state” do tend to redound to the benefit of the insidiously illiberal segments of the state that cannot be justified or accounted for on almost any standard liberal theory of legitimacy. The point being that too many “liberals” are really conservative apologists for the status quo political order, just as too many “libertarians” are really conservative apologists for the status quo economic order.

An excellent unwittingly left-libertarian sentiment. We libertarians will have an easier time making common cause with the left when we choose to acknowledge these truths. The Jacobin article above is a promising step in that direction. Let’s continue to make left-wing market anarchism visible, so we can see even more like it. I look forward to it.

On January 15, freelance sports blogger Caleb Hannan published a longform article at Grantland documenting his eight-month search for the truth behind Yar Golf’s “physics-defying” putter and its inventor, Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt.

Over the course of Hannan’s reporting for this essay, he discovered that Vanderbilt’s claims regarding her academic credentials turned out to be unverifiable. As he dug deeper, he learned from her investors and court documents that she might be a con artist. He also stumbled upon a facet of Vanderbilt’s life that should have been inconsequential, but which he thought was important – nay, “shocking” – enough to focus at least part of his piece on: she was a transgender woman.

According to Hannan’s own accounting of events, Vanderbilt asked him from the beginning to “focus on the science,” and not on her. He agreed to this. As he investigated her claims and found that some of them didn’t pass the smell test, he was well within his rights to do more research. As a journalist he had an obligation to tell the truth given the context of his story. Where that obligation ended – in fact, where that obligation never even approached – was her gender identity.

In his essay, Hannan details at least one scenario where he discussed Vanderbilt’s gender identity with an investor of hers, and it becomes clear as the article progresses that he viewed her transition as another aspect of her con. Indeed, he casts her increasingly agitated email exchanges with him over the course of the reporting period as attempts to obfuscate his ability to tell the entire story. It probably didn’t occur to him that she didn’t want to discuss her gender or have her trans status publicized.

And yet, he did it. And it killed her. Vanderbilt committed suicide on October 18, 2013, almost exactly three months before the piece went to print. Hannan styled the final paragraphs of his essay as a “eulogy,” clicked “save” in his word processor, and sent it to his editors at Grantland, who had no problem publishing the final product.

-~*~-

This final product created a firestorm on the Internet.

Audrey Faye at Autostraddle highlighted Hannan’s flippant misgendering of Vanderbilt:

Hannan details Dr. V’s history of lawsuits, relationships and a suicide attempt. He describes outing her as trans to at least one investor without her consent, and without any acknowledgement of the fact that that’s what he was doing. And then, as the linchpin of the piece, he writes “What began as a story about a brilliant woman with a new invention had turned into a tale of a troubled man who had invented a new life for himself. Yet the biggest question remained unanswered: Had Dr. V created a great golf club or merely a great story?”

“A tale of a troubled man who had invented a new life for himself.”

A troubled man.

Just like that, Hannan did what so many people do: he called into question the reality of Dr. V’s gender as if her being trans was as suspect as her missing degrees, engaging in the deplorable and time-honored practice of depicting trans* people, and especially trans women, as duplicitous and deceitful.

Melissa McEwan at Shakesville notes his separation from the human element in his story:

Hannan distances himself from this tragedy by including in the story the report of a previous attempt at taking her own life made by Dr. V, as if to suggest that her suicide was inevitable.

Further, he catalogs her deception about her educational and professional background alongside the revelation that she is trans, in a way that suggests her failure to reflexively disclose that she is trans as part of any introduction to a new person is a lie, just like so many others she told.

When she does not agree to become the focus of his story, which was meant to be about the science, he pouts and tasks her with the responsibility for his aggressive invasiveness: “Dr. V’s initial requests for privacy had seemed reasonable. Now, however, they felt like an attempt to stop me from writing about her or the company she’d founded. But why?” He reports disclosing that Dr. V is a trans woman to one of her investors. He publishes her birth name. He describes the scene of her death. And he concludes the piece by calling it a eulogy.

Grantland responded to the multivarious criticisms with an apology letter from editor Bill Simmons and a response piece by ESPN.com baseball reporter Christina Kahrl. These responses were, in turn, criticized for 1. treating Vanderbilt’s death like they would treat a misspelling of a name, and 2. for continuing to treat Vanderbilt’s identity as part of her con game, respectively. Tim Marchman at Deadspin brought up how inappropriate the chronological nature of the article’s structure was; that, by writing the story in linear time, Hannan apparently felt he had to out Vanderbilt in order for everything else to make sense:

By writing the story chronologically, as a mystery where every revelation led to a further revelation, Hannan essentially locked himself into a structure where he had to reveal that Vanderbilt was a transgender woman to make sense of the blanks he’d found in her background. The chronological structure requires that to be the emotional pivot of the story, the moment when the story begins to open up for the author; the death is only a coda.

This is all the more troubling given that Grantland’s editor-in-chief, Bill Simmons, wrote that the story was filed in something approximating its present form before Vanderbilt killed herself in October. That suggests that in the process of writing, Hannan thought it would be acceptable to out Vanderbilt, by way of buttressing his claims about her background and thus casting doubt on the science behind her putter.

