The recent trajectory of events leading up to the shooting of NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, and the nationwide police backlash afterward, have made it clearer than ever how police feel about the public they supposedly protect and serve: they’re terrified of us. For more than twenty years, the Drug War and associated…

On Saturday, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp released four of its 136 uncharged detainees from custody. Six years late, Barack Obama is inching closer towards keeping his promise: “I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that.” But as for the pledge to restore habeas corpus that accompanied his making an anti-Guantanamo…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Big Business and the Rise of American Statism” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Roy A. Childs, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. The purpose of this particular essay is simply to apply some of the principles of libertarianism to an interpretation of events in a very special and important…

The concepts monopoly and aggression are intimately related, like lock and key, or mother and son. You cannot fully understand the first without understanding the second. Most of us are taught to think of a monopoly as simply any lone seller of a good or service, but this definition is fraught with problems, as Murray…

In the wake of an uprising in Ferguson, Barack Obama requested hundreds of millions of dollars to arm the police with cameras. This, he thought, was a way of holding police accountable. And he was right, it feeds into the system of “accountability” already in place in local justice systems. It holds them accountable to…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Ryan Calhoun‘s “Jon Stewart, Jester for the Warfare State” read by Erick Vasconcelos and edited by Nick Ford. The difference between Carlin and Stewart is that Carlin was not beholden, he kept nothing as sacrosanct and by the time of his death had at one point offended the sensibilities of every demographic on the…

Molly Sauter. The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet (New York, London, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2014). “The aim of this work,” Sauter writes, “is to place DDoS [distributed denial of service] actions… in a historical and theoretical context, covering the use of the tactic, its development over time, and…

The Colbert Report‘s windup completes its namesake’s shift from the gadfly who tore into George W. Bush at an official White House event to the court jester who gave softball publicity to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. It is thus the perfect symbol of the evolution of American liberalism from the tail ends of the administrations…

Nella parodia di Citizen Kane fatta su Saturday Night Live, in un giorno di fiacca giornalistica Charles Foster Kane dice: “Se non ci sono notizie, possiamo inventarle,” e comincia a sparare alla cieca quelli che passano fuori dalla finestra della redazione. Questa è stata la prima cosa a cui ho pensato quando ho letto un…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Thomas L. Knapp‘s “‘Intellectual Property’ is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” read by Erick Vasconcelos and edited by Nick Ford. I came late to the news of Twitpic‘s impending (and thankfully partial) closure and even later to an explanation for it. … That may not seem like a big deal but it was,…

È stato pubblicato un sommario minimo, parziale, fortemente censurato del rapporto che il senato americano ha redatto sul programma di torture della Cia dopo l’undici settembre. Il modo in cui i media di regime hanno accolto il rapporto illustra il problema in questione non meno del rapporto in sé. Come direbbe un tossicodipendente che cerca…

Dall’istituzione conservatrice American Enterprise Institute arriva un’altra difesa dello sfruttamento dei lavoratori. A farlo è il professor Mark J. Perry, autodefinitosi difensore della libertà e del libero mercato. In realtà la sua è più che una difesa; è una raccolta selezionata di citazioni e aneddoti che inneggiano alle fabbriche che sfruttano i lavoratori come una…

We are fascinated by the image of rebellion. The present generation came of age amidst global unrest and upheaval, from the Arab Spring to the anti-austerity movements in the West. Its immediate impulse has been to identify with those in the streets, even in the case of ill-fated and dubiously progressive movements. The image of…

In Saturday Night Live‘s parody of Citizen Kane, on a slow news day Charles Foster Kane says, “if there’s not any news, we’ll make some,” and begins randomly shooting people out the newspaper office window. That’s the first thing I thought of on reading reports that two plainclothes California Highway Patrol cops found themselves outed —…

It’s surprising what passes for high political drama these days. After a DC dust-up similar to, but neither as exciting as watching paint dry nor as convincing as professional wrestling, the US House of Representatives passed a $1.1 trillion “Cromnibus” bill to fund the federal government through September 2015, passing it on to the US…

The cops who ganged up on Eric Garner, got him into a chokehold, and mashed his face into the sidewalk didn’t intend to kill him. They intended only to show him who’s boss on the streets of Staten Island — and show him in a way he would never forget. As a Facebook friend of…

Gizmodo reports that Swedish police raided the Pirate Bay, seizing its servers and shutting down its web site on December 9. My first reactions were irritation and even anger. But now I just feel like laughing. The state is an obsolete organization and becomes more and more so as it continuously tries to enforce the unenforceable. At first glance, this…

La procedura seguita dal gran giurì riguardo Darren Wilson, l’assassino di Michael Brown, dimostra quanto sia fittizia negli Stati Uniti la separazione dei poteri. Gli unici a farlo notare, purtroppo, sono quelli che protestano per le strade nel Missouri… sempre che abbiano la fortuna di poter dire la loro per due minuti in un’intervista da…

Last year at Salon Michael Lind asked “The question libertarians just can’t answer” (June 4): “Why are there no libertarian countries?… If libertarianism was a good idea, wouldn’t at least one country have tried it?” He got some answers — the best of them from us free market libertarians of the left, who consider ourselves critics of…

The US Senate’s minimal, partial, heavily redacted summary of its report on the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program is out. That report’s reception by establishment media turns out to be at least as demonstrative of the problem it addresses as the report itself. As any recovering addict will helpfully inform you, the first step is admitting the…