Month: September 2017

Return of the city-state

Political battles of the future will be between the forces of global capital and city-states where non-state actors manage to gain hegemony. By Jamie Bartlett Aeon.Com If you’d been born 1,500 years ago in southern Europe, you’d have been convinced that the Roman empire would last forever. It […]

The Dark Side of Empathy

I’ve often been accused of lacking “empathy,” “sensitivity,” and all the other usual pieties. To which my response is “Guilty, but Proud.” Here’s why. By Paul Bloom The Atlantic I’m not usually in favor of killing, but I’d make an exception for the leaders of ISIS. I’d feel […]

Ideology as Addiction

There are an awful lot of people nowadays, many of our “anarchists” as much as anyone, who need to take the message of this piece to heart. What we witnessing today is the proliferation of cults committed to one or another fanatical ideology. Of Two Minds Solutions abound, […]

Fascists of the Left

Some comments from a Facebook friend on Antifa: Just because a group claims to oppose fascism, that doesn’t make their fascistic behavior any less fascistic. Black bloc so-called anarchists train in organized street fighting, wear uniforms which simultaneously shield them from accountability and mark them as an organized […]

The Ugly Side of Antifa

By Leighton Woodhouse Yesterday, at the anti-Alt-Right rally in Berkeley, I watched groups of masked Antifa members in Black Bloc formation swarm individuals who were apparently antagonizing them, and pummel them with their fists, feet, and flagpoles. When the victims tried to escape, they were run down, and in at […]

Anarcho-fascism: Nature Reborn

It had to happen, although I’ve actually written about “anarcho-fascism” in the past myself. In some ways, “anarcho-fascism” may be a useful counterpart to actual Fascism just as anarcho-communism is a useful counterpart to actual Communism, and just as Antifa may be a useful counterpart to the neo-Nazis […]

An Aesthetic of Liberty

I have my differences with Jeffrey Tucker, but this is a timely article calling for the need to develop an anti-statist centrism in response to the present day polarization and without falling into the various right-wing and left-wing deviations. By Jeffrey A. Tucker Foundation for Economic Education Liberty-minded […]

A Blue Texas? Keep Dreaming

This article is from 2012 but it raises an important issue that was largely ignored in the 2016 election, and that is the fact that even though Texas is now a “majority-minority” state, Trump still beat Clinton by nine percentage points. A standard presumption on both the Left […]

A Beating in Berkeley

What I find most interesting about this article is that the “right-wingers” being described would have qualified as being on the Left, even the far Left, only 10-20 years ago. This is in keeping with my general theory that American society has shifted far to the left culturally […]

Why Left and Right Are Not Enough

This is a map of the present state of U.S. politics designed by a well-known antifa intellectual apologist. With the exception of the dubious claim that the Alt-Right and neo-Nazis are a genuine part of the Republican Party, I generally agree with this map. In reality, the leadership […]