The response to Grantland’s attempted mea culpa was just as fierce on Twitter:

And people are really trying to spin this as “Good journalism violates boundaries.” I need a drink…so I can throw it at you!

— Shaadi (@tgirlinterruptd) January 21, 2014

spent the whole time explaining your journalism fails, totally missed how you failed as a human being @BillSimmons — Daniel José Older (@djolder) January 20, 2014

@sophiaphotos it almost reads like “growing pains”. No. A woman is dead. Her death is not “a mistake” that legitimizes your journalism. — Invincible Joy (@aisha1908) January 21, 2014

This woman’s ENTIRE LIFE is less important than this writer’s FIRST PIECE for Grantland. His career can be fixed. She can’t be brought back.

— GenderTerror.com (@Wolferfly) January 21, 2014

.@bodysnatcher226 @scATX It was terrible. Kahrl’s piece basically said Dr. V was at fault for being stealth. Victim blaming, bull.

— GenderTerror.com (@Wolferfly) January 20, 2014

Grandland laying into stealth trans people is a way to discredit trans people and frame stealth trans people as liars and frauds.

— Sophia Banks (@sophiaphotos) January 21, 2014

Of course, Hannan didn’t have to write the article according to the edicts of linear time, and he didn’t have to out Essay Anne Vanderbilt. And ethically, this shouldn’t have even been a question up for debate by either him or his editors.

-~*~-

Just about every newsroom in the world abides by a code of ethics. Sometimes this is a set of loose guidelines, but usually, it’s written out clear as day and in neon. The Society of Professional Journalists, for instance, has incredibly clear rules regarding conduct and harm reduction. Caleb Hannan should know this. He’s been working as a professional journalist since at least 2010, when he won several SPJ awards for his reporting in Seattle Weekly; he has written for Bloomberg Businessweek, Deadspin and others on a variety of subjects besides sports, so it’s hard to believe he’s green in this regard.

Here’s what the SPJ has to say about harm reduction:

Ethical journalists treat sources, subjects and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect.

Journalists should: — Show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage. Use special sensitivity when dealing with children and inexperienced sources or subjects.
— Be sensitive when seeking or using interviews or photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.
— Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance.
— Recognize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than do public officials and others who seek power, influence or attention. Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone’s privacy.
— Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.
— Be cautious about identifying juvenile suspects or victims of sex crimes.
— Be judicious about naming criminal suspects before the formal filing of charges.
— Balance a criminal suspect’s fair trial rights with the public’s right to be informed.

In the bluntest terms, Hannan objectified Vanderbilt’s transness; he saw her gender identity as a hook to get more eyeballs to his story and his work, and he wasn’t going to let frivolous facts, like transgender people being 25 times more likely to commit suicide than the general population, get in his way. He disregarded her desire to keep this aspect of her life private. He, and Grantland, profited from her death.

Hannan’s essay is journalistically unethical. It’s also grossly inhuman.

“This is one of the most horrifying, despicable things that I have seen all day. People who post this kind of adulation for this mass murderer — an immensely privileged millionaire dynastic politician, who imprisoned hundreds of thousands of innocent people in military internment camps solely on the basis of their race, who repeatedly turned away Jews fleeing the Holocaust, who sponsored and administered nativist immigration policies and spoke in openly racist terms against “the mingling of Asiatic blood with European and American blood,” whose policies and whose court appointments resulted in some of the worst adverse civil-rights decisions of the 20th century — the man who authorized the firebombing of Tokyo and the creation of the atomic bombs, who spent the 1930s courting votes from Jim Crow Dixiecrats, who repeatedly used federal forces to imprison striking workers during the Depression, who drove Congress to create the House Un-American Activities Committee and who ordered J. Edgar Hoover to begin the massive covert political espionage program which later became COINTELPRO, . . . — people who post this kind of adulation, I say, thinking that they are doing so in the name of liberalism, are white-washing history and excusing the violation of human rights in defense of immense, unaccountable privilege.

Nobody who professes to have even an ounce of concern about social justice or civil liberty should have anything but disgust for the record of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”

Wendy McElroy reviews a historical work on the surveillance state.

Jonathan Cook discusses the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Sheldon Richman discusses how intellectual property creates corporate concentration.

Jim Lobe discusses the fall of Fallujah.

Stephen Kinzer discusses the potential detente with Iran.

Thaddeus Russell discusses The Other America.

Kevin Carson reviews AFFEERCE: A Business Plan to Save the United States and then The World.

Brian Doherty discusses petty law enforcement directed against the poor.

Barry Lando discusses the American legacy in Iraq.

William Blum discusses the NSA spying.

Peter Van Buren discusses 10 NSA myths.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the war in Afghanistan.

Chase Madar discusses the use of police power against kids.

Kevin Carson discusses 5 libertarian reforms to fight for.

Ryan Calhoun discusses state control of the weed market.

Molly Crabapple discusses the 12 anniversary of Gitmo.

Noam Chomsky discusses Ariel Sharon.

Joseph Stromberg discusses Gabriel Kolko.

Clancy Sigal discusses Fallujah.

Sheldon Richman discusses how our leaders don’t mean well.

