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

A riot broke out on February 20 at Willacy Correctional Facility, a Texas prison for “illegal immigrants.” 2,000 inmates demonstrated against their subjection to neglect and overwork. The situation quickly escalated as inmates armed themselves with blunt instruments, swarming the yard and dismantling and setting fire to the structures they’d been shackled to for too long. As the…

In his ongoing quest to remain relevant, Rudy Giuliani recently accused president Barack Obama of not loving America. In the ensuing outrage, Giuliani quickly backpedaled, clarifying that he doesn’t doubt Obama’s love of country, but instead believes Obama’s policies are wrongheaded, representative of someone who doesn’t know what’s in America’s best interests, as set forth in the Rudy…

We’ll get to the book in a bit, but first I have to say a few things about the phenomenon of Russell Brand himself. Frankly, I’m a bit worried for Russell Brand. He has shown tremendous personal courage in recent years, transforming himself from a bad-boy British comedian/celebrity, whose comedy revolved around his own dionysian…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Roderick Long‘s “History of an Idea” read by Jeff Riggenbach and edited by Nick Ford. So long as the confusion between free markets and plutocracy persists – so long as libertarians allow their laudable attraction to free markets to fool them into defending plutocracy, and so long as those on the left allow their…

These three short stories all come from the same Cory Doctorow collection, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2007). Free download here. The three are all set against a background of what I call the “DRM Curtain,” a transnational corporate Empire based on artificial scarcities enforced through a maximalist version “intellectual…

C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “The Warning of Animal Farm: Inequality Matters” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. Like Hodgskin, today’s market anarchists do not object to the mere fact that capital is compensated for its part in the process of production. The worry — which can only finally be allayed by observing…

The first thing I saw on Twitter this morning, when I sat down with my coffee, was Allison Kilkenny (@allisonkilkenny) linking to a David Edwards piece at RawStory with the remarkably asinine comment “‘Spontaneous order’ is not a thing, libertarians.” The article (“Fox host: FEMA is unnecessary because Walmart will ‘spontaneously’ save us all in…

The prospect of compulsory vaccination (“Should Obama make vaccines mandatory for all children,” Dr. Manny Alvarez, Fox News, January 30) should trouble even those who think the practice can be defended in principle as a kind of self-defense. The burgeoning women’s liberation movement of the 1960s emphasized a theme with a prominent American pedigree, powerfully expressed…

My radio alarm woke me with a perky voice announcing “Northwest Arkansas! We’re all growing together as a region — and so is our newspaper!” I hear that tone of breathless enthusiasm a lot from local elites trying to secure public buy-in on actions they were never consulted on to begin with. By way of…

New corporate enclosures, looting and monopolies are springing up all over the place these days. Watching the news is a lot like watching Robocop or Blade Runner, what with stuff like Detroit’s “Emergency Manager” auctioning off local assets to corporate cronies the same way Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority did in Iraq. Given all that,…

Schematic designs for a new society seem to be really popular among self-described anarchists of all stripes. On the Right, we have Rothbard’s model for an entire society modelled whole-cloth on a “libertarian law code” deduced from axioms like self-ownership and the non-aggression principle. Within the historic anarchist movement of the Left, we have uniform…

If America has any characteristic that does not so much define it as it is, but defines it as it aspires to be, it’s offering upward mobility. Class struggle which gets anyone anywhere could be understood as meritocracy against a permanent oligarchy. Beginning with the rise of the merchant class and ending with the rise…

The life of Laurance Labadie appears very much like his anarchism, a deliberate, often anachronistic struggle against the vogues and prevailing winds of his day, a hopeless attempt to revive an energy faded or extinguished entirely. His thought belonged to a libertarian strain regrettably anchored to those of the previous generation or two, to a…

So, January 25-31 is “National School Choice Week.” Break out the bubbly! The event, put on annually by a coalition of lobbying groups, advertises itself as “an unprecedented opportunity, every January, to shine a positive spotlight on the need for effective education options for all children.” I’m sure most “school choice” advocates firmly and honestly support that goal. Unfortunately, their…

Via the Association of Libertarian Feminists discussion group (natch) I found this video by up-and-coming YouTube star Cameron Watt (on Facebook anyway), from his channel Libertarian Socialist Rants (LSR). His title is “My Thoughts on Feminism”, but as my Tweet on it explains, it’s really about why the hierarchy analysis of anarchism necessitates feminism. The embed…

Iain Levison’s A Working Stiff Manifesto (2002) reads like a less political and more sardonic version of Barbara Ehrenreich’s tale of the working poor in America, Nickel and Dimed. The subtitle, A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine that Fired me, and Three I Can’t Remember means that Levison gives a more detailed account…

On January 14 the US Department of Justice announced that the Joint Terrorism Task Force had disrupted the latest “domestic terrorism plot” — this time by “a Cincinnati-area man … to attack the U.S. Capital and kill government officials.” House Speaker  John Boehner immediately cited the disrupted plot as evidence that Congress should think carefully before refusing…

Last week’s bloody events in Paris demonstrate yet again that a noninterventionist foreign policy, far from being a luxury, is an urgent necessity — literally a matter of life and death. A government that repeatedly wages wars of aggression — the most extreme form of extremism — endangers the society it ostensibly protects by gratuitously making enemies, some…

The critically acclaimed film Selma‘s conspicuous absence from Academy Award nominations for Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor for David Oyelowo’s portrayal of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. follows its concerted targeting by flunkies of Lyndon B. Johnson outraged by its portrayal of friction between King and the arch-war criminal president. One leading critic,…