Make love like you were 16 again!

And the message then proceeded to offer me Viagra, Cialis, and all that stuff.

16 again? Gah, let’s hope not. Some things truly do get better with age.

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.

YES WE CAN!

And we can do it.

Just do it!

Do it now. Do it because your country wants you to. Do it for… do it for love! Do it for… do it for God and CHILDREN and justice in your neighborhood. Do IT for consistency! Do it for philosophy. DO IT FOR AMERICA!

We can do it! Together! We can do it for fun. We can do it for PEACE. We can smash the state (and avoid collapse, mass starvation, conquest by hostile aliens, etc.*) before next Tuesday! We can create a voluntary society based on love and compassion. And we can do it for MASSIVE PROFITS!

Would you like an action plan to improve your life? Do you want to guarantee your retirement and your children’s future? Do you want to know just how EASY all this is? How you can make it all happen by accident? And all for the very special introductory price of $19.95?***

INSTANT SUCCESS — or triple your money back!

I would like to invite you, right now, to get out of your chair. Please: put down your laptop. Please leave your iPhone on the table. Please turn the volume WAY UP LOUD! Please start the music. And, please, get into your body — and go out of your mind!

Turn on, tune in, drop in. Drop in any time!

Shut up and dance!** Get off your ass and get on the path. The path to TRIUMPHANT FALLIBLE FRENZY!**** Arise!

ACCESS ALL AREAS.

DJ Misjah & DJ Tim, “Access”, X-Trax, 1994

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o4joooH5tg

Whatever you do, DO NOT DOWNLOAD AND WATCH THIS FILM (isohunt.com, search for “arise subgenius”). You have been warned.

Collaborators will be shot. Prosecutors will be transgressicuted. Deviation and counter-revolutionary talk will not be tolerated.

That is all. Return to your assigned work allocations and dwelling units.

* By reading this sentence you agree that neither nostate.com, Rabbi Guano Infusion PhD. (deceased) nor Michael Jude Gogulski shall be held responsible for damages caused by reading this sentence.

** Seeing this footnote indicates your legally binding consent that should you lack the appropriate number of functioning limbs necessary for dance in your jurisdiction that neither nostate.com, Rabbi Guano Infusion PhD. (deceased), nor Michael Jude Gogulski shall be liable for loss of life, liberty, productive capacity or future potential profit brought about by seeing this footnote or other means.

*** If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

**** Do not over-meditate.

The short answer, of course, is an emphatic “no”, unless you’re going to adopt the patently insane position that we’re all criminals for doing so, as Francois Tremblay does in saying “We are all war criminals” — a position which I will contest to my last breath.

In exploring the question, FSK links to my first “Educating for anarchism” post, and elaborates on a theme that I’ve heard before — and rejected.

This post was originally going to be a reply comment to FSK’s post, but since it grew so long and was so long ago, I thought it deserved a post of its own, here:

FSK writes:

I noticed this post by Mike Gogulski, where he refused a job for the State. The fallacy in his reasoning is that *ANY* on-the-books work supports the State via taxes. Suppose I have two choices. I can do $10k of work directly for the State, or $10k of work in a wage slave job. Suppose my income taxation rate is 50%. In the $10k wage slave job, I contribute $5k directly to the State. Similarly, if I accept the $10k job working directly for the State, I pay $5k directly back to the State in taxes. (In some countries, income on State jobs is tax-exempt. I’m ignoring that possibility here.) If I don’t accept the $10k State job, someone else will take it, still getting paid $10k but perhaps doing marginally worse work. However, by refusing the direct State job, I am forced to accept a marginally lower salary. Overall, the net damage to the State by my refusal to work directly for the State is negligible.

“I refuse to work directly for the State” is an attitude that only works when vastly more than 50% of the population has been convinced “The State is evil!” By that time, the State has already lost anyway. Once a vast majority of people have been convinced “The State is evil!”, then it’s already all over for the State. In the meantime, if you refuse to work directly for the State, then someone almost as qualified will gladly take your place.