Sahar Aziz discusses the War on Terror’s authoritarian template.

Naomi Wolf discusses the use of secret assassins by Obama.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the Syria peace settlement.

Jonathan Blanks discusses how recognizing power structures is not incompatible with individual liberty.

Sheldon Richman discusses how rights violations aren’t the only bads.

Chris Gilbert discusses U.S. intervention in Colombia.

Uri Avnery discusses Ariel Sharon.

Kathleen Wallace discusses an infamous raid on Lawrence, Kansas.

Chris Wainscott reviews Position and Pawn Tension in Chess.

John Watson reviews a whole heap of opening books.

John Stossel recently penned a piece titled Equality vs Liberty. In it, he argues that wealth inequality is not a serious issue. This post is the beginning of a lengthier response to him. It will be expanded into an opinion editorial. Quotations from Stossel will be used in both pieces.

Stossel remarks:

It’s true that today, the richest one percent of Americans own a third of America’s wealth. One percent owns 35 percent!

But I say, so what?

Stossel is oblivious to the fact that control of wealth and property allows a person to dictate the terms of existence to another. A person with little money is more likely to have to work for a boss, because they don’t have the resources to survive otherwise. Inequality is by definition a phenomena involving subordination. When people aren’t relatively equal – command and control ensues. Individual liberty and equality are thus intertwined.

Stossel goes on to say:

Progressives in the media claim that the rich get richer at the expense of the poor.

But that’s a lie.

Hollywood sells the greedy-evil-capitalists-cheat-the-poor message with movies like Martin Scorsese’s new film, “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which portrays stock sellers as sex-crazed criminals. Years before, Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” created a creepy financier, Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, who smugly gloated, “It’s a zero-sum game. Somebody wins; somebody loses.”

This is how the left sees the market: a zero-sum game. If someone makes money, he took it from everyone else. The more the rich have, the less others have. It’s as if the economy is a pie that’s already on the table, waiting to be carved. The bigger the piece the rich take, the less that’s left for everyone else. The economy is just a fight over who gets how much.

But this is absurd. Bill Gates took a huge slice of pie, but he didn’t take it from me. By starting Microsoft, he baked millions of new pies. He made the rest of the world richer, too. Entrepreneurs create things.

Stossel is also unaware of the extent to which state intervention in the “market” props up established wealthy economic players. A genuinely freed market would not involve people getting wealthy at the expense of others, but we don’t live in such a society. A genuinely freed market would likely have a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. Not a perfect equality, but a substantially better one. This is what we left-wing market anarchists aim for.

Konkin offered a scenario [PDF], using agorist class theory, to illustrate the difference between a limited-government libertarian and an agorist:

“Consider the individual standing at the corner of the street. He can see two sides of the building behind him as he prepares to cross the street. He is hailed and turns around to see an acquaintance from the local libertarian club approaching in one direction. The latter advocates ‘working through the system’ and is an armed government agent. Walking along the other side of the building is another acquaintance, same age, gender, degree of closeness and so on, who is a practicing counter-economist. She also may be armed and is undoubtedly carrying the very kind of contraband the State’s agent is empowered to act on. Seeing you, the first individual waves and confirms she indeed has the illegal product — and is about to run into the ‘libertarian statist’ at the corner. Both are slightly distracted, looking at you.

The situation is not likely to happen too often but it’s quite possible. Only the removal of ‘complicating factors’ is contrived. If you fail to act, the counter-economist will be taken by surprise and arrested or killed. If she is warned, she may — at this last-minute — elect to defend herself before flight and thus injure the agent. You are aware of this and must act now — or fail to act.

The agorist may take some pains to cover his warning so that he will not get involved in a crossfire, but he will act. The socialist has a problem if the State agent works for a socialist state. Even the ‘libertarian’ has a problem. Let’s make it really rough: the State agent contributes heavily to the local ‘libertarian’ club or party (for whatever reasons; many such people are known to this author). The counter-economist refuses to participate except socially to the group. For whose benefit would the ‘political libertarian’ act?

Such choices will increase in frequency when the State increases repression or the agorists increase their resistance. Both are likely in the near future.

Agorist class theory is quite practical.”

Every day, I’m confronted with articles and opeds that discuss and defend an institution I don’t recognize, an abstraction projected by those who seem to be invested in convincing us that it actually exists. This institution is said to preserve law and order in society through various arms, all accountable to something else called “the people” or “the electorate.” The concept under consideration is identified as the state or government, but there are at least two ways to consider that concept.

The state as we find it in these pieces is the state of fantasy, a phenomenon we might contrast with the state of history. The state of liberal fantasy is a result of social contract, freely developed from the will of autonomous, equal citizens; it provides crucial services, protects individual prerogatives and rights, and furnishes the foundation of society. That this state has never existed is of no import to the proselytizers of statism. Because they want to believe that the state is a well-meaning quasi-charity that the social body has organized and instituted voluntarily, it matters not that the historical state is a very different creature.

