Also thank Governor Gregoire and legislators for adopting the “Fair Play in Community Sports” bill. http://bit.ly/DGPvc

Seriously this is weird, from my rarefied perspective.

So, there’s this guy who comes around and rapes me twice a week for the past year…

And one day I notice he hasn’t been around for a few months.

What do I do now? Send him a fucking fruit basket?

Originally posted by me as a reply to a discussion on Bureaucrash Social.

Why?

Dunno. It occurred to me. I used to have this “friend”, see, who in between loading the three-foot “weed eater” for the next bong hit would occasionally belt this one out. An odd thing, perhaps, for a Jew to sing.

And no, we really didn’t have any good friends who just happened to be black… or communists… or Christians.

Let’s hope he got it from someplace… someplace pure. Someplace like The Doctor Demento Show, for instance.

Anyone know who wrote this piece of Ameri-horror-cana?

Speaking of random thoughts which crawl out of the depths of one’s mind late at night… anyone remember the scene from Airplane! where the well-dressed, polite boy comes to sit next to the well-dressed, aristocratic little girl on the plane, bearing a tray of beverages?

“Coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

“Milk?”

“No, thank you. I take it black. Like my men.”

Yeah, I thought you did.

Stand up and be counted, show the world that you’re a man
Stand up and be counted, go with the Ku Klux Klan

We are a sacred brotherhood, who love our country true
We always can be counted on, when there’s a job to do
We serve our homeland day and night, to keep it always free
And proudly wear our robes of white, protecting liberty.

Stand up and be counted, show the world that you’re a man
Stand up and be counted, go with the Ku Klux Klan

[trumpet solo]

The Bible, cross, Old Glory, too, our symbols of a man
A sword and water, robe and hood portray our noble Klan
In search of peace and liberty, we pledge our hearts and hands
We must defeat the communists to save our Christian land

Stand up and be counted, show the world that you’re a man
Stand up and be counted, go with the Ku Klux Klan

Stand up and be counted, show the world that you’re a man
Stand up and be counted, go with the Ku Klux Klan

On 18 December 1865, the US Congress passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, by which it is claimed that “[n]either slavery nor involuntary servitude” shall never again exist in the country.

At that time, this appeared to many as a very radical step. It even led to debates on whether slaveowners would be harmed. Today it is something officially unimaginable, though a trade in “white meat” does exist. Slavery would never have been abolished had its opponents not set such a goal and had they not cried out for it decades previously. Its abolition came at practically a single blow, not gradually or compensationally.

But with the extinction of the direct form of servitude there came and grew its other form. There appeared that plundering band called known as the state, which, just as the slaveowners did, usurped without consent and under threat of violence not only a portion of the labor and life of their thralls, but their property as well.

Lower taxes, broader privatization of “public” services, a less-extravagant state budget, less state intervention? No. No taxes, complete privatization, and neither the state nor “its expenditures and investments”. That is the path to freedom.

Just sent to every relevant Slovak media outlet, a few others besides, plus a bunch of personal contacts. Anyone got a big list of editorial contacts for American media?

PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Bratislava resident renounces American citizenship, becomes stateless person

BRATISLAVA, SLOVAKIA, 10 December 2008 – Citing US war, human rights abuses, rapacious state capitalism and hypocrisy, Bratislava resident Michael Gogulski announced today that he has renounced his United States citizenship and become a stateless person as a means of “political divorce”.

Gogulski, 36, renounced his citizenship on 8 December 2008 at the American embassy in Bratislava, surrendering his US passport and culminating a two-week process and months of personal preparations. He currently awaits a Certificate of Loss of Nationality of the United States confirming his loss of American citizenship. As Gogulski has no other citizenship, he is now a stateless person.

