My latest commentary is online at Center for a Stateless Society:
The experience of Egypt should drive home the fact that it could take more than a couple of weeks and a change at the top to make a substantial revolution that actually improves the lives of average people.
The Ad-Hoc Coalition to Defend the Egyptian Revolution will have information on solidarity actions in the US.
My latest commentary, Urinating on Life is up at Center for a Stateless Society.
The release of a video showing four US Marines urinating on the corpses of Afghan Taliban fighters shocks people, and for good reason. Such a display of dominance and disregard for the dead prompts questioning what the killing really meant. When a life extinguished forever is devalued in this way, one must ask where the process of devaluation began.
US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta quickly condemned the action caught on tape. Yet what shows a more callous disregard for life: What these Marines did or Panetta’s recent re-authorization of calculated drone strikes in Pakistan?
This article made it into two newspapers (Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age and Kuala Lumpur Malay Mail) before I even posted it here.
I just finished my semester, which is why there haven’t been any blog updates for a while. Now all I have to do (haha) is write my thesis and pass a translation exam and I’ll have my master’s degree, which I hope to finish in May.
I’ve written four Center for a Stateless Society commentaries since I updated the blog.
Egypt in the Next Stage of Revolution discusses ongoing protests and repression in Egypt.
In What Does Democracy Look Like, Actually? I examine what people mean when they say they are in favor of democracy, and why they should consider anarchism.
A Fast and Furious String of Government Failures takes a look at the not-so-surprising development that BATFE was trying to lobby for more power by citing guns it allowed to go to drug cartels .
A Year of Upheaval, A Year of Upping the Stakes is the first ever year in review article I’ve done, which apparently wasn’t so popular judging by the Facebook like statistics. But Facebook is lame anyway.
Calvin and Hobbes fans and people who should be Calvin and Hobbes fans will enjoy this video:
My latest commentary is online at Center for a Stateless Society.
What we see in the clouds of teargas and the handcuffed crowds is the state doing its thing. The state is made of authoritarian power relations backed by force…
But the state’s power comes not only from force but from enough people accepting its exercise of force — believing it is legitimate or believing that they are helpless to stop it.
The state is more than a set of power relations; it’s also the people who make those relations function. And people have the power to decide.
Read the rest: Crackdowns Show What the State is Made Of
My latest commentary is online at Center for a Stateless Society: Alternative Currency: Coming to Stores Near You?
The opportunities that the network engenders are especially important at a time when news from Greece tends to be grim — most recently, massive wage cuts have been proposed for state-controlled publicly listed companies. When the system fails to deliver what it promised in exchange for power, alternative economic networks offer a real social safety net for people to fall back on.
But investing in alternative networks is beneficial not just as insurance, but as a means to greater individual and community autonomy. A Volos resident described the sense of empowerment that came from participating in the alternative economy. “The most exciting thing you feel when you start is this sense of contribution,” she told the Times. “You have much more than your bank account says. You have your mind and your hands.”
Philadelphia has a newsletter of occupation. Check it out:
My latest commentary, To Occupy and Rise, is now online at Center for a Stateless Society.
Against visions of a bleak and stagnant future, the occupiers assert the optimism that a better world can be made in the streets. They have not resigned themselves to an order where the young are presented with a foreseeable future of some combination of debt, economic dependency, and being paid little to endure constant disrespect, an order that tells the old to accept broken promises and be glad to just keep putting in hours until they can’t work anymore. The occupiers have not accepted that living in modern society means shutting up about how it functions.
For the latest updates on the Wall Street occupation and similar movements check Twitter #occupywallst.
I took some pictures during my brief stay at Liberty Plaza on September 19, which are viewable at my Google+ profile
As the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks approached, I thought I should write something about it. But then I was hesitant to do so. What more could I say that hasn’t already been said? And if I was going to write it as a news commentary, how would I put my thoughts on the event into such a format?
As someone who was 16 when the attacks were made, I would have to say that the entire politically-involved period of my life has been colored by the post-9/11 period it took place in. Since I was too young to be aware of the Soviet collapse, I would consider September 11, 2001 the defining historical event of my lifetime.
As someone who studies history, I’d like to think about what September 11 will mean in the long run. So that’s the standpoint I took in my 9/11 commentary, which is available for reading at Center for a Stateless Society.
It’s not uncommon to hear that “everything changed” on September 11, 2001. While it is not true that policies that came after September 11 were always different from what was done before, the tragic attacks on that day did lead to major changes. As we remember the events of ten years ago, we should also reflect on how to build a better world.
(Read the rest: What is a Post-9/11 World?)
It is good that people remember September 11, but thinking about September 11 is better than just remembering. As difficult as it might be to think about so many lives destroyed, people who could be neighbors, people dead because they were in the way of a murderous act of political violence, we do no service to the dead or to the living by keeping our minds away from the task.
My commentaries for the month of August are both up at Center for a Stateless Society.
In Justice Without the State, I respond to a question raised by E.D. Kain at the Forbes Blog.
Kain describes his reservations about anarchism and wonders “what would replace our criminal justice system in a stateless society?” As an anarchist — one who believes in maximizing individual liberty and wants no person to rule over another — I’d answer hopefully nothing…
The criminal enterprises of the state should not be replaced, but instead displaced, by cooperative alternatives. This may seem like nitpicking, but to me it emphasizes the differences between authoritarian and anarchic functions.
And since I’ve been in Disaster Mode, I naturally did a commentary called Hurricane Reality. It started with considering whether or not the news was over-hyped, and went on to exploring anarchist solutions to disaster preparedness and response.
As flooding and power outages still affect people, many are saying that Hurricane Irene was overhyped by the media. Some, like Howard Kurtz in his article A Hurricane of Hype focus on the minimal damage to New York City, as if this were a superhero movie where bad things strike Manhattan first…
There are probably already commentaries claiming that the disaster shows how important government action is. Certainly, the individuals helping stranded people can be commended by those of us who think the institutions they labor under are not optimal. But there really is no reason why government services would work better than any non-government services.
My latest commentary at Center for a Stateless Society is about the ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious and the Drug War.
ATF agents watched as large quantities of weapons were brought out of a Phoenix gun store by a suspected supplier for a Mexican drug cartel. They allowed well over a thousand weapons to pass this way.
One would have to ask if this is just a noteworthy example of bureaucratic incompetence or something more sinister. I’d say it’s a toss-up between the two.
Read the rest: Incompetence at Best