Defined by war, conquest and spoliation, the state we find all throughout history has been fundamentally antisocial and antithetical to the principle of contract. Rather than dispensing necessary services and aiding the poor, the historical state has dedicated itself to establishing the preconditions for predation and for the exploitation of the laboring classes. The historical state stole and monopolized in order to make the working poor the tools of the idle rich. Were we ever to find the state of fantasy, it would indeed be inaccurate to call it the state at all. Having shed all of the definitive traits of the state — which is coercive rather than contractual, predatory rather than philanthropic — we mightn’t, as anarchists, find it objectionable at all.

The state of fantasy is in point of fact what we look forward to as proponents of a free society, a condition in which free, sovereign individuals in genuine community provide for one another through consensual trading and giving. The historical state is the foremost enemy and impediment to the emergence of this kind of society. It is interesting, therefore, to see so many apologies for the state from those whose interest in the poor and underprivileged is sincere, those who actually care about wealth inequality and social justice. But these defenses of the state make perfect sense once we understand that the state of fantasy is the one liberals see.

Jacob Huebert has penned a very informative introductory text to libertarian philosophy called Libertarianism Today. It was a pleasure to read, but this left-libertarian market anarchist has some qualms to raise. A detailed review is in the works, so this will be a brief exploration. Quotations from the book will be provided for the reader’s edification. The reader is encouraged to read the whole book.

On pg.39; Huebert states:

Some libertarians argue that libertarianism is not just about property rights and the non-aggression principle, but requires promotion of certain liberal social values.

This left-libertarian market anarchist supports a thick approach to libertarianism. One that emphaizies a broad conception of liberty requiring the promotion of liberal cultural values. The dialectical libertarian model of Chris Matthew Sciabarra serves as an inspiration for this too. The book never mentions thick and dialectical libertarianism. It briefly mentions left-libertarianism, but the coverage is not too extensive. In fairness to the author; the book is intended as an introductory text and broad overview. Not a comprehensive encyclopedia of libertarian thought. 

These thinker’s liberal social views may or may not have merit, but they are not part of libertarianism per se. Again, libertarianism itself is compatible with both liberal and conservative social values.

Is it really? Insofar as conservative social values tend to promote collectivist conformity, deference to traditional or established authority, or self-sacrificial dutifulness, there is a conflict with the individualistic orientation of libertarianism. Implicit in the libertarian conception of individual rights and non-aggression is a liberal sensibility. A society with the conservative social values mentioned above is less likely to sustain it.

On pg.39 to 40; Huebert goes on to say:

To suggest otherwise is an ideological mistake and probably also a strategic mistake. It redefines libertarianism to mean something it has never meant to most modern libertarians, and it narrows the audience for libertarianism to only those people who share this liberal worldview. For many people, the beauty of libertarianism is that it lets everyone pursue their values, as long as they do not feel a need to force their views on the rest of the world.

Redefinition of a paradigm or fundamental change is sometimes necessary to make ideological progress. The subjective comfort of most modern libertarians matters less than pinning down a proper conception of liberty. An abandonment of this liberal worldview could have serious consequences for marginalized populations that run afoul of traditional social norms. It’s also not true that only those with a liberal worldview will then be enticed by libertartarianism. Open minded conservatives who are convinced to challenge their beliefs could still find a reason to jump on board.

Over the weekend, Bill and Emma Keller declared which side they were on in the ongoing blogger vs. journalist debate, and they did it in the worst way I could conceive of: They tag-team attacked a woman with stage four breast cancer for daring to tweet about her experiences, and daring to be optimistic about her chances of survival.

Bill Keller is the former Executive Editor of the New York Times, so his arrival at this position, from up at the peak of the ivory tower, is at least understandable (though no less abhorrent). His wife, Emma? A cancer survivor.

Emma Keller’s post at the Guardian, titled “Forget funeral selfies. What are the ethics of tweeting a terminal illness?” has already been deleted “with the agreement of the subject because it is inconsistent with the Guardian editorial code.” Thanks to the Wayback Machine, we’re able to knock back the clock and see exactly what she said.

“Lisa Bonchek Adams is dying,” Emma Keller writes. “She has Stage IV breast cancer and now it’s metastasized to her bones, joints, hips, spine, liver and lungs. She’s in terrible pain. She knows there is no cure, and she wants you to know all about what she is going through. Adams is dying out loud. On her blog and, especially, on Twitter.”

Is this mockery? I can’t tell. If I wasn’t aware of the title or theme of the article, I would probably say that this was just a very succinct, radio-friendly lede. But it becomes clear very quickly that this is no mere profile of a dying woman. Keller’s distaste of Adams’s practices is apparent by the second paragraph. It is apparently notable that Adams tweets “dozens of times an hour,” and that some of the people who follow her do so like they would a reality television show.

Keller doesn’t mention until further down that she herself is one of those people:

“The clinical drug trial she was on wasn’t working. Her disease seemed to be rampaging through her body. She could hardly breathe, her lungs were filled with copious amounts of fluid causing her to be bedridden over Christmas. As her condition declined, her tweets amped up both in frequency and intensity. I couldn’t stop reading – I even set up a dedicated @adamslisa column in Tweetdeck – but I felt embarrassed at my voyeurism. Should there be boundaries in this kind of experience? Is there such a thing as TMI? Are her tweets a grim equivalent of deathbed selfies, one step further than funeral selfies? Why am I so obsessed?”