“I was disgusted to be associated through citizenship with the most dangerous gang of criminals in the world, the United States government. Renouncing my citizenship is a means of achieving a political divorce with that vile institution,” Gogulski said. “American politicians extol their state in terms of liberty, human rights, free markets and the rule of law. Examination of the country’s history and present actions reveals nothing but lies and hypocrisy. The genocide of Native Americans, slavery, nuclear slaughter at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, support for brutal dictators, the torture of innocents at places like Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the massive robberies for the benefit of big business in the name of ‘rescuing’ the economy, the world’s biggest prison population, the growth of a domestic police state and the brutal wars of oppression underway in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia paint a rather different picture. America, via its government agents, is truly exceptional – exceptionally evil,” he stated.

Gogulski says that when he receives the Certificate of Loss of Nationality he will apply to the Slovak Interior Ministry for a Travel Document – similar to a passport – under the 1954 Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons, which Slovakia signed in 2000. He says that he has no plans to leave Bratislava until then, and that he recognizes that his life without citizenship will be more difficult, especially with respect to travel. But, “if the Schengen Zone is to be my cage,” Gogulski states, “I think it’s large enough for me. There’s enough to explore within Europe to last a lifetime.”

On his personal blog, Gogulski indicates that he works as a freelance translator and editor. He also writes about anarchism and supports the revolutionary theory called agorism, which posits that free-market service providers will compete with and eventually supplant states, giving rise to a voluntary society. “Governments pride themselves on notions of ‘equality’ and ‘rule of law’, but fail to apply the same standards to themselves that their subjects must endure,” he says, explaining his political philosophy. “The foundation of state power, taxation, is robbery. That the robbers have fancy uniforms, impressive titles and the sanction of law does not in the slightest way change the basic formula for extortion: pay us, or we will kill you.”

Michael Gogulski’s blog can be found at www.nostate.com.

###

TLAČOVÁ SPRÁVA

NA OKAMŽITÉ VYDANIE

Obyvateľ bratislavy sa zrieka amerického občianstva a stáva sa osobou bez štátnej príslušnosti

BRATISLAVA, SLOVENSKO, 10. decembra 2008 – s uvedením dôvodov vojny vedenej USA, zneužívania ľudských práv, nenásytného štátneho kapitalizmu a pokrytectva dnes obyvateľ Bratislavy, Michael Gogulski, oznámil, že sa vzdal svojho občianstva Spojených štátov a stal sa osobou bez štátnej príslušnosti ako prostriedok „politického rozvodu“.

36-ročný Gogulski sa vzdal svojho občianstva 8. decembra 2008 na americkom veľvyslanectve v Bratislave, odovzdal svoj pas Spojených štátov amerických a zavŕšil tak dvojtýždňový proces a mesiace osobných príprav. Momentálne očakáva Osvedčenie o strate občianskej príslušnosti Spojených štátov, ktoré bude potvrdzovať jeho stratu amerického občianstva. Keďže Gogulski nemá inú štátnu príslušnosť, je teraz osobou bez štátnej príslušnosti.

„Bol som znechutený tým, že mám byť spájaný občianstvom s najnebezpečnejšou bandou zločincov na svete, vládou Spojených štátov. Vzdanie sa občianstva je pre mňa prostriedkom dosahujúcim politický rozvod s touto podlou inštitúciou,“ povedal Gogulski. „Americkí politici ospevujú svoj štát, pokiaľ ide o slobodu, ľudské práva, slobodné trhy a právny štát. Preskúmanie histórie krajiny a súčasných krokov odhaľuje len klamstvá a pokrytectvo. Genocída amerických domorodcov, otrokárstvo, jadrový masaker v Hirošime a Nagasaki, podpora brutálnych diktátorov, mučenie nevinných na miestach, ako sú Guantanámo a Abú Ghraib, obrovské krádeže v prospech podnikania vo veľkom v mene „zachraňovania“ hospodárstva, najviac väznených občanov na svete, rast domáceho policajného štátu a brutálne vojny útlaku, ktoré sa dejú v Iraku, Afganistane a Somálsku, vykresľujú skôr odlišný obraz. Amerika je cez svojich vládnych zástupcov skutočne výnimočná – výnimočne zlá,“ uviedol.

