Anarchoblogs

My latest commentary is up at Center for a Stateless Society.

Lots of pundits are piecing together lessons from Tuesday’s US primary elections. But what lessons might the primaries hold for anarchists in America? Read the rest

I was going to do one on the new NYPD tape recordings, but Radley Balko already did a good article about it.

Last night’s Thinking Liberty was one of the best shows we’ve done. Xaq Fixx joined us to talk about anarchism, Fr33 Agents, and DIY culture.

Download the archive from ThinkingLiberty.net.

Thinking liberty is an interactive audio broadcast where Darian, Tennyson, Bosco, and Bile banter and plot to free the world. We often have guests join us by phone, and listeners can call in or chat with us on Skype. Check out ThinkingLiberty.net for the latest updates.

George Donnelly, a Pennsylvania activist, was tackled and arrested for filming federal officers harassing pamphleteers. After being held in a federal detention center he was released under a number of oppressive conditions. He has been charged with resisting and striking federal officers, which could carry an eight year sentence. See Penn. Activist Facing 8 Years in Prison for Video.

It is well known that cops lie, and that they will accuse people of being violent to try to deflect criticism from their own actions.

I ask you to join me in supporting George, not only because he is one of the friendliest, most committed, and most principled advocates of liberty I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, but because there is so much that is important about this case.

Individuals attempting to peacefully prevent government assaults on liberty by advocating jurors exercise nullification power are harassed by agents of the state who would prefer to settle things through violence. An individual documenting this struggle, attempting to hold government officials to some kind of accountability, is violently assaulted, hauled away in chains, and put into a cage. If you believe that government officers should be held accountable for their actions and that we have the right to document what they do while on duty, then you should care about George Donnelly.

So please help George defend himself against the state.

TRIGGER WARNING This post and its links contain information about sexual assault and/or violence against women which may be triggering to survivors.

Let’s be clear: the Oklahoma legislature has instituted legal rape (though the law is temporarily suspended).

And, no, it is not OK because it’s common practice to receive a pap smear or other vaginal exam as part of medical care.

“Tenured Radical”:

Don’t you think that there is a difference between giving someone an ultrasound/vaginal exam to promote good health and one that is done to punish women who want to access their legal right to abortion? Just like there is a difference between consensual sexual intercourse and having sex with someone because he won’t let you out of the car until you do?

“Historiann”:

The difference between your pap smear and the Oklahoma law just vetoed [passed] is that no one has passed a law requiring you to submit to your pap smear on pain of criminal prosecution. The problem is the coercive arm of the state, not the specific form of a given medical procedure.

“skylanda”:

A point of technical clarification: An ultrasound is done before every abortion in this country…an ultrasound through the abdomen, which is done to date the pregnancy and ensure it is within legal dates. Requiring an ultrasound through the vagina is an additional burden that serves no clinical purpose other than to harass women (nevermind the providing doctors) with an invasive, unnecessary procedure that can be doubly traumatic for those whose pregnancies resulted from penetration they did not consent to in the first place. The sanctimonious whining about “holocaust” and “murder” – that women would change their mind if they just saw that little baby first? Every women already gets an ultrasound first. Just not one by phallic probe up the vagina.

And, no, it’s not OK because it can be looked at as a take-it-or-leave-it package deal.  A woman cannot refuse, and a doctor cannot choose to offer, an abortion option without it. The threat of force and the seriousness of pregnancy do not allow for genuine consent.

And, no, it’s not OK because you can “just” go to another state. Unreasonable demands undermine consent, amount to victim-blaming, and presuppose the legitimacy of the law.

And, no, it’s not OK because she might have something inserted into her vagina anyway to perform the desired abortion. Any amount of time that someone’s body is violated that is longer than they consent to (and, again, consent is impossible under this law) is too long.

And, no, it wouldn’t be OK if a provision was added exempting victims of rape or incest. The very act itself is rape. “Being raped once is “Oklahoma, OK”,…but being raped twice is an act to which the state cannot consent?”

