Telescoping batons in action! - The sex-violence-state nexus, illustrated

At right you see the cover of Naše Vojsko — Vojesnký a policejní magazín (“Our Military — The Military and Police Manazine”), a Czech publication. This is issue 3/2009, and the magazine is in its fifth year of production.

I picked up this issue at Svět Knihy Praha 2009, the annual Prague book fair, earlier this year. The cover photo really caught my eye.

The article which goes with the photo is entitled “Teleskopy v akci” (“Telescoping batons in action”). It features a series of photographs in which men dressed in clown suits military and police uniforms can be seen using these telescoping police batons to:

• Immobilize a man in a pain hold which threatens to break his elbow
• Subdue a prone man
• Project an image of power
• Conduct close combat with an unruly crowd
• Smash a train window
• Smash the window of a van
• Threaten the resident of an apartment during a raid
• Inspect the underside of a vehicle with a mirror extension

There is also another photo accompanying the article, with the telescoping baton filling the role of striptease club dance pole, complete with a beautiful young lingerie-clad pole dancer.

Rather than project my own thoughts here, I’d like to invite you, gentle reader, to share yours. Your comments on the image are most welcome, but if you really want to have an impact, click through on the picture for the full-resolution version, and make your own blog post, Facebook note or whatever with it, alongside your own commentary.

Right near the beginning of the discussion, I asked group members to indicate if they were criminals, by raising their hands, and led off by sticking mine up first.

Eventually, and rather quickly, every hand went up.

There is honor among thieves, though the “thievery” in play here is of the legal kind, not the moral kind (think: mp3). This represents and opportunity for building community among libertarians, which is largely ignored by the mainstream libertarian movement.

Camp attendees who are following my blog are encouraged to read “The penalty is always death” (which I presented in abbreviated form in several sessions anyway), and the linked “Clown suit defense” articles.

I started the site, really, as my own soapbox, primarily intended to be a platform for publicity around my renunciation of US citizenship. Early on I did a lot more writing than I have been lately. Looking back in the archives will show up to 3 posts per day, back in the day, a lot of it reaction to current events. These days my level of engagement with the news has fallen to roughly zero, as it tends to every few years. Now, three posts in a week is a busy time around here. What the future holds is unclear, though I will make one promise: later this year, probably in the summer, there will be a semi-dramatic, fully-anarchist event starring — who else? — me, captured on video and posted here. Stay tuned!

What I did not expect when I joined the blogosphere was to become so much more engaged as a libertarian and anarchist. I did not expect to meet, make the acquaintance and even become friends with so many worthwhile, interesting people. This, truly, is a greater reward than I ever imagined. Thanks to all of you!!!

Significantly, nostate.com became (barely) self-funding in March 2009.

Some statistics, aggregating a year’s worth of data from Google Analytics and other data sources:

Unique visits: 64,381
Pageviews: 103,868
Visitors: 52,749
RSS subscribers: at least 120, counting only those using web-based readers

Top 5 countries, by number of visits:
United States: 45,149
Canada: 4,436
United Kingdom: 3,981
Slovakia: 1,334
Germany: 998

Top content, view count and top referrers thereto:

US government announces new logo: 24,288 (StumbleUpon)
The clown suit defense, and the excuses of symbols: 8,424 (StumbleUpon)
A declaration of separation: 4,141 (whatreallyhappened.com, davidicke.com)
I surrendered my US passport today: 3,872 (reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon)
The penalty is always death: 2,488 (StumbleUpon)
Press release: 2,267 (various)
Fuck the troops!: 2,034 (various)
An anarchist’s declaration: 1,911 (various)
Free Janine! And all political prisoners!: 1,878 (reddit)
Lèse majesté: 1,755 (StumbleUpon)

Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law.

– Edward Abbey

David Gross of The Picket Line submits an exploration of ethical reductionism in the context of political theory: Does political philosophy reduce to ethical philosophy?