If this article were directed at the doubtless innumerable tourists of the internet, then I would most likely have no need to devote blog space to it. But it isn’t. Keller criticizes Adams for using social media as a way to keep herself going.

“It’s clear that tweeting as compulsively as Lisa Adams does is an attempt to exercise some kind of control over her experience,” Keller writes.

“She was enraged a few days ago when a couple of people turned up to visit her unannounced. She’s living out loud online, but she wants her privacy in real life,” she said. “In some ways she has invited us all in.”

Emma Keller ends her piece by saying,

“Will our memories be the ones she wants? What is the appeal of watching someone trying to stay alive? Is this the new way of death? You can put a “no visitors sign” on the door of your hospital room, but you welcome the world into your orbit and describe every last Fentanyl patch. Would we, the readers, be more dignified if we turned away? Or is this part of the human experience?”

Emma seems to oscillate between being frustrated with herself that she has allowed a compelling story to hold her attention, and angry at Lisa Adams for creating that compelling content.

Bill’s article is still standing strong over at the New York Times, and while the snarkiness of his concern-trolling is more subdued, it’s still emblematic of a larger issue the Kellers seem to take with the medium.

He begins his less-virulent hit-job with a more-or-less stone-faced appraisal of Adams’s activity as a blogger over the last seven years. He writes,

“Since a mammogram detected the first toxic seeds of cancer in her left breast when she was 37, she has blogged and tweeted copiously about her contest with the advancing disease.”

The way he describes Adams’s fight with cancer from this point on is reminiscent of a war zone, and that’s not an accident: later in the piece, he reminisces about the time his father-in-law died from cancer in a British hospital, where,

“more routinely than in the United States, patients are offered the option of being unplugged from everything except pain killers and allowed to slip peacefully from life. His death seemed to me a humane and honorable alternative to the frantic medical trench warfare that often makes an expensive misery of death in America.“

Yet Adams, despite the advanced nature of her cancer, does not seem to be miserable; as Keller notes, she is currently receiving care from the New York Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the oldest private cancer research center in the world. Her tweets have lost some of their optimism, but she’s continuing to fight.

That she’s doing it in the public eye apparently deserves the ire of old media. If Adams had taken the time between painful and debilitating chemotherapy treatments to pen a memoir, or, as other writers have quipped, hundreds of thousands of sentences for the New Yorker, Keller (Emma and Bill both) would be weeping over her beautiful eloquence and inspiring prolificness. But because Adams decided to blog, this is not worthy of attention and we should question her motives.

It’s clear that, at least in the minds of some of the old media guard, blogging isn’t just “not-journalism.” It’s not fit for existence. That others are proving them wrong is inspiring in itself.

Adams’s story is not that of attention-seeking. It is emblematic of the struggle for human flourishing, despite astronomical odds against them. That she’s blogging it makes it no less powerful.

Review 12 is here!

Martin Morse Wooster reviews, Rome’s Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Ceaser’s Mortal Enemy.

Sheldon Richman discusses the ceding of the war power to Israel.

Sheldon Richman discusses how morality and practicality coincide in making the case for liberty.

Jim Miles reviews, Goliath – Life and loathing in Greater Israel.

Kelly Vlaho critiques the show, Homeland.

Jason Brennan discusses Matt Walsh’s take on homeschooling.

Patrick Cockburn discusses events in the Middle East.

Colin Green discusses Israeli militarism in the Gaza Strip.

Clancy Sigal discusses Hitler’s women adherents.

Jorg Guldo Hulsmann discusses the conservative movement and the libertarian remnant.

Amy Goodman interviews Dr. Carl Hart on drugs.

Michael Brenner discusses the militarization of U.S. foreign policy.

Noam Chomsky discusses the common good.

Nick Turse discusses the proliferation of special ops.

Tom Engelhardt discusses the national security state.

Kelly B. Vlahos discusses the war in Afghanistan.

Lawrence Wittner discusses public support for war.

Robert J.S. Ross discusses the funneling of money to sweatshops.

Sheldon Richman discusses the wreckage of U.S. foreign policy.

Christopher H. Pyle discusses Jamses Woolsey’s critique of Edward Snowden.

Kevin Gosztola discuses Fred Kaplan’s critique of Edward Snowden.

Uri Avnery discusses the alleged neutrality of the U.S. in the Israeli-Palestine conflict.

Ivan Eland discusses allowing the army to copy the marine’s mission.

Melvin A. Goodman discusses Robert Gate’s memoir.

Winslow T. Wheeler discusses Robert Gate’s responsibility for the deaths of at least half a million Iraqis.

Ramzy Baroud discusses the Palestinian refugees in Syria.

Ed Krayewiski discusses U.S. interventionism.

Klaus Wiegrefe discusses the continued relevance of WW1.

Michael McGuerty reviews, Aron Nimzowitsch 1928-1935: Annotated Games & Essays. It’s considered a sequel to both My system and Chess Praxis.

John Watson reviews Move First, Think Later. A provocative title and worth checking out.