Gogulski hovorí, že keď získa Osvedčenie o strate štátnej príslušnosti, požiada slovenské Ministerstvo vnútra o cestovný dokument – podobný pasu – podľa Dohovoru o štatúte osôb bez štátnej príslušnosti z roku 1954, ktorý Slovensko podpísalo v roku 2000. Hovorí, že dovtedy nemá v pláne opustiť Bratislavu a že uznáva, že jeho život bez občianstva bude zložitejší, najmä pokiaľ ide o cestovanie. Ale „ak sa má Schengenský priestor stať mojou klietkou,“ hovorí Gogulski, „myslím si, že je pre mňa dosť veľká. V rámci Európy má človek čo objavovať počas celého života.“

Na svojom osobnom blogu Gogulski uvádza, že pracuje ako prekladateľ a redaktor na živnosť. Zároveň píše o anarchizme a podporuje revolučnú teóriu nazývanú agorizmus, ktorá predpokladá, že poskytovatelia služieb na voľnom trhu budú súťažiť so štátmi a nakoniec ich nahradia, vďaka čomu vznikne slobodná spoločnosť. „Vlády sa chvália pojmami, ako je „rovnosť“ a „právny štát“, ale sami zlyhávajú v uplatňovaní rovnakých noriem, ktoré ostatní musia strpieť,“ objasňuje svoju politickú filozofiu. „Základ sily štátu – zdaňovanie, je krádež. To, že títo zlodeji majú elegantné rovnošaty, pôsobivé tituly a odobrenie zákonom, ani v najmenšom nemení základný vzorec vydierania: zaplať nám, lebo inak ťa zabijeme.“

Blog Michaela Gogulskeho nájdete na adrese www.nostate.com.

###

Smerom k poddanstvu

Explanation: The photo is of Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, leader of the ruling SMER party. The word smer in Slovak means “direction” or “way”, and thus the name the party gives itself is an attempt cast itself as “the way”. One of the party’s slogans is “Smerom k ľuďom“, which means, roughly, “By means of SMER, unto the people”. What is being given “unto the people” is not specified. Poddanstvo means “serfdom” in the medieval sense, and also carries connotations like “bondage”, “servitude” and “slavery” — at least according to the dictionary definition.

One does wonder, a bit, as to in just what direction Mr. Fico is looking in the photograph.

Enjoy.

The author (YouTube page) writes at his blog:

You are being used. You are being exploited. You are a slave, and you are kept only comfortable enough so that you will not notice. You are regularly misled, propagandized, and all out lied to.

You, as a human being, are nothing but a faceless resource to the moneyed power structure that controls modern banking and politics. You are a drone, a pack-horse, a conspicuous consumer.

When you no longer can labour, when there is nothing left to strip mine, like Boxer in Animal Farm you are left to simply die in the fields.

I think you deserve better. I think we all deserve better. And I’m here to make sure that we get it.

This analysis resonates with me. I don’t agree with everything in the video, but it has plenty of merit nonetheless.

Hat tip to Talley.

Hey there,

You know, it’s funny, after reading your recent interview, I feel as though essentially you and I believe in the same (or a very similar) ideal world. I never realized that might even remotely be the case. I guess that could be because we rarely if ever engaged in political debate with one another, assuming the other felt very differently.

One day not too long ago, I was describing my ideal ‘political’ system and basically it hearkens back to my teenage fascination with communes and dropping out of society at large in order to live with like minded people who create their own guidelines to live by – growing their own food, caring for one another’s children – communally. Ideally, small groups/communities would ‘govern’ themselves: everyone could sit in a room together and have a vote and the group would be small enough that each voice would be heard. I think that’s what government was meant to be (or at least should have been), but it got all fucked up when it grew – it wasn’t scalable.

