eye of the storm

There he was arrested on September 24 at a motel room for allegedly listening to a police scanner and relaying information on Twitter to help protesters avoid heavily-armed cops -- an activity the State Department lauded when it happened in Iran. ...

But a closer look at the court documents leaves the unmistakable impression that Elliott Madison is yet another casualty of the government's nasty, post-9/11 habit of considering political dissidents as threats to national security.

this piece from cnn is remarkable for not just going: "anarchist" rioters! anti-government insane people! etc. indeed, the very notion that we do not live in an entirely free society is for the most part unrepresentable in our media. so, um, good job.

it's amazing that when people discuss genocide, as in daniel goldhagen's new book (at least as it's represented in the review; i intend to read it), or in the alternative views mentioned in the review ('“Mobilizing the Will to Intervene,” a study by leading Canadian and American figures, identifies “poverty and inequality, population growth and the ‘youth bulge,’ ethnic nationalism and climate change” [climate change!] as the chief “drivers of deadly violence”'), they ignore the breathtakingly obvious. all of the events mentioned are the acts of states. states possess the resources (derived from coercive taxation and weaponry) to be effectively irresistible when they turn to mass slaughter. we are all potentially their victims throughout our lives.

really, this blindness to what is jumping up and down right in front of you waving its arms and screaming is a testimony to what our era really is: we cannot imagine life without the state; we cannot imagine our own lives except as nurtured, controlled, or subject to the extermination by the state. it has to be . . . what we want, who we most deeply are. it could extinguish the whole planet and the omega man would still be trying to blame the whole thing on...whatever: climate change, the youth bulge. the yout bulge? he'd be in despair because there was no one left to be subordinated by.

correction: actually, goldhagen evidently mentions 9.11/alqaeda. ok not a state. other "eliminationist" disasters mentioned in the review: the holocaust, rwanda, stalin. mao, colonial kenya and guatamala, sudan, srebrinica.

forward my minions, etc. but it's amazing how obviously pejorative the coverage is of any given anarchist riot.

The wanton destruction, which lasted for about 90 minutes early Saturday evening, was a dramatic reminder that France and other European nations, below their surface of stability and wealth, harbor tiny bands of ultra-leftist activists who still want to combat the market economies and parliamentary democracies on which the continent's well-being is founded.

"We will destroy your morbid world," one of the Poitiers protesters sprayed-painted on a wall near the city's landmark Notre Dame Cathedral.

well i suppose that the continent's well-being is to some extent founded on market economies and parliamentay democracies. but i also suppose that, if you're going to attribute the ecstasy of europe to its alleged market economies and supposed liberal democracies, you must also hold those items responsible for the miseries of europe, if any.

They donned plastic masks, pulled up their hoods and started destroying everything in sight. In what police described as an organized attack, the band shattered store windows, damaged the facades of several banks and spray-painted anarchist slogans on government buildings.

you might ponder how the specific data about their actions supports the assertion that they were "destroying everything in sight." then they're described as performing "wanton destruction." but though these ultra-violent nihilists more or less leveled poitiers to the ground, there seem to have been no serious injuries, else you can be sure they'd be duly reported. and the only voices quoted are, of course, government spokesmen. 

i'm not asking edward cody of the washington post to endorse anarchist riots, but on the other hand it might be in better taste not simply to go all pravda on us. the piece just takes it as obvious that opposition to the current order in europe is entirely incomprehensible; putting it the other way, the piece blandly asserts that that order is about as sweet and good as it could possibly be. well, to sustain an argument like that (which has no place in a news story anyway), you'd better find out what the objections are. in other words, you've got to do more than just go to the news conferences conducted by officials or re-print their press releases. if immigrants or young people feel profoundly alienated from this system, you might try to figure out why. no point in assuming there can't be any reasons without trying to find out what the reasons might be.

this (arrested for using twitter) raises all sorts of interesting questions. "hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime." i say just string the guy up for his anarchism.

one thing that world leaders certainly understand - as they meet to help realize their ecstatic vision of the future for us all, as we all pull together behind their inspirational leadership (yes, we can): they would all be bullet-riddled corpses without a continual massive security cordon. that's because the state is all of us, pulling together to help each other by means of a perfectly voluntary social contract.

here is a relatively good principle: live so that no one wants to kill you, or at a minimum, so that if they do, it's wrong and irrational for them to. tip: try not to run a war machine, have unfathomable power over every aspect of the lives of the people around you, administer a prison system, and so on. these things, understandably, piss people off.

