By Ed Krayewski Reason Today is the 40th anniversary of the June 26, 1975, shootout at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota between two FBI agents who drove in with unmarked cars and several members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), a Native American rights group operating out […]
If during the course of some Twilight Zone moment I had found myself on the Supreme Court this past term here’s how I would have approached the gay marriage issue before the Court: First, the objections to gay marriage. 1. Gay marriage is against religious teachings. Perhaps, but […]
“The way we treat non-violent drug crimes is problematic, and from a fiscal perspective, it’s breaking the bank.” “It’s draconian, and it doesn’t work,” Simon told the president. That was “The Wire” creator David Simon in a video posted to the White House YouTube channel about the war […]
While approximately 70% of the world’s nations have abolished the death penalty, the “freest nation on earth” and “symbol of democracy” remains one of the world’s leading executioner states along with China, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, North Korea, Cuba, Indonesia, the oil fiefdoms of the Persian Gulf, […]
Nobel Laureate economist Gary Becker’s article from the Wall Street Journal from two years ago. Right now, the War on Drugs appears to where the Vietnam War was in the period between 1971-1973. The war was still going on, but it was obvious it was a doomed effort. […]
Panelists (Free for All): 1) Godfrey Bloom (Economist and former MEP) 2) Sean Gabb (Director, Libertarian Alliance) 3) Keith Preston (Attackthesystem.com) 4) Jakub Jankowski (Student) 5) Oliver Wilson (Student)
By Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society Murray Bookchin. The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies & the Promise of Direct Democracy. Foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin (New York and London: Verso, 2015). This book is a collection of Bookchin’s essays on libertarian municipalism and communalism, extending from […]
Interesting. It looks like even sectors of both the left and right wings of the ruling class are concerned that the police state and prison industrial complex have gone a bit overboard. The right is apparently concerned about impending fiscal bankruptcy, and the spillover of state repression into […]
This book is one of the very best I have seen to date that critiques the U.S. criminal justice system. What’s ironic is that the author was neither an anarchist nor a libertarian, or even a leftist or liberal. He was a conservative Republican and an evangelical Christian. […]
Please introduce yourself and describe your organization, Stomp Out Child Abuse(SOCA). I’m Dennis, co-founder of S.O.C.A. (Stomp Out Child Abuse). We are a direct action organization whose purpose is to raise awareness against child abuse & molestation. How did the organization get started? Who are the founders, and […]
Sean Gabb joins Caity and Dan for a third time for a fascinating conversation around the topic of classical liberalism. We begin by discussing classical liberal ideas going back to ancient Greece and being hard-wired into western European thought and how this can be shown in fairy and […]
An interesting question that no one ever seems to ask is this: How is it that on one hand we are treated to a never ending series of hysterias over someone having said a bad word pertaining to race, gender, homosexuality, or some other inflammatory topic, and yet […]
Michelle Alexander, highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University, and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, delivers the 30th Annual George E. Kent Lecture, in honor of the late George E. Kent, who was […]
By Ruth Wilson Gilmore Social Justice Journal by Ruth Wilson Gilmore* After declining for three consecutive years, the US prison and jail population increased in 2013. The widely declared victory over mass incarceration was premature at best. Below I raise four areas of particular concern about the state […]
By Dan Greene So Morrissey has cancelled a gig in Iceland because the venue refused to comply with his demand that all meat be removed from the building (he’s done this before also) and it seems that he demands this from all the venues where he performs. Now […]
It is not unreasonable to suggest that the decades ahead will witness the unfolding of a golden age of anarchism. What is the evidence for this? -The most powerful state in the world, the United States, the mother country of the empire, is slowly losing its internal legitimacy […]
By Drew DeSilver Pew Research Center Federal drug policy is in the midst of a major conceptual shift away from the long, automatic prison sentences and zero-tolerance policies of the “War on Drugs” era. But it’s the states, whose prisons house the vast bulk of U.S. convicts, that […]
I have long believed that the most important role mainstream libertarians can play is in the realm of the legal system, e.g. more libertarian lawyers becoming activist judges, district attorneys, and defense attorneys that reshape the legal system according to much more libertarian values. The U.S. legal system […]
The police state and prison-industrial complex have become so large that state repression has spilled over into the mainstream, rather than remaining on the margins and on the bottom. It’s become costly enough that mainstream liberals and conservatives alike are starting to rethink it all. Interesting. By Erik […]
Nothing less is acceptable. By Ernest Drucker and Mike Trace Huffington Post Atty. General Eric Holder’s long overdue realization that “too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason” was an important step toward a national recognition […]
The Heritage Foundation Overcriminalization describes the trend to use the criminal law rather than the civil law to solve every problem, to punish every mistake, and to compel compliance with regulatory objectives. Criminal law should be used only if a person intentionally flouts the law or engages in […]
Good article from 2010 about over criminalization in the US. The Economist IN 2000 four Americans were charged with importing lobster tails in plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes, in violation of a Honduran regulation that Honduras no longer enforces. They had fallen foul of the Lacey Act, […]
1. Continue to attack all mainstream institutions across the board, until all of the system’s institutions have a single digit approval rating, just as Congress presently does. 2. Continue all dissident movements everywhere, and grow these to the point that they collectively become a majority, and then a […]
This is interesting. A 50 percent plus majority of Americans now favor legalizing marijuana. However, two thirds say it should be a states’ rights issue. How can this be? Because the demographic that is least likely to favor legalizing marijuana is the one that is most likely to […]
By Bonnie Kristian The American Conservative wtfspvm / cc Darrin Manning’s unprovoked “stop and frisk” encounter with the Philadelphia police left him hospitalized with a ruptured testicle. Neykeyia Parker was violently dragged out of her car and aggressively arrested in front of her young child for “trespassing” at her […]
It’s interesting seeing these conservative luminaries taking positions on criminal justice that would have been considered moderate-liberal or even left-liberal twenty years ago. I certainly never thought I would see this. The winds of change are starting to blow. RightonCrime.Com As members of the nation’s conservative movement, we […]
This one seemed open and shut.