In a previous post; the following was said:

You’re more concerned with property values than human freedom. What’s truly destructively selfish is your willingness to use initiatory force to uphold your property values. Freedom matters more.

My interlocutor responded to the comment thusly:

It’s not that I’m more concerned with property values than personal freedom (that’s the way an ideologue with a rigid value system phrases things)–these are things that have to be weighed, and in general, our society has more or less held that attacks against property by actions that lower its value are just one step away from outright theft. If you destroy the value, don’t you also destroy the effective use of the property? I thought the libertarian bunch thought that property rights have a major role in human progress. Maybe I misread all that Locke stuff.

Anyhow, your false dichotomy between property and freedom (whatever that is) pretty much reveals a passive-aggressive debate strategy that really irritates. It’s pretty much why most people don’t cotton to ideologues. If you step on their ideological toes, they hurl accusations of being “destructively selfish” for (as in my example) trying to defend my property against the passive-aggressive encroachment of some jerk using his property to his advantage but very much against mine. I didn’t say I was going to shoot the son of a bitch, I thought I was going to take him to court or before the zoning board. Or is that indistinguishable from actual physical violence? Can’t you tell the difference?

Do you at all recognize that one person’s use of property as an extension of his personal “freedom” can be harmful to another?
Think of how one person (or a corporation) engaging in commerce can use your liver, lungs, kidneys and nervous systems to process the by-products of their profitable activity. I believe economists call this kind of activity a “negative externality.”

Apologizes for being passive-aggressive. The point to be made was that the initiation of force hardly represents a non-destructively selfish approach to dealing with others. It’s good to hear you say you wouldn’t shoot the “son of a bitch”, but the government will initiate force on your behalf. In that narrow sense; going to court or the zoning board is equivalent in effect. Men with guns will show up to threaten forcible imprisonment or enforce compulsory payment of a fine.

That being said, you do raise an issue I overlooked in my original post. The question of negative externalities deserves consideration. As a commenter put it:

If a neighbor’s hog farm creates negative externalities like stench and noise that affect their enjoyment of the home as a base of subsistence, they’re entitled to civil remedies.

In my last blog post; I discussed some criticisms of Roderick T. Long’s, An Open Letter to the Peace Movement, by a non-anarchist or non-libertarian friend. This post continues that discussion. It contains responses to a part of my friend’s response not previously dealt with. The earlier comments will be given a second look in a future blog post. Once again; the Roderick T. Long text is in italics, and my friend’s comments are in bold.

Suppose I go to the polls and vote to maintain or increase income taxation, or gun control, or mandatory licensing, or compulsory education. Am I not calling upon the state to invade people’s lives and properties? To impose my will, by legalised force, on those who have done me no harm? To choose violence over persuasion? Am I acting like a peace activist, or am I acting like George Bush?

It looks like what a well organized society looks like instead of a garbage dump full of idiots looks like. I prefer to live in a society based on taxation and the provision of some collective services. Most people do. People also don’t like being ripped off by charlatans and have convinced the government to regulate business dealings and impose licensing standards for professionals. Maybe you’d like to go to a doctor who got his medical degree from a print shop with fancy scrolly lettering…but I want someone who went to Med School…and on from there. Why is it that the libertarian fantasy always looks like a subterfuge for scoundrels? Like an evasion of responsibility for doing harm by swindling people or running a scam?

Your first comment doesn’t really address Roderick T. Long’s point about “calling upon the state to invade people’s live and properties? To impose my will, by legalized force, on those who have done me no harm?” Unless your point is that such a thing is necessary for an organized society to exist. An assertion requiring evidence and proof. The fact that you or most people prefer a society based on taxation hardly renders it just. You also assume that collective services couldn’t be provided in a non-governmental or non-state mutualistic fashion outlined by anarchist, Kevin Carson.

As for the points pertaining to the licensing of professionals. Who wouldn’t prefer a competent doctor who went to Med School to a charlatan? I certainly would prefer the Med School doctor. Quality can be assured through competitive accreditation associations with a vested interest in policing their members successfully. The state or government isn’t the only source of legitimacy or ensuring competence.

Last year, I had a simple, and seemingly achievable, goal as C4SS’s media coordinator: To reach a total of 1,000 “mainstream media” pickups and citations of the Center’s op-ed material (since we started identifying such pickups and citations in mid-2010).

We didn’t make it in 2013. We made it today.

Which pickup is “the 1,000th?” That’s impossible to say — sometimes a piece will appear on the web and then not show up on my search protocols for some time.  Once I find them, I might enter several from or on the same day without regard to when they actually posted at the other site. And sometimes I miss them for a looong time until the author notices one and lets me know. For example, the 1,000th pickup I entered was actually from back in October — Nathan Goodman came across it and dropped me a line about it today.

But, however we got here, here we are. Hooray for us!

One of the bigger media stories coming into 2014 is over whether Patch, AOL’s so-called hyperlocal news organization, will survive or bite the dust. While rumors of the controversial network’s demise were greatly exaggerated, it does appear that the future of the service is in flux – and what that means for hyperlocal.

For y’all keeping track at home, hyperlocal news means exactly what it sounds like: basically, a person or group of persons are covering events in a town, sometimes down to the individual street level, and publishing it for their friends and neighbors – and audiences beyond either – to see. (Sounds awfully like blogging.)