Although, you’d likely leave out all the warm fuzzy hippy-sounding bits of what I’ve said, I think we seem to essentially have very compatible ideal visions of the future.

And I respond:

Okay, I’m stunned by the synchronicity here, because literally at the same time you were likely writing this I was playing a video game and thinking to myself that it’s a pity that we find ourselves so divided on political questions, and that if you understood more of the background – or if I were better at explaining it to you – that we would find we have much more common ground than we thought.

Agorism is a revolutionary strategy for achieving a voluntary society. Intellectually, it grew out of the anarcho-capitalism of Murray Rothbard. The principles of that philosophy are not entirely compatible with more “socialist” forms of anarchism, in that anarcho-capitalism rejects almost everything which flows from economics based on the Labor Theory of Value in favor of Austrian subjective value theory (marginal utility), rejects the notion that hard titles to land are immoral or indefensible, and rejects the propositions found in many schools of thought which say that profit, rent and interest are either immoral or would disappear in a stateless society.

What is interesting is that the ancap model, I believe, is capable of subsuming all of the other models within itself, and serving as an overall framework under which any given philosophy of property and economics could be freely tried out within areas inhabited by people who wanted to adopt their own, so long as agencies for resolutions of disputes between communities with different philosophies could be agreed upon.

Within the anarcho-capitalist panarchy communities could choose to organize themselves along whatever lines they wanted to. Communes? Fine, have at it. Rugged individualists? Great, just don’t come stuffing it at the rest of us. Worker self-management and a society of independent contractors? That’s permissible. Syndicalist communes where the workers control the means of production? Fine, so long as they acquire their property legitimately. Corporations? Absolutely, but good luck maintaining anything even remotely like the predatory corporate forms of today or the past without State-backed limited liability, corporate personhood and the massive subsidies and externalizations of costs granted to big businesses by States today. Any or all of these could exist side by side – and of course, there’s a lot more to it than just a general permissiveness.

Overall, and perhaps of great interest for you, who I believe approaches questions of what ought to be in society more from a “harmonious human systems” approach than from an egoist individual rights approach, is that a society of this nature would naturally entail the disappearance of the corrupt, predatory, coercive and downright evil practices used by today’s ruling classes and wealthy elites via today’s States against poor and repressed people all over the world and throughout the horrible history of humanity. Revolutionaries everywhere want to overthrow their ruling class, but usually seek to replace it with their own familiar personal despotism, and let there be blood. The Agorist seeks to subject the bloated, loathsome carcasses of State and ruling class to the merciless creative destruction of the marketplace.

Agorism implies a great many things which challenge the ruling classes and what is called today by many “the Capitalist system” (though it ought better be called something like “the neo-Mercantilist system”) at fundamental levels. People who make money smuggling human beings from one country to another ought to be celebrated as heroes provided they are not selling people into slavery and they take necessary safety precautions. The real crime is that since the activity of smuggling people across artificial State borders is illegal, there’s no effective way to drive evil or careless operators out of the business. If the evil ones could be identified and excluded, the remainder are the Agorist’s allies if they are susceptible to an Agorist ideological conversion.

Likewise the drug dealers of today. Not the top layers of the extremely violent organized crime rings and their State accomplices, but the far more numerous minor dealers who form perhaps the one or two levels of connection to the ultimate drug user and who are rarely involved in violence or fraud. The same with the pimps and the whores and the bookies and the loan sharks and all the tradesmen willing to do a household repair job “under the table” and all those unlicensed day care centers operating in suburban homes and all other people engaged in nonviolent activities which are prohibited by States or done in ways States do not permit. All of these people are allies against the State if they accept the basic contract: Don’t tread on me, honor your agreements, and, if we fall into dispute, pledge to find a non-State solution. The Agorist is anyone who, at least part of the time, trades in markets the State prohibits, or does so in manners which aren’t permitted by States – such as without complying with ridiculous regulations that serve to create barriers to market entry for the benefit of existing participants and/or wealthier entrants, or without reporting the activity for taxation.