This event that took place this past June is a prototype for what there needs to be more of. There needs to be mass protests all over the world against the U.S. and U.N.-led War on Drugs that ties all of the relevant issues together: police militarization, civil […]
By Zach Weismueller Reason.Com “I’m a narc. I’ve been a narcotics guy forever,” says San Francisco police chief Greg Suhr. “But I’m just telling you, I’ve always felt bad for the people that were addicted to drugs.” Suhr is following in the footsteps of his predecessor, George Gascon, […]
This piece will probably piss off many anarchists and libertarians, but these arguments are worth hearing. The procedural rights of the accused and due process are as important an aspect of civil liberties as any other. One of the reasons we now have the massive prison-industrial complex is […]
This gives a pretty good overview of the legalities involved in the Ferguson case from a fairly objective legal experts’ perspective. It’s also fairly consistent with my own amateur analysis of the case. In my view. Wilson was not indicted for these reasons: 1. Unreliable and contradictory witness […]
By Keith Preston For an opposing perspective, see this article by Joseph Nye. For an article that makes comparable arguments, see this piece in Foreign Policy by Gideon Rachman. When the future history of the former United States of America is written, the pivotal turning point that likely […]
Read this classic lecture from 2000 by Professor Van Creveld, and then read my “Philosophical Anarchism and the Death of Empire” from 2003. Van Creveld’s lecture describes the emerging world order, and my essay outlines a new paradigm for the “worldwide Grey Tribe” as it might be called. […]
Interesting. The Skeptical Libertarian. We libertarians like to gripe about all the things that are getting worse for freedom in this country, but along some dimensions, the libertarian agenda of personal liberty is winning: from the right to marry to the right to carry, America has become much more […]
The Supreme Court represents the values of the ruling class at any particular time. This has been true throughout American history. For instance, the Dred Scott decision represented the conservative wing of the ruling class during the ante bellum era. The Locher decision represented the values of the ruling […]
My latest @ Taki. ______________ Last Friday proved a more eventful one than usual in New Zealand: on top of the usual weekend hustle, the Kiwi nation hosted the wedding of one Travis McIntosh to his partner, Matt McCormick. As it took place at the hallowed rugby […]
My Takimag debut. The responses pretty much reinforce what I said in the piece about the demos. I noticed a fair few mentions of the phrase “death penalty” from UK news outlets last fortnight; little surprise, given that the antepenultimate Wednesday marked the half-century since this Sceptered Isle’s […]
The Huey P. Newton Gun Club protested against police shootings with an armed march in Dallas on Wednesday. Dallas-Fortworth Fox News reports: Earlier Wednesday, other demonstrators held an open carry gun march through South Dallas to protest against police shootings. Organizers there said the show of force served […]
I suspect that at some point in the not too distant future there will be a growing movement to decriminalize or legalize prostitution, comparable to the gay rights movement in its early phase or the present movement for legalization of marijuana. This is to be welcome from an […]
Libertarian Alliance Note: See this news story for background: “A bakery owned by a Christian family is facing legal action after it declined to make a cake printed with a message supporting gay marriage.” (Belfast Telegraph, 8th July 2014) Speaking in London today, Sean Gabb, Director of the […]
Some Gay Cake Nazis earlier today Several times I’ve seen what I assume was a hypothetical suggestion that PC elites might one day persecute a Xian bakery for refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding . Well, that day has now arrived (more or less). The […]
Old but gold. _________ by AntisocialMisanthropicPessimist I think immigration, as a subset of private property, is one area where the AnCaps have a serious practical issue, that is assuming AnCaps have enough clout to matter anyway. Basically, if you didn’t personally appropriate something, you don’t own it. […]
Abbie Hoffman used to call the New York Times “the voice of the ruling class.” When the voice of the ruling class admits there’s a problem, it must be serious. New York Times Editorial Board For more than a decade, researchers across multiple disciplines have been issuing reports […]
“Crime” is not a phenomenon that can be defined according to any objective set of criteria. Instead, what a particular state, legal regime, ruling class or collection of dominant social forces defines as “crime” in any specific society or historical period will reflect the political, economic and cultural […]
ArrestRecords.Com
By Lucy Steigerwald Antiwar.Com On March 13, the Colorado Court of Appeals issued a ruling that may provide a benefit for a small but not insignificant number of the people arrested for marijuana in the state. Brandi Jessica Russell had her 2011 conviction for possession of less than […]
This is a reasonable start, but a bigger question is can a Left-Right coalition bring about the overthrow of the state, the ruling class, and the empire? That’s what ARV-ATS is all about. By Carla Murphy Bill Moyers.Com There’s not much that Tea Party Republicans and liberal Democrats […]
What does it mean to live in a society where weed and gay marriage will soon be legalized nationwide, and discrimination against homosexuals and transexuals is increasingly prohibited, but where due process is increasingly non-existent and where the police rob, murder, and maim with impunity? By Damon Root […]
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson
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