[This] is what makes the liberal political theories and their justifications difficult for me to swallow. They seem to have this backwards. According to them, some behavior at the ethical level switches from unethical to ethical based on the description it is given at the political level, rather than its description at the political level being based on an analysis of it at the ethical level. Whereas it seems to me that whether a particular action is ethical or not should not depend on what political system you’re operating under or what role the people involved play in that system; rather, whether the system is reasonable and coherent should depend on whether the individuals enacting their roles in that system behave ethically in so doing.

With his submission, he says: “Some anarchists and libertarians seem to believe that political philosophy reduces to ethical philosophy, the same way some scientists believe that chemistry ultimately reduces to physics. Is this part of the appeal of anarchism, and does it make sense?” I for one do believe that the political ought to reduce to the ethical, that this does make sense and that it is part of anarchism’s appeal. My own posting on the clown suit defense makes this point, though a bit obliquely.

Mike Billy of Reflections from a Rotting Nation writes of another incident in what seems to be a new trend driven by both advances in technology and some rather insane law in Teen Girl Charged With Sex Offense For Sending Nude Pictures of Herself.

The girl may receive a punishment of several years in a juvenile detention center and forced registration as a sex offender. This new status could prevent her from living within a specified radius of any school, church, or park for the rest of her life. It may also force her to inform all of her neighbors that she is a sex offender when she moves.

So now, not only does she have nude pictures of herself floating around, but she also has the stigma of being labeled a sex offender hanging over her head. But hey, that is the law and ignorance is no excuse.

The ABC News story linked to in the post has comments attached which present both many defenses of the girl’s action as well as a catalogue of what passes for sexual “morality” in America, especially as connected to children: “Satan on the loose”, “She doesn’t need jail, she needs therapy”, “What the hell are kids thinking these days!”

The blog post I never wrote reacting to this incident and to some of the ABC News commenters was going to bear the title, “Shocking news! Teen girls enjoy fucking”.

Mike also brings us The Financial Crisis is Not a Market Failure:

No, the financial crisis is not a failure of the free market, it is a failure of fascism. Allowing one unchecked overarching organization known as the Federal Reserve to control the money supply and thus the interest rates has caused the failure.

And how do they propose to fix it? By having that same organization create even more money to bail out these banks.

Like a fly repeatedly striking a glass window, more of the same will not solve our problems. It is time to end the Fed.

The economics lemurs at nostate.com agree wholeheartedly.

Commenting on a resurgence of the Taliban and the displacement of the anemic, imperialist-funded state in Afghanistan, Darian Worden, author of Bring a Gun to School Day (worth reading, and promoting!), says, “Revolutionaries, Take Note“:

When desired goods and services are provided in a revolutionary context, the consumers then join entrepreneurs in building revolution. A revolution based on libertarian principles ought to build liberty outside of the system. It is not enough simply to tell people that the free market can do things better. They must be shown that we will make it do things better. Agorism and other left libertarian philosophies provide ideas for such action.

Pity the Taliban aren’t agorists, or anarchists of any stripe.

Francois Tremblay of the Check Your Premises blog submits a controversial article entitled “Why hierarchies are immoral“. He writes:

Anarchy, as a position on social organization, forces us to rethink the purpose of society itself. What is the goal of social action? While mainstream political ideologies disagree on various issues, there is one thing they all agree on: they universally elevate economic and technological progress as an ultimate, unimpeachable goal, and that the only disagreement is how to effect it and how fast. But this goal is driven by hierarchies that concentrate power and seek to expand that power by all means necessary. Anarchists are the only people who pipe up and say “hey, maybe this whole idea of limitless progress at all costs isn’t so great- maybe the costs are greater than we’re ready to accept.”

This post provoked a great deal of response, in my view, some of which can be found here, here, here, here and here, as well as in the comments to all those posts. One needn’t agree with Tremblay’s definition of hierarchy or with what he derives from it in order to find valuable explorations of social theory here.