Dr. Mekdese Kassa, 45, from Columbia Md., was marching with other Ethiopian immigrants Thursday in a permitted rally on Liberty Avenue to protest the presence of the prime minister of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi, at the meetings. The protesters said Mr. Zenawi illegally took power by force in 2005.

Dr. Kassa said he was more worried about police behavior than vandalism.

“When you see this kind of police presence, it makes you feel like you’re back in your old state,” he said.

Shaking his head at the police officers standing in front of him, Mr. Kassa added, “That’s why we came here from Ethiopia, because our rights were repressed there.”

"it would be unfair to prosecute interrogators for actions they had been told were legal." thus fred hiatt. though it's not clear he endorses this as a principle, he lets it pass as obvious or trivial. but i propose to you that it is entirely and obviously absurd: exactly the sort of error that makes persons into the merest idiots and will extinguish our species. i realize that it's a tremendous burden, one which none of us, finally, can entirely bear: but no matter what you are told or by whom, you are responsible for what you actually do. and if you're letting john yoo do your moral deliberation for you, you deserve a lengthy prison sentence no matter what the result.

a moral system - such as all varieties of statism, or any political philosophy other than anarchism - which does not center responsibility in the individual, is fantastical and always the product of cowardice and a premonition of great evil.

of course, i guess it depends on who's telling you what's legal. if the voices in your head are telling you to kill, or some arbitrarily selected mental patient is telling you that torture is legal, that's an understandable reason to throw some chump into a box with scorpions. but if it's a justice-department lawyer, i say you're insane if you listen to him. a schizophrenic has no particular motive to encourage torture; a justice-department lawyer is adminstering a systematic justification for a massive spree of state sadism. if you decide to participate you are at fault, no matter what letterhead is on the memo.

probably even newspaper columnists/opinion editors could eventually be made to understand the inadequacy of 'alberto gonzales told me to' as a global moral excuse.

pretty interesting stuff on slate about american secessionist movements and scenarios of the end of the united states. needless to say, i support all secessionist movements of any sort everywhere in the world. indeed, each human body should be a sovereign nation.

one inspiring feature of khamenei's approach is that he insists on the rule of law. if the protesters allege vote fraud, they should pursue the proper legal channels. the fact that the people who made the laws and who enforce them are the very same people who dicked the vote is of course neither here nor there, "the law" being a trans-human truth rather than an instrument of power.

people i know keep showing up in the nytimes, lately. like chris francese, marion winik and nick gillespie. but i have to say that gillespie's proposal - legalizing, regulating, and taxing all vice - is not groovy. i just want to start out by pointing out that such policies lead to bizarre ironies, like the gov working to stop smoking, and running on tobacco taxes and settlement money. indeed, i could see a state that depends utterly on the illness of its citizens and also provides them with healthcare, which is cool in its ironies, but senseless. in a way, this makes it perfectly clear that the state is a parasite and a faction of society - an independent group of people with a set of common interests, as opposed to a bunch of public servants - and i guess eventually that would just make anarchism obvious. so that would be good.

i think all these vices should be legal and, um, unregulated. but a government that's your pornographer and pimp and bookie and supplier of meth is caught in an infinite moral loop, a perfect cycle of hypocrisy, even more than it is now. the state of pennsylvania currently asserts a monopoly on gambling and booze, and seeks to ban or control or tax up the wazoo most other forms of vice. well that makes our bureaucrats exactly as good as our bookies and moonshiners (if any remain). that is a blow for reality, but hardly a formula for improving our wretched little lives.

pa funds education in part through gambling. i remember when there was a set of ads that tried to connect drugs to terrorism, and say that if you were using drugs you were supporting terrorists. that was ridiculous, but in these circumstances, it is an act of public service to gamble, and the most addicted are the most generous. if we fund education through tobacco, or booze, or pot sales, then we're making our children's welfare vary proportionately with our illness and addiction: it suggests the shape of a whole human life, from eager, well-resourced kindergartner to vice-ridden middle aged schlumph whose slow descent into degradation and death is an act of charity.

the same things that make addictive substances, activities, and services excellent commodities, make them excellent targets for taxation.people will tend to keep using them almost no matter how expensive they become, and anyone who objects to your raising the tax is apparently in favor of vice. no one wants to be the state legislator favoring cheap tobacco or whiskey. on the other hand, it puts you straight into the sickness and death biz.