Filed under: Feminism, Law, News Tagged: Rachel Maddow

During the protests as part of today’s General Strike in Greece, 3 bank workers are reported to have been found suffocated to death after a fire. This on-the-ground report from LibCom is a sober assessment. According to news reports that began at 14:00 Greek time after, under pressure by the events, most radio and TV stations decided [...]

Last night’s Thinking Liberty podcast can be downloaded from LibertyActivism.info. You might need to get a plugin to play it – if so, just click on the Ogg Vorbis link on the page and download the appropriate file for your system.

We should be getting a dedicated url for Thinking Liberty this week. This is one of the changes we’re making to the format. Now that we have our own equipment, we can make a much more reliable setup. We’ll have more guests on the show, and more ways to interact with the live broadcast. Please bear with us as we make the conversion.

The government will fall that raises the price of beer. – Czech proverb

When you invite the whole world to your party, inevitably someone pees in the beer. – Xeni Jardin

The Lost Abbey tasting room is literally an oasis in the desert. They are no joke and one of  only two breweries (along with Stone) to have two beers on Wine Enthusiast Magazine’s list of the top 25 beers of 2009. The San Diego area has 33 breweries, part of what makes it Men’s Journal’s top pick for American beer towns (Portland has a mere 29). Yes, it’s good to live in San Diego.

What was I saying before this turned into a tourism ad? Oh, yes. The tasting room. A dollar doesn’t get you much these days, but in their tasting room, “it’ll get ya drunk” on a seriously generous serving (4 oz.) of high-ABV beer of outstanding craftsmanship; full pints are a bank-breaking $4. It’s a ridiculous deal in a wonderful atmosphere, right among the barrels, tanks and attendant smells of a working brewery.

It was a good deal; then the state showed up to put a stop to it. The frustration, anger, and raw emotion expressed in this post makes for a breathtaking read. There isn’t much more to say. But I’ll say it anyway.

Prohibition in the US nominally ended at the end of 1933. I say “nominally” because, as Gary Chartier reminds us, “the end of Prohibition was not accompanied by an end to cartelizing laws and regulations…” In this case, the regulation isn’t directly about alcohol per se but is one of “public safety,” because, as everyone knows,  alcoholic beverages are teeming with all kinds of nasty things that can kill you (and it’s not like, you know, the process of making beer requires cleanliness). But Kevin Carson knows that these kinds of regulations are no less draconian than outright prohibition:

One of the central functions of business and occupational licensing, and “health” and “safety” regulations, is to mandate minimum levels of overhead and make such small-batch production effectively illegal.  “Health” and “safety” codes, for instance, typically require our would-be microbaker to purchase an industrial-sized oven, refrigerator and dishwasher:  an enormous debt which can only be serviced by large batch production on a full-time basis, in a separate building with permanent hired staff.

Under such circumstances, the only people who can afford self-employment and entrepreneurship are those who can raise the artificially high, state-mandated capital outlays;  everyone else must offer himself for hire to an employer who can afford such outlays.  And since the entry barriers artificially reduce the number  of employers and inflate the number of people seeking wage employment, obviously, the dynamic tends to be one of workers competing for jobs, and the terms of employment being artificially set by the employer.

Of course this is lost on the trolls, who arrive right on cue:

Awe [sic]…what a shame that someone running a business has to comply with health regulations. I bet if you think about it there are a lot more throughout your business that you don’t really need either, right.

What they, you and I (“we”) need is “an effectively functioning tort law system that hasn’t been hampered by preemption and similar sorts of limitations.” What “we” need is to understand that “decisions about health and comfort are best made by the individual people who bear the costs and reap the benefits.” What “we” need is to let markets work, the actual, freed market:

Government interference only seems necessary to regulate a market, in the positive sense of the word regulate, if you think that the only way to get social order is by means of social control, and the only way for to get to harmonious social interactions is by having the government coerce people into working together with each other.