Hello, FSK! I’m finally circling back on this post, which has been open in a browser tab since, er… last year I’m just gonna reply to the bits that mentioned me.

The fallacy in his [i.e.: my] reasoning is that *ANY* on-the-books work supports the State via taxes.

This is true. However, you overlook something here, though you do kindof address it later — though I have a quibble with that as well.

If I earn $10k making sex toys (something which, as far as I know, no state anywhere actually produces, nor desires), and surrender $5k of my earnings to the state, the state receives a net benefit of $5k, minus collection and enforcement costs, which may be held to be negligible.

If I earn $10k making ICBMs for the state and surrender the same $5k in income tax, the state receives a net benefit of $5k cash PLUS whatever benefit the state assigns to the missiles.

By choosing to make sex toys which do not benefit the state in any way (other than by the taxes imposed upon them) rather than missiles which benefit the state directly, I at least keep my hands off of a transaction which would create greater evil.

I put it to you that by refusing to do the state’s work I am creating a benefit for freedom. Certainly, in the inverse case, you would not praise me for finding a quasi-agorist method of doing work to help provide the state with ICBMs. The object of the work matters as well as the economics.

That was quibble #1. Quibble #2 is this:

[I]f you refuse to work directly for the State, then someone almost as qualified will gladly take your place.

Arguably true, given today’s circumstances. However, in my particular case, there are only a very small number of professional translators who both speak English as their native language and who have a high level of competency in translating the Slovak language. Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that I have a real niche market, and that there are only ten other people in the world, including me, who can deliver the same Slovak-to-English translation job at the same level of quality as I can. My refusal takes me out of the pool of available labor, and thus the state has only 90% of the potential labor force available to it. At any given time, this tends to make getting the state’s work in translating Slovak to English more difficult, as there are fewer resources which can be applied to the task. It might also have the side effect of driving up prices among those other nine translators who are willing to work for the state. At some point, when prices are driven up high enough, the customer stops buying.

However, there is yet another benefit. When I tell one of my agency clients that I do not do any work for directly governments, that I do not do any work on non-governmental company/charity projects that are funded by governments, that I do not do any work for organizations that derive more than X% of their revenues from taxes, that I do not do any work for organizations which engage in certain objectionable statist activities, I am making a contribution toward anarchist education. I have alerted one or more people at that translation agency that there is a moral objection which might be raised against taking certain kinds of work.

In many cases, that message may well fall on deaf ears today. Maybe only 1 in 100 translation agency employees might have their own beliefs modified by coming into contact with mine in this way. But it will be remembered, and perhaps in the future those same people might think over the issue again, or tell a story to a colleague or a friend: “Hey, there’s this Mike guy who says ‘All taxes are theft!’ and ‘I read FSK!’ and won’t take certain kinds of jobs from us, isn’t that funny?” And it can spread from there.

And now, quibble #3:

There is a moral argument for refusing to take jobs and income from the state. All of the state’s money and property is stolen. When we freely accept known stolen property in trade, if we do not become accessories to theft ourselves we at least become facilitators of that theft, in that if we refused to accept unearned wealth in trade and convinced those around us to do the same, then the criminals stealing it would no longer have an incentive to do so, as they could never spend it. I, personally, do not want to be paid out of money stolen from other people through taxation. Recognizing that eliminating this entirely under the statist system may be impossible, I still hold it as my own duty to minimize the occurrence thereof and to encourage others to do the same.

A drop, perhaps, in an ocean of statist shit. But it’s my drop, damnit, and I’d like you to see all sides and all possibilities.

Dixie Flatline of the No Treason blog adds additional commentary, to which FSK replies in An Example of Pointless State Resistance. Your mileage, as always, may vary.

And that’s Web 3.0. Papers, please.

From The Telegraph:

One in five teens engage in ‘tech sex’

One in five teenagers say they have sent naked or partially-clothed images of themselves to someone by email or mobile phone, according to a poll in America.

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!