I’m attaching two fairly brief and highly influential works [ed: attached were Konkin's New Libertarian Manifesto and Agorist Class Theory]. Keep in mind that Agorism is a theory of revolution. Though it grew out of anarcho-capitalism and is grounded in that theory, it is quite distinct. You will not find a description of Utopia here (though I can tell you where to find plenty). In my mind, the Agorist praxis can be employed by a social revolution toward pretty much any Utopian vision, so long as the State and all of the privilege connected to it is eliminated along the way.

Enjoy

Let’s picture the citizen/state relationship, for the sake of discussion, as a marriage. You fell in love when you were young and impressionable and decided to get hitched. For the sake of linguistic convenience, let’s have you be the wife, the citizen, and the state the husband.

After your honeymoon and as time goes by in your marriage, you notice some things are decidedly wrong about your husband. For one thing, his history is really quite different from how he described it before you got married. The more you learn about what your husband did in the past, the more doubt you have in the notion that he is really a good person. How could the one you love have done such awful things? How could he wrap his past crimes up in fancy language and present them as virtues? You try to ask your husband about these things, and if you are not met with stony silence or cold dismissal all you get is a repeat of the same slide show and heavily edited home movies you’ve seen before, to the strains of triumphant music and accompanied by words that seek either to bury that terrible history or to change the meanings of the very words themselves. Sometimes you get slapped hard across the face. You have real doubts.

One day your husband comes home after a late night out with blood on his clothes. “What happened!” you cry. “Oh, I was handing out candy to the children in the neighborhood. Then I killed a man.” Why? Because the other man believed the wrong things, spoke out of line, failed to obey, resisted your husband’s commands and was trying to fight off your husband. “What was the fight about?” you ask. Turns out that your husband was trying to rob that other man, or force him into slavery, and he wasn’t too happy about it. It’s all okay for the moment — surely your husband wouldn’t do such things to you or your family now, would he? But still, the doubt grows: do I really want to be married to a robber and a murderer?

One day you realize that your husband in fact comes home every day fresh from killing and/or robbing someone. There always seem to be good reasons for the torture and the killings — or so dear hubby says — but there’s this nagging voice inside you that asks: how is he different from any other psychopathic mass murderer? Am I next?

You look back more deeply into your husband’s history and find and entire lifetime drenched in blood and clouded by lies. The horror runs so deep and is so pervasive! Sure, your husband may have performed a million good or neutral acts in his past, but there are thousands of incidents of such unrestrained barbarity that there never possibly could have been good intent behind them. You see a pattern.

And you wake up one morning — alone in your bed, as your restless husband never sleeps — and you realize you’ve been tricked. You recall, all at once, the times your husband has beat you, has tormented you about your own nature, has slandered you to the neighbors and has treated you as worthless. You note that he does no work himself, but regularly steals half of your paycheck before you have a chance to enjoy any of it. You see his bloody, murderous present in the context of his bloody, murderous history, and you wonder just what sort of monster you married. No matter: he is certainly not the man you imagined, nor the man he claims to be.

"I love you" by nubuck @ sxc.hu

You try to reform your husband, but he is recalcitrant; in fact, the beatings become even more severe when you do so. You try to enlist the help of neighbors and friends, but they all rebuff you, saying that your husband can’t possibly be an evil psychopath — after all, look at the millions of good things he’s done! You find few if any people that can see through the deception. You realize that your husband is the very embodiment of evil, and that you have been duped into believing him virtuous, duped into the marriage and lied to every day and through every one of his acts. You realize that your love was misplaced, as it was based on lies.

Clearly, it’s time for a divorce.