i actually think a thriving black market economy is ok. it gives much of the population a stake in crime, and hence a basic anti-statist stance. it allows many people to make a living who might otherwise be starving etc. it encourages resourcefulness and self-reliance. on the other hand there are drawbacks, such as very high rates of violence. but every rose has its thorn. in an era in which every single segment of our lives is permeated by state power, we ought to try to keep the bureaucracy off our vices.

i truly do not understand these people: let's start with nancy pelosi and condi rice. their view is that, since the justice department assured them it was legal, it was legal. or: since it assured them it was legal, they were not responsible for assessing its legality, rightness, or efficacy. it's really an insane loop: cheney's office directs you to produce a legal justification for torture, then uses that legal justification - a horrendous tissue of idiotic fallacies produced with the intention to evade the law - as a legal justification. and everyone - everyone - just hides in that pile of crap, staying warm.

what none of these people seem to understand is that even a memo from john yoo does not relieve you of the responsibility to think, or relieve you of the responsibility for your own decisions. even if it comes on nice letterhead. i file this under "anarchy now" because this shows you exactly what's wrong, exactly what the rule of law actually means or amounts to: human decisions, indeed idiosyncratic preferences or sudden impulses or rages or prejudices, shrouded in this obscuring, weightless fog.

sometimes i just groove on the whole concept of law. i remember a gorbachev-era law making it a crime to insult the leader of the soviet union. and i just want to say that the russian contribution to the war effort in world war 2 was trivial. i belittle it roundly. the war was won by patriotic georgians and emperor haile selassie, king of kings, lord of lords, conquering lion of the tribe of judah.

i set up a youtube channel of the philosophy-type stuff.

third in the series encompassing arguments for anarchy:
autonomy and responsibility

here's a disturbing story, especially for those of us raising teenagers in pennsylvania.

"martin marched so barack could run":
anarchism and pacifism

yet another argument against the legitimacy of the state, this one focusing on the notion of the rule of law:

It is often said that anarchism is entirely impractical. An enumeration of anarchist experiments and moments in history does not entirely refute this claim. But it may be of interest nevertheless. If y'all have suggested additions, I'd love to hear them.

tribal societies: what is and what is not a political state is obviously a hard question, but many tribal societies surely have none. One thing we might point out: people have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, the political state for perhaps 4,000. Call this the period of civilization if you like, or of terminal illness. Michael Taussig has argued that the tribal peoples of pre-columbian Americas were perfectly aware of the state alternatives (as, the Inca empire), and took active measures to reject it.

Peasants' War: The radical reformation, with leaders such as Thomas Muntzer, attacked all established Church and political authorities and "liberated" the town of Allstedt. He was, well, beheaded, but many radical reform sects, such as Anabaptists, set up independent communities throughout northern Europe in the decades that followed.

Diggers: The most radical faction of the English revolution in the mid-seventeenth century, they set up small independent agrarian communities on the common in Cobham, Surrey. Gerrard Winstanley.

American Utopias: Because the American frontier was rather unsupervised, many radical protestant sects set up shop to escape the political authorities in Europe, from the 17th through the 19th centuries. These were followed by many secular experiments that essentially declared their independence from the state. many such communities were relatively enduring and successful. One might mention: Rappites, Shakers, Modern Times, Brook Farm, Oneida, Hopedale.

Pirate Utopias

Revolutionary Ukraine: Anarchists were of course one element in Russia during the revolutionary period. Nestor Makhno organized the Ukraine along anarchist lines from 1919-1921, and successfully resisted the Bolsheviks before finally getting crushed.

Spanish Civil War: Anarchism was a major element in the Spanish Civil War and resistance to fascism in the late 1930's, led by figures such as Buenaventura Durruti. They managed to hold parts of the country for substantial periods of times, organizing them in as free a manner as possible, given the military pressures.

me on podcrash.

one of the arguments i'm proudest of in against the state, and which has received little attention, is that the coercive power of existing states makes consent to them conceptually impossible. rad geek does an excellent job of tightening this argument and wielding it against some critics. i appreciate that!

i don't know if there are any fans of voltairine de cleyre out there, but i thought i'd draw your attention to this wonderful autobiographical essay, unaccountably omitted from the book edited by me and sharon presley, exquisite rebel.