Almost every city in America has a website devoted to something along the lines of hyperlocalism, whether or not they call it that. Some consist of independent reporters covering things they’re passionate about. Others, like Journatic, are in the business of outsourcing hyperlocal, which has made for some interesting and sometimes cringeworthy times.

AOL wanted their network to be the largest in the country, which is not in itself a deplorable goal. Where they went wrong? Trying to flood out their smaller competitors and gouge advertisers for more than they could afford – natural, if you model yourself off your predecessors.

Media critic Jeff Jarvis wrote (“The Almost Post-Mortem for Patch”), “Hyperlocal works in town after town. What doesn’t work is trying to instantly scale it by trying to own every town in sight. That was Patch’s fatal error: acting like an old-media company.”

Instead of trying to own everything from the top down, new, hyperlocal media needs to be built from the bottom up. Stigmergic, decentralized outlets have already been proven to thrive and be as effective – if not more so – than old media sites.

A recent emailing of Roderick Long’s, “An Open Letter to the Peace Movement,” precipitated some criticisms from a non-libertarian and non-anarchist friend. This post will be a response to those criticisms. The author’s name will be withheld. If he so chooses, he can reveal himself in the comments section. The original text of the piece is in italics, and my friend’s criticisms are in bold.

“Dear Peace Activists:

All honour to you. In your opposition to the United States’ impending war on Iraq, you represent a welcome voice for sanity and civilisation, lifted up against the incessant baying of the dogs of war.

But I want to urge you to follow the logic of your position just a bit further.

Much has been said, and eloquently so, about the need, in dealings between nation and nation, to choose persuasion over violence whenever possible. Hear, hear!

But why this qualification: between nation and nation?

If persuasion is preferable to violence between nations, must it not also be preferable to violence within nations?

Here comes the shift from macro-level (nation) to micro-level (persons). Is it really useful to extend this metaphor? Hard to tell. Nations can cause a lot more damage than individuals when they get roused to action, mainly from the collective ability to dish out pain wholesale.

True enough, but the underlying principle of violence over persuasion remains. Nations or other macro collectivities may do more damage, but that doesn’t change the basic principle involved.

Suppose my neighbour runs a business out of his home, and I’d rather he didn’t. If I call the zoning board and ask them to shut his business down by force, am I acting like a peace activist? Or am I acting like George Bush?

So if someone wants to open a pig farm next door or an opium den, I just have to sit by in a non-mobile “investment” or house that now has diminished value. So someone with property can impose expenses on others by using his property with no regard for others (this is why people think of libertarians as selfish assholes, if you didn’t figure that by now.)

You’re more concerned with property values than human freedom. What’s truly destructively selfish is your willingness to use initiatory force to uphold your property values. Freedom matters more.

That’s all for now, but I will address the rest in a future blog post.

Enjoy review 11!

Sam Kierstead discusses Hamid Karzai’s role in determing the future of Afghanistan.

Charlie Hinton discusses the ten steps to dictatorship in Haiti.

Pepe Escobar discusses a provocative incident related to China.

Tanya Golash-Boza discusses Obama’s deportation record.

Julie Mastrine discusses why libertarians shouldn’t slut shame.

Sheldon Richman discusses the Pope’s take on the free market and capitalism.

Dave Lindorff discusses the outing of three CIA Pakistani chiefs.

Jonathan Cook discusses the planned Gazaification of the West Bank.

Tom McNarma discusses the terror of bombing and saying no to war crimes.

John Laforge discusses the treatment of Gitmo detainees.

Tom Engelhardt discusses the bombing of wedding parties.

Mitchell Plitnick discusses Max Blumenthal’s book, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.

Aaron Rubin reviews the new film, My Afghanistan: Life in the Forbidden Zone.

Semuas Milne discusses the war in Afghanistan.

Shamus Cooke discusses the potential for peace in Syria.

Norman Solomon discusses Moveon.org’s indifference to the atrioticies of Obama.

Lynn Fitz-Hugh discusses police estatism.

Jonathan Carp discusses Christmas.

Peter Beinart discusses the absence of an anti-war left on Iran.

Josh Marsfeder discusses Miley Cyrus and socail entropy.

Ryan Calhoun discusses libertarians and thre 60’s counterculture.

Noam Chomsky and Stefan Molyneux discuss a range of issues.

Conor Friederdorf discusses why secret operations and self-government don’t mix.

Robert Taylor discusses 10 most libertarian moments of 2013.

Sheldon Richman discusses the Federal Reserve.

Nathan Goodman discusses thick libertarianism.

Dr. Cesar Chelala discusses the application of the Nuremberg precedent to the Iraq War.

Laurence M. Vance reviews, The Moral Case for a Free Economy.

Review of the new algrebaic editon of Winning Chess. Both Irving Chernev and Fred Reinfield wrote this book. Two very prolific chess writers. This is a book on tactics. As the master level player, Teichmann, put it: “Chess is 99 percent tactics”. I own the descriptive notation edition of this book, and can attest to its usefulness.