Francois continues to push boundaries in his second submission, “I know what’s best for people”:

The Anarchist view is that our institutions and rules must be grounded in the individual’s values: that social morality, like everything else in society, must be a bottom-up system. In contrast, the ruling class imposes the concept of “law” in order to justify its coercive control over society.

An extremely important point, and one which ought to be shouted constantly at those who would seize control of whatever illegitimate coercive apparatus is at hand in order to try to impose their own vision of a “shining city on a hill” upon the rest of us. Looking at this from an agorist perspective, we might say that there is a tendency where if the values forced upon people do not comport with those of the individuals subjected to them, then the power of black and gray markets will increase. Or, as Princess Leia told the Governor: “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”

Hosting the carnival gives me a little bit of power, which of course begs to be abused. In that spirit, I present also two things that I wrote this past month: Agorism and ancap panarchy – a response to an Obama voter, and The Golden Rule is insufficient.

Enjoy, and thanks for visiting!

It’s my most popular article by far. They come in their droves via stumbleupon.com, they don’t leave any comments and as far as I can tell, they never come back.

But they keep reading that article.

Hmmm. Talk amongst yourselves.

I would submit, though, that these thinkers celebrate too soon. The State’s ultimate penalty for real crime (initiations of force or fraud against people or their property) as well as all those non-crimes the State takes umbrage at is always death. This is the nature of the State; killing is the instrument by which it maintains itself.

To be sure, the State is mostly careful to not exercise the penalty too often. The system of compulsion and coercion, backed by the ultimate tool of death, is one which States have learned functions much better when the sword is cloaked in layers of misdirection and abstraction. The simple — and perhaps more honest — compulsion of the local tyrant demanding of his subjects, “Do it thus, or I shall kill you,” has been replaced with a long chain of escalation beginning with paper things like demands for compliance and citations, leading through more forceful papers such as summonses and warrants, but ultimately grounded upon the power of that barely-concealed blade.

If we accept the natural-rights view of self defense as given by libertarian theory, we can see that the penalty for every infraction is death.

Fail to pay your taxes? You will be killed.

Consume a proscribed substance? Death awaits you.

Neglect or ignore some trivial regulation? Murder is your fate.

“Oh come now,” they will cry, “the government doesn’t kill people for not paying their taxes!” In general this is true. In general people are compliant, whether out of worship or fear. But as situations escalate from non-compliance to the State’s demand for enforcement, be sure that the blade remains ready to plunge into the belly of the scofflaw.

I’m quite fond of hyperbolic examples. Let’s make one now.

Imagine that Bob is a fruit vendor. He sells apples, oranges and plums, and prices them by the piece. He advertises them at “12 for $3″ or “20 for $5″, or at whatever price he determines he can sell them profitably.

One day a policeman comes around to Bob’s stand and tells him about a new law. The State has adopted a new numbering system, duodecimal, which uses base-12 instead of base-10 decimal notation. The State has passed a law saying that all transactions, offers, sales, etc., must be denoted in duodecimal.

The policeman informs Bob that his signage is out of order. “12 for $3″ must be replaced by “10 for $3″, and “20 for $5″ must be replaced by “18 for $5″. Because Bob is in violation of the law, the policeman issues Bob a citation ordering him to comply and imposing a fine for breaking the law.

Bob naturally looks at this as ridiculous. Everyone he sells fruit to understands decimal notation, and to change it would only create confusion. Further, Bob knows that he’s committed no crime, no offense against the person or property of another. Bob refuses the citation and tells the policeman to stick it where the sun doesn’t shine.

A few days later, Bob receives a letter saying that the fine has been imposed on him by a judge, that he has 30 days to pay it, and that he must comply with the new duodecimal law. As before, Bob ignores this letter and this judge, harming and having harmed no person or thing.

