This (re)awakening created a huge excitement in me, which needed to be shared immediately. So, I started calling close friends and having long telephone conversations. Some of those friends are in the US and the UK. I really wasn’t paying attention to where I was calling or for how long.

So, the downside fruit: my mobile phone bill for the last billing period is for €528.86. Argh!

Can ya help me out with that? Donations welcome via the ChipIn widget or via “support nostate.com” above. The US$699 number represents the amount over and above my usual ~€30 monthly bill.

The full bill is available in PDF form here, in Slovak: T-Mobile bill of doom

And when you’re done responding to my own rather trivial blegging, Anarcho-Professor Roderick Long is in need of serious mutual aid, due to the tax man robbing him.

It is a necklace with a pendant in the shape of Kurdistan, bearing the Kurdish national emblem and colors.

Free Kurdistan!

Stateless anarchist Gogulski posting a nationalist statist symbol! Way off, you say?

Free Kurdistan is an idea. It is a dream shared by millions inside and outside the territory. First and foremost, it is an idea about community, identity and self-determination. A dream and an idea to celebrate.

Secondarily, Free Kurdistan is an idea that must touch the ground someplace. Within the generally-accepted context of things on this planet, that means that Free Kurdistan should become a state.

‘Round these parts, we hold that states are illegitimate, unnecessary and undesirable. However, I support the idea of Kurdistan becoming a state, both because that’s what a lot of Kurds want for themselves, and because I hold that so long as we are to have states, we should have as many as possible, and that they should be as small as possible.

Free Kurdistan!

I submit for your consideration, as compassionate beings and as my captive audience and niche market, the idea that the Agorist slogan of “Agora! Anarchy! Action!” has it precisely backwards.

For billions, including YOU, right where you are standing now, action precedes agora, and cares precisely fuck-all about anarchy. It just does it. And it just does it quickly and efficiently, most of the time, almost by accident.

Just do it.

I strongly suggest that you consider the proposition that we might one day come to agree that the opportunity which exists in the broader libertarian context which is typically labeled among left-libertarians as a “problem” actually is a problem of emphasis, it is a problem of language, and it is a problem by which we fail to communicate with the stinky, filthy earth creatures WE NEED MOST to Arise!, take to the streets, go out of their tiny little cages and tiny little minds in the atomized industrial cities in order to enter the homes and lives and even bodies of their nearby conspecifics, and actualize an actual change in our actual circumstances such that our actual communication problems actually all disappear. Right now, or at least some time prior to next Tuesday. Action!

Such an event, such a permanent revolution, will not occur via mechanisms such as educating youngsters about the ideals of dead philosophers. It will not come about by virtue of those ideals being correct or consistent. It will not come about by means of setting an institutional agenda to make sure that we have the right message and are transmitting it via the right channels at the right times to the right recipients and with the right representatives. It will JUST HAPPEN.

Get out of the way!

As libertarians and Libertarians, it seems we have great faith in markets as a generally applicable rule. Meanwhile, we have almost no faith at all in people just doing it by themselves, in their own minds, in their own bodies, in their own families, in their own communities, in their own world, in their own universe and multiverses. And meanwhile, they are just doing it. They trade actively and passionately in close approximations of truly free markets already, even though the criminal, unjustifiably immoraly and inconsistent State continues to exist, in your mind and theirs. And they’ve never read or perhaps even heard about Mises, Popper, Rothbard, SEK3 and the rest of the suppressed pantheon.

I believe and feel and know that the fact is that at the Liberty Camp this week, I personally created more value for me than anyone else. And I did it by largely ignoring the fucking program and producing merry chaos along the way as an unnecessary, controllable side-effect that ought to be well-managed if such things are to go smoothly. I either inspired, independently conceived or incubated something like five new truly free-market businesses. I also successfully taught the Language of Liberty to one of my conspecifics who shall remain nameless in the interest of Agorist Opsec, inspired another and became almost instant friends with several more — none of whom were part of the Camp program! And this reality means that I am starting to live free RIGHT NOW while I must recall the necessity of being compassionate toward those around me who aren’t doing it terribly much, but merely sitting around talking about doing it instead.

And then I was sort-of purged from The Management, at one level, as a counter-revolutionary, though we did part ways with the consensus that we still love and support each other anyway. And the purge occurred around my own reaction to a response from a group of passionate, committed, fully consistent libertarians who reacted WRONGLY to me coming into the room and waiting my turn and asking a question of the general form: Is it okay for me to ask a question now?

The responses were things like: “What kind of question!” and “No!” and “That’s not on the agenda!” — even before they knew what the question was! (And by the way, no, I’m not going to tell you what the question was.)

And I found that my feelings were hurt, so I left the room and decided that I was going home. And nobody really expressed a great deal of concern, in my view, toward the idea that that fact itself had any particular value or importance for actualizing what we’re all trying to accomplish.

Discuss. With passion, compassion, and revolutionary fervor for the MASSIVE CHANGE IN BRAIN CHEMISTRY occurring right where you are sitting now. Or die. Meanwhile, I’m gonna go jerk off.

Yours, et cetera,

Sri Syadasti

PS: A3 is still groovy. Just swap the emphases around and we’re home.

Needs notes, but … meh. No time.

Powerpoint 2003: Download

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 was very stressed and exhausted the first 2 days of Liberty Camp here in Martin, Slovakia, because I was trying to do this and support a number of online projects at the same time and keep up with my email and keep up with my usual copious intake of alcohol, etc.

Then yesterday, my laptop broke.

I didn’t panic. I felt relief. There are a few important things I must do while I’m on the road, the rest is gonna have to slide until I return home, around 8 July. Meanwhile, my energy and my attention are being extremely well employed here, in teaching, learning from and building community with the extraordinary people around me.

So, if your email or other contact goes unanswered for a long while, please know that it’s not because I don’t love you. It’s because I’m busy working to build a better world for you and for me and for all of our conspecifics right this very second.

Peace,

Mike

Answers varied wildly. The exercise, as constructed, was great, because I didn’t know this answer for myself until doing it.

My answer: Compassion. Compassion is my highest value.

Next: What’s your vision for expressing/achieving/maximising that value?

My answer: End all legal privilege. Smash the state.

Next: What is your unique ability to contribute to making that happen? Where is your comparative advantage?

My answer: Crypto/web tech to support the growth of peaceful black and gray markets.

Agora! Compassion! Action!

With a single exception, attendees responded with words evoking free markets, individualism, free association, self-determination, respect for property, the ability to create and retain wealth, no interference in peaceful trade, ideological consistency, and so on.

I then told them that they are all absolutely right. And at the same time absolutely wrong.

I said: Capitalism is an exploitative system of privileges granted to wealthy interests to the detriment of the poor.

And that definition is also right, because it lives in the minds of billions.

Discuss.