C4SS Feed 44 presents Nick Ford‘s “The State Can’t Sink Our Battleship” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. For every site the government tries to take down, another five spring up. And no one in government is going to admit that what they’re doing is futile. They simply don’t have incentives to act rationally. They’re…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Free Market Reforms and the Reduction of Statism” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Kevin Carson, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. The default tendency in mainstream libertarianism is a high degree of statocracy, to the point not only of (quite properly) emphasizing the necessary role of state coercion in…

The US Congress approved construction of the Keystone XL pipeline’s fourth phase on February 11, with the bill scheduled to land on president Barack Obama’s desk for a likely veto sometime after the “President’s Day” recess. Near-unanimous support for Keystone from self-proclaimed “conservatives” and “libertarians” is disappointing but unsurprising. This government land grab is just…

Geçen Kasım, Birleşmiş Milletler Yüksek İltica Komisyonu (UNHCR) “devletsizlik sorununu” bitirmek için 10 yıllık programı başlattı. Aralıkta, UNHCR Devletsizlikte Bölgesel Koruma Kıdemli Memuru, Emmanuelle Mitte, gazetecilere (Batı Afrikada ve dünya çapında) programı desteklemeleri için temyiz etti ve basının “savunma ve konu sensitizasyon sorumluluğu” anıldı. Ancak bu kampanya, “Ben Aitim” ismiyle, destekci ve yaraticiların Birleşmiş Milletler, siyasi hükümetler, ve yöneten…

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

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…

Watching Fox News’s recent coverage of the Islamic State’s Twitter-hack left me shaking my head in disbelief, as usual. The latest act alleged to have been carried out by IS is the group’s takeover of several Twitter accounts belonging to the wives of US military servicemen. Among the threatening tweets issued by IS through the hacked…

“Hardline House GOP conservatives aren’t worried about a looming Department of Homeland Security shutdown,” reports Cristina Marcos at The Hill. They’d rather let DHS’s funding lapse than give up a provision in its new appropriation reversing president Barack Obama’s recent executive orders on immigration. Is it just me, or does this sound more like the promise of ice…

The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory by Jesse Walker (Harper 2013), 448 pages. What is the substance of American paranoia? From where does it emanate, and why is its study important? These are some of the questions that, without preaching or bludgeoning us with elitist pretensions, Jesse Walker, books editor at Reason magazine,…

Usually when we see right-wing commentary on the upper-middle-class (“NPR/limousine/Whole Foods liberals,” “boho bougies,” or take your pick of other trendy labels), it’s a fake populist attack on their “cultural elite” tastes like brown mustard or wind-surfing, to divert attention from genuine populist attacks on the super-rich. So I guess it’s a sort of man-bites-dog…

How to write an Alternet criticism of libertarianism: 1) Cite an unpleasant aspect of Ayn Rand’s philosophy; 2) use the news topic of the day as an exemplar of that unpleasantness; and 3) treat it as somehow symbolic of the fundamental nature of the entire libertarian movement. In this case, I’m not so much interested in…

“The so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL),” writes US president Barack Obama in his letter to Congress of February 11, “poses a threat to the people and stability of Iraq, Syria, and the broader Middle East, and to U.S. national security.” Therefore, Obama requests that Congress pass an “Authorization for the Use of…

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…

For the last twelve years, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams has publicly recounted the story of a harrowing 2003 helicopter flight in Iraq. Covering the war on the first day of the American invasion, Williams traveled with the US Army’s 159th Aviation Regiment. According to Williams, an Iraqi RPG struck his helicopter, forcing it to make a dangerous emergency landing. Williams…

On February 6, an exceptional documentary about the unacknowledged whistleblowing group The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, 1971, previously only screened at festivals, is beginning a limited theatrical run at New York City’s Cinema Village. As of this writing, there are limited engagements planned in Santa Fe, Portland (Oregon), Los Angeles, Bellingham, Columbus, and internationally in…

It’s frustrating to hear US president Barack Obama receive kudos from the beer community simply because of his fondness for the beverage. Between his 2009 Beer Summit, his occasional beer in public, and his recent quip that he’s the first president to brew beer at the White House since George Washington, Obama has successfully cultivated a…

On February 4, American media trumpeted the expected, “dog bites man” headline: “Ross Ulbricht Convicted” of being Dread Pirate Roberts, operator of the online Silk Road marketplace. Few expected an acquittal. From the moment US Attorney Preet Bharara announced Ulbricht’s indictment on seven charges, ranging from “money laundering” to “drug trafficking,” the prosecution ran on rails. A…

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,…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Thomas L. Knapp‘s “Shutdown Theater (Off-Off Broadway Follies)” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. When even “progressive” Democrats like Elizabeth Warren threaten “shutdown” to get their way, it’s just too obvious that there’s no real shutdown in play. Per Chekhov, “[i]f you say in the first chapter that there is a…