Thirty days pass, sixty days, ninety. Bob keeps on selling his decimal-denominated fruit during the day and going home to enjoy time with his family in the evening. One day another letter arrives stating that the judge has issued an order which says that if Bob does not comply with the first letter within 5 days, he will be in criminal contempt of court and subject to arrest and a term of imprisonment. Bob is disturbed, of course, by this threat against his person, but ignores it as he might ignore the taunts of a bully on the street.

A week later, a group of armed men wearing clown suits appear at Bob’s door and say they are there to arrest Bob and take him before the judge. Bob tells them he won’t go, as he’s done nothing wrong, but the uniformed thugs are insistent. He closes the door in their faces. They break down the door and enter Bob’s home, guns drawn against Bob and his family.

Bob then, in fear of his life and the life of his family, perhaps draws a pistol and tells the clowns to go away. Perhaps he attempts to flee. The clowns shoot him dead.

In the aftermath, the killing is sanctified among the State’s organized criminals as justifiable, since Bob failed to comply with lawful demands, threatened police officers and resisted arrest. The State’s worshipers and pawns fall all over themselves to praise the brave uniformed thugs and denounce Bob as having “had it coming.”

The penalty is always death.

If I were to break down the door to my neighbor’s home, push a gun in the face of the family that lives there, announce that they had offended me, or my masters, for some behavior of theirs which was proscribed by the scrawlings of blind yet dutiful scribes in some mysterious set of holy books that they had neither read nor subscribed to, and then demand that they comply with my instantaneous orders or be subject to the instantaneous power of death which issues from the barrel of my gun — would they or would they not be justified in defending themselves? Would they or would they not be justified in attempting to escape? Would they or would they not act morally by exerting every possible influence, by applying every possible force, to stop me enforcing whatever arbitrary proscription I found in my holy book?

Of course they would. Be it that my presumably holy book contained a proscription against eating rabbit, that it spake ill of cooking and eating meat on the bone, that it condemned the growing and ingestion of cannabis sativa or salvia divinorum or cooking up a bit of methamphetamine in the bathtub, you should rightly denounce me thus:

Of course! You have no right to come into their home, to disturb them, to push weapons into their faces, to threaten them with death, torture, imprisonment, sanction, condemnation or to demand anything! Your act is a crime, and when the rest of us in the neighborhood get together and hear about it, we’re going to throw you OUT of our community at the very least, and if you resist, use every power and force to be rid of you, so that we may protect ourselves and our children and our families and our loved ones and our comrades and our friends and our colleagues and our neighbors and our acquaintances and the bitchy middle-aged spinster who works as a cashier at the shop on the corner from YOU and your insane, arbitrary, needless, senseless, highfalutin proscriptions.

I would be a criminal. Perhaps misguided, perhaps insane, perhaps deluded or perhaps only following orders, I would still be a criminal, a violator, a trespasser and completely out of my right.

Oh, but… the objection is raised, as was done by that listserv contributor and fellow human being whose name I have long forgotten, “What if I’m wearing a clown suit when I do this?”

“Oh! A clown suit!” all proclaim, prostrating themselves and genuflecting before the one true God. “Why, if he’s wearing a clown suit, it must be all right! We know that clowns want only the best things for our children, and of course clowns must go through rigorous training and certification in order to be granted, by the powers that be, that most sacred privilege of wearing the clown suit! Surely, if he’s wearing a clown suit, he is in the right, and they are the evil doers, they are the ones who have transgressed, and, indeed, they must be punished.”

Ridiculous, isn’t it?

Per Bylund, whose writings are far more incisive than mine, describes it thus in an article which goes far beyond the issue of drug prohibition:

What is it with a uniform that makes a vice a virtue? Let me tell you a secret: there is nothing with a uniform that gives you the right to kill, pillage, destroy, and attack. The villain here is not only the person committing the crime – i.e., carrying out the attack – but to a great degree you. You are the problem with this world, for as long as you react not to the crime but what the perpetrator is wearing there is no hope for this world.

But, when you ask yourself, deeply, honestly, in that still place that is the center of your universe, whether or not the clown suit makes any difference, what is your answer?