Wednesday 24 August 2011

What is it good for?

Sympathy for soldiers should not entail a concomitant endorsement of war. No matter how brave and selfless they may be, no matter how highly you value their individual sacrifice do not allow such reactions to be manipulated into supporting war.
Individual soldiers are as much victims as the other human collateral of state aggression. The entirely natural human reaction of empathy for their suffering should never be impressed into support, endorsement or legitimisation of the evil they are sent into.
The only way to support soldiers as individual people is to be completely opposed to sending them to war in the first place. Furthermore reducing funding for the military, one hopes, may reduce the number of individuals that can be tempted.
The current propaganda paradigm is that heart strings be tugged for 'our brave boys' to build support for aggression, militarism and war. 'Feel sorry for the amputees? Then vote for military funding'.
A shark will only eat your friend if you push him into the sea. If you both keep out of the water you'll keep your limbs. In the same way, a soldier can only become a casualty of war if you send him to war.

Monday 15 August 2011

where does victim disarmament lead?

a whole ton of riot inspired blog posts going round at the mo echoing the same sentiment re ownership of the tools of defence.


this one from mises.org is good but this comment from the facebook posting of the article is downright stunning! thankyou Jan Paulson whoever you are
enjoy...



In 1929 the Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953 approximately 20,000,000 dissidents, unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.

In 1911 Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917 approximately 1,500,000 Armenians, unable to defend them selves were rounded up and exterminated.

In 1928 Germany established gun control. From 1939 to 1945 approximately 30,000,000 Jews, Homosexuals, gypsies, mentally ill and political dissidents, unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.

In 1935 China established gun control. From 1948 to 1952 approximately 20,000,000 political dissidents, unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated

In 1964 Guatemala established gun control. From 1963 to 1981 approximately 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated

In 1970 Uganda established gun control. From 1971 to 1979 approximately 300,000 Christians, unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated

In 1976 Cambodia established gun control. From 1976 to 1977 approximately 1,000,000 educated people, unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.

The total number of victims that have lost their lives to Governments because of gun control in the last century is approximately 56,000,000.

Our Forefathers did not write the 2nd Amendment to protect our Right to hunt fuckin’ ducks. They wrote it in the same spirit that the Magna Charta was written. They wrote it to insure that OUR government would ALWAYS be in fear of the People and that’s the way it should be.

as the mighty doug stanhope says in a diatribe