John Watson reviews Eplus #107 and an e-book version of Chess Praxis. The latter is by the famous Russian player, Aron Nimzowitsch. He was famous for writing My System. Chess Praxis was the follow up game collection to the aforementioned theoretical work.

This was quite the year for left-liberty. Others have already examined the year from different ideological perspectives. This has ranged from Lew Rockwell’s Ron Paul filled piece to Medea Benjamin’s take. It’s time for a retrospective that addresses 2013 from a left-libertarian perspective. There are 4 things worth focusing on.

1) The Canadian Supreme Court’s striking down of the anti-prostitution laws. This was an important step in the direction of sex worker liberation. Not the only step that needs to be taken, but a meaingful one nonetheless.

2) Chelsea Manning’s continued heroic stand against the warfare state. It landed her in jail, but she has many supporters on the outside. Those of us who oppose American warfare statism have much to thank her for.

3) Radley Balko’s book on police militarization earns a spot in this piece, because those police powers are often used against the marginalized and oppressed. The War on Drugs is a notable example, because it predominantly targets African-Americans.

4) Edward Snowden’s revelations about the surveillance state. Glenn Greenwald has been instrumental in helping us find out about the spyng of the NSA. He deserves accolades for this principled behavior. It goes to show that he is one of the more reasonable left-liberals or centre-leftists out there.

I spent a couple of hours this morning scouring the search engines for C4SS “mainstream media pickups” in December.

The good news: Usually December is a month that kind of trails off for us in terms of pickups — newspapers tend to run cheery holiday stuff instead of anarchist polemic at this time of year. But THIS December was an exception! I’ve identified 35 pickups of C4SS material in “mainstream media” — well above our normal expectation of 20 or so.

The better news: All our authors had successes this month, but two standouts are Jonathan Carp, whose “So This is Christmas and What Have We Done?” broke us into Pakistani media for the first time ever and Trevor Hultner, who had pieces published from coast to coast in the US and abroad as well.

The not quite so good news: I had really hoped to break 1,000 total pickups in 2013. We fell short of that — as of today, the count stands at 976. But if January is as good a month as December was, we’ll hit 1,000 this month. Thanks, as always, for your continuing support!

Best regards,
Tom Knapp
Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society

We’re happy to announce the creation of another regular column here at Stigmergy: the C4SS Blog, devoted to the analysis and criticism of mainstream and independent media. Regret the Error will publish every Tuesday.

Every entry-level journalism and media writing textbook will stress objectivity as one of the central standards and practices of the craft. Objectivity is usually defined (with some variations) as “the closest possible version of the truth,” which is a well-meaning sentiment. In practice, however, it usually means, “Talk to two people with opposing views and include equal numbers of quotes in your article, and voila! You’re a paragon of objective journalism.” This is the view from nowhere.

The dangers of glibly playing with moral relativism aside, this is a lazy approach to writing and an even lazier approach to truth-telling. However, I’ve noticed that in some independent media outlets’ dash to be more “hard-hitting” or radical with their coverage than mainstream news, they sometimes take the polar opposite approach to what I described above. Namely, “let’s only publish stuff by people we agree with, because they’re always right/the mainstream media is always wrong!”

This is, I would argue, how sites like Breitbart and The Blaze formulated their mission, at least in the first months of their inception (now you are just as likely to find a well-written story at The Blaze as you are anywhere else). This is also why independent media faces such a huge struggle to become accepted by more people.

Let’s face facts: what independent media needs is not to be diametrically opposed to Big News’ stated values. Independent media needs to be the one to do the jobs no major news org wants to, to do the shoeleather reporting. To offer the context those big, old legacy publications and radio stations and television networks don’t feel like offering. The thing I love about independent media is that we don’t feel the need to play into the trope that all ideas are right, either ethically or factually. We can give our readers, listeners and viewers the tools to figure out their own paths that the major media won’t give.

This is especially important for anarchist media. I think C4SS and other, similar sites have done an excellent job at this so far with op-eds and commentaries, but I don’t think we should shy away from hard newsgathering, either.

One of the best examples of this, I believe, is Nathan Goodman’s reporting for C4SS on Jane Marquardt, a Salt Lake City activist for the Democratic Party and one of the United States’s biggest prison profiteers. William Gillis, our resident Transhumanist and Bay Area correspondent, managed to masterfully explain the context of the recent Google Bus window-smashings without shying away from facts OR going easy on commentary.

This kind of writing needs to be encouraged. To quote Kevin Carson, (who, on an unrelated note, I firmly believe to actually be a cadre of agorists acting collectively as one man):

The way to arrive at truth is to apply logic to the facts and make the best case for reality, as you see it, that you can. Any bias in your case will be ruthlessly cross-examined by others using logic and evidence to make their own case.

When a blogger presents a one-sided version of reality, guess what happens? They’re hyperlinked by an opposing blogger, who then puts their one-sided account into perspective by linking to the information they left out.

It’s only through such an adversarial process, with all the entry barriers removed from the marketplace of ideas, that the whole truth can emerge. This way is certainly better than a deliberate pose of obtuseness, pretending not to see what’s staring you right in the face, for fear the facts might show that reality itself is biased.