Lots of people have lots of complaints about the Internet, and some of those complaints are based in fact. One that I hadn’t heard before, until US Secretary of State John Kerry brought it up in recent remarks to embassy personnel in Brazil, is that the Internet makes it “much harder to govern, much harder to…

(*Actually, the first “dialectical” libertarian!) In his short review of The Political Philosophy of Herbert Spencer, Timothy Virkkala (May 1999) praises Tim S. Gray’s discussion of the great classical liberal’s methodology as a synthesis of “individualist” and “holist” approaches to social theory. But Virkkala remarks This method–I’m tempted to call it “dialectical,” but Spencer’s prose…

“An open, public, informed conversation on surveillance,” writes Philip Bump in The Atlantic Wire, “has been the president’s stated goal since shortly after the Edward Snowden leaks began” (“It Doesn’t Count as Outreach When Obama Talks About the NSA in Secret,” August 9). In a society governed by “rule of law” as portrayed by our,…

Industrial Utility In the vast arid lands of the Arckaringa Basin in Australia a major shale oil discovery has been made. Linc Energy has discovered across 16 million acres of land an estimated 133 – 233 billion barrels of shale oil that lies beneath the region’s lithology. No matter how much of this oil is…

Estou chocado — chocado! — com o fato de a Coronela Denise Lind, juíza militar que sentenciou, em fevereiro, que Bradley Manning poderia ser julgado em função de diversas acusações mesmo depois de ter ficado preso antes de ser denunciado por mais do que cinco vezes o período mais longo total especificado nas regras das Forças…

Even as the U.S. security state becomes more closed, centralized and brittle in the face of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks, civil society and the public are responding to the post-Snowden repression by becoming more dispersed and resilient. That’s how networks always respond to censorship and surveillance. Each new attempt at a file-sharing service, after…

In the back of each issue of Liberty magazine is a section titled “Terra Incognita,” which consists of news clippings inane or horrific or both. So I must assume that someone at Liberty found the following item inane or horrific, since it’s the third featured item in the latest (January 2006) issue’s “Terra Incognita”: Port Townsend, Wash. A glimpse into…

Back in 2006 Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, in The Starfish and the Spider, contrasted the way networks and hierarchies respond to outside attacks. Networks, when attacked, become even more decentralized and resilient. A good example is Napster and its successors, each of which has more closely approached an ideal peer-to-peer model, and further freed…

Imagine if you had to fight in a court of law in order to be permitted to move in with friends, go to work, and make basic decisions about your daily life. Jenny Hatch doesn’t have to imagine, because she just fought and won that battle for her basic liberties. Hatch has volunteered for political…

Lately, it hasn’t been clear what exactly the First Amendment protects. Between whistleblowers PFC Manning and Edward Snowden, one awaits a sentencing of potentially 90 years in prison, and the other finds himself trapped in a country where he doesn’t speak the language. Perhaps it’s time to find a better way to protect free speech….

Everywhere you look in the right-wing commentariat, you see the recurring theme of the “underclass” as parasites. Its most recent appearance was the meme of the productive, tax-paying 53% vs. the tax-consuming 47%. And of course there’s the perennial favorite mythical quote attributed to Alexander Tytler, trotted out by many who should know better, about…

A decade after Califormia’s disastrous experience with Enron-style electrical utility “deregulation” — rolling blackouts and price spikes — caused Arizona to abandon a similar project, the Arizona Corporation Commission is once again considering it. The real problem with “deregulation,” as promoted by the libertarian establishment — the think tanks and lobbyists who pressure the state…

If there’s one thing the libertarian establishment — that is, mainstream libertarian organizations whose main activity is lobbying the state for “free market reform” — loves, it’s so-called “privatization.” An article by Paul Buchheit at Truth-out.com (“Eight Ways Privatization has Failed America,” Aug. 5) treats the failure of privatization as a reflection on the limits…

C4SS Fellows Jason Lee Byas and Trevor Hultner discuss war, the anti-war movement, the civil war and left libertarianism with Smash Walls Radio.

One of the quickest and simplest ways to gloss what “Left-Libertarian,” or the “Libertarian Left” part of ALL, means, is just to say that we are for left-wing social ends through libertarian means. This inevitably involves a certain amount of oversimplification — does “through libertarian means” just mean “by getting rid of government controls and letting social outcomes emerge spontaneously,” or does it mean something…

O poder não é para ser conquistado, é para ser destruído. Ele é, por natureza, tirânico, seja exercido por rei, ditador ou presidente eleito. A única diferença da ‘democracia’ parlamentarista é o escravo moderno ter a ilusão de escolher o senhor a quem obedecerá. O voto torna-o cúmplice da tirania que o oprime. Ele não…

Major Ashlend Fein, US Army prosecutor in Bradley Manning’s court martial, caught my attention when he referred to Manning as an “anarchist” in closing arguments. As an anarchist, I’d be proud to share that label with Manning. But I’ve never heard from any reliable source that he considers himself one. Manning — if indeed guilty…

Dear President Obama, I possess neither Emile Zola’s writing talent nor his penchant for presidential flattery, but I think I may perhaps lay rightful claim to some semblance of his well-developed sense of moral outrage. I address you as “president” only as a concession to popular convention. In truth, your claimed authority is a fraud,…

In California, prisoners are fighting back against appalling human rights violations. Their hunger strike is into its third week, with nearly 1,000 inmates still participating. When the strike began, 30,000 prisoners refused meals. The prisoners are striking against long term solitary confinement, a punishment recognized as a form of torture by sources as diverse as…

Two quotations, juxtaposed, summarize the errors into which modern American defenses of ‘free markets’ and capitalism have entered. In the process these errors led to abandoning any real meaning for liberty or human well-being.  Right wing libertarians in particular sincerely believe they are seeking to preserve these values, but they are sincerely wrong. But before…