It is a sad fact of human existence that there are tendencies in our psychology where people who are victimized become bonded to and emotionally dependent on those who prey upon them. Battered person syndrome is one such, and Stockholm syndrome is another. I have known many people, largely women, who have gotten trapped in abusive relationships with the most despicable creatures. Worse than seeing their bruises or wounds, worse than crying with them, worse than knowing the agony of their pain is hearing them justify why they really ought to stay with the person closest to them and who causes them the greatest harm — for the children, for the house, for the money, to avoid looking like a failure in marriage, because what will the neighbors think, because a marriage is a gift from “God”, because they think themselves worthless, because maybe “this time” it will all work out for the best, etc. Trying to talk these poor souls out of such situations, especially when you care for them personally, is most often an exercise in bitter disappointment as you watch them again and again return for more and more abuse.

The one thing they really must do in order to save themselves is to sever the abusive relationship immediately: pack your things, leave the house, start a new life, get a divorce, never look back.

I’ve done the first few of those things, now it’s time for the next step. It is my intent to divorce the criminal enterprise which calls itself “The United States of America”. I will not remain bonded to evil voluntarily through the exercise of citizenship.

YES, I am anti-American.

But let’s clarify a few things. I don’t think that the words “I” or “am” or the prefix “anti-” need any clarification. What does need to be cleared up is what is meant by the word “American”.

“American” means many different things. Let’s take them in turn.

• “America” the country — This, ultimately, is a set of lines drawn on a map, a geographical segment of the world. Do I oppose drawing lines on maps? Hardly. Marking roads, towns and rivers is useful. Even marking places where one might be subject to arbitrary violence is useful. But am I “anti-” the particular lines drawn to separate “America” from “the rest of the world”? YES. And I’m against all the other national and sub-national lines as well.

• “America” the land — Is it possible to hate a land? Perhaps, but I don’t. Mind you, there are plenty of places within those artificial map lines that I’d never recommend anyone to go, but there is nothing wrong with the land itself, the place, the landscape or its features. Do I hate the Grand Canyon, the central plains, the Adirondacks, or the Jersey shore? Not in the slightest. There are some southeastern swamp areas I wouldn’t recommend, but that doesn’t mean I hate those places any more than I could hate the moon.

• “America” the people — First of all, I don’t know these people. Sweeping generalizations about “a people” are often wrong and sometimes used to make the most horrifying collective judgements. As with any set, there are some people within the “American” boundaries who are good and some who are evil, some who are thoughtful and some who are mindless, some who are kind and some who are cruel. I can’t hate the “American people” any more than I can hate the “Congolese people” or the “Finnish people”. Mashing large numbers of human beings into collectives in order to pass judgement on them is ultimately a futile exercise.

• “America” the ideal — Ah, now we’re getting closer. America has a great mythology attached to it. A nation of migrants fleeing downtrodden lives in the old world settle a new, vast and fertile territory, bringing with them the finest ideals of liberal society and a vision of a bright tomorrow, and eventually giving birth to a society of freedom and prosperity. Gosh that sounds great, until you look at the history. The ideal is beautiful. Waving the ideal around today as some sort of excuse for what America has become is rank hypocrisy. And I really hate hypocrisy.

• “America” the historical national entity — From the extermination of native tribes through slavery, the “Civil” War, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, all the other bogus wars of the 20th century, the War on (Some) Drugs, Jim Crow apartheid, the US-led global abandonment of sound money in favor of fiat currency and predatory central bankers, McCarthyism, New Deal socialism and the entire narrative of American exceptionalism up to the present three wars (Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia) and the endless bullying of the American state on the world stage, I hate America.

• “America” the system of government — “Democracy, hooray!” This one’s easy; I hate all existing systems of government.

• “America” the state, comprised of people currently running around in clown suits, their masters in the political class, the plutocrats who own the political class, plus the bureaucracy and the shareholders, employees and managers of all those corporations that exist for little reason other than to serve the aforementioned filth — Well, let’s just say I won’t miss you when you’re gone.

So, am I anti-American? Yes and no. On balance, and for the sake of argument, let’s say yes, yes I am anti-American. And I believe my heart — and my hate — are in the right place.