And further:

American state corporatism forcibly reshapes the world of work and business on the model of a commercial strip mall: sanitized, centralized, regimented, officious, and dominated by a few powerful proprietors and their short list of favored partners, to whom everyone else relates as either an employee or a consumer. A truly free market, without the pervasive control of state licensure requirements, regulation, inspections, paperwork, taxes, “fees,” and the rest, has much more to do with the traditional image of a bazaar: messy, decentralized, diverse, informal, flexible, pervaded by haggling, and kept together by the spontaneous order of countless small-time independent operators, who quickly and easily shift between the roles of customer, merchant, contract laborer, and more. It is precisely because we have the strip mall rather than the bazaar that people living in poverty find themselves so often confined to ghettoes, caught in precarious situations, and dependent on others—either on the bum or caught in jobs they hate but cannot leave, while barely keeping a barely tolerable roof over their heads.

The poorer you are, the more you need access to informal and flexible alternatives, and the more you need opportunities to apply some creative hustling.

- Charles Johnson, “Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty as We Know It”

I don’t know if the brewers at The Lost Abbey are anarchists; they write like anarchists might write. If not, I hope, after this, they’ll head over to C4SS and have a look around. Maybe then they will see all facets of the state as not worth a pitcher of warm piss. If warm piss isn’t your thing either, let me call for solidarity with The Lost Abbey folks. Buy their beer!* Become a Patron Saint or Sinner.  I’m sure it will help them cover these unexpected and downright evil costs.

* I’m not affiliated with the brewery.

Filed under: Anarchism, Culture, Law, News Tagged: Charles Johnson, Gary Chartier, Kevin Carson

If you prefer text, then: Occupied London blog BBC’s Paul Mason Athens Indymedia (all Greek to me)

Before I was involved with Center for a Stateless Society, I supported their work and asked others to do the same. My reasoning was simple: Center For a Stateless Society is the only organization that consistently produces uncompromising and original market anarchist material, neither bowing for politicians, corporations, or dogma. Now that I’m a paid news analyst, I’m asking you to help keep us at it. All the writers put a lot into our work, the organizational staff tirelessly works toward liberty, and we often go above and beyond our stated responsibilities. If you’re unfamiliar with the Center, check us out at c4ss.org. If you think this is a project worth supporting, please click the widget below to throw in some cash.

If you don’t have the funds right now, there are other ways to help the Center. You could spread our articles through Facebook, Twitter, and email. You could pass along our work in print form by a) printing the C4SS pamphlets at LibertyActivism.info and Invisible Molotov, b) making your own pamphlets out of articles you like and sending them to either site, or c) making good old flyers or broadsides by copy-pasting our works into a word processor then printing them.

And don’t hesitate to give us feedback in any of the comment threads or by email. We want to help you make a free world.

• ALL At NYC Anarchist Book Fair. DarianW, DarianWorden.com (2010-04-20). Alliance of the Libertarian Left folks from New Jersey, New York, and New Hampshire converged at the 2010 NYC Anarchist Book Fair. This is the first time ALL had a table at the event. We had a good mix of cheap and free literature: The table got more organized as... (Linked Tuesday 2010-04-27.)

• *"It is the responsibility of writers to listen to gossip and. Masha, Cyganeria (2010-04-26). "It is the responsibility of writers to listen to gossip and pass it on. It is the way all storytellers learn about life." ~Grace PaleyOne of the benefits of working a side job as a writer is the constant exposure to people and their stories. My co-workers are people I'm... (Linked Tuesday 2010-04-27.)

• The Big Anarchist Survey. DarianW, DarianWorden.com (2010-04-21). I hope lots of anarchists fill out The Big Anarchist Survey. It won’t take long, and the survey writers provided space to write in answers and comment on the survey itself. (Linked Tuesday 2010-04-27.)

• A (comparatively) cheerful post, for once: Naomi Wolf and the Tea Parties. John Markley, The Superfluous Man (2010-04-21). My feelings towards the Tea Party movement, and the public protests against the current administration's policies in general, have generally been favorable but pessimistic: It's nice to see a popular movement opposing the galloping statism of the bailouts, the stimulus, and health care "reforms," but my expectation has been that... (Linked Tuesday 2010-04-27.)

• Apple IIe Twitter Terminal. Daring Fireball (2010-04-28). Awesome. (Linked Wednesday 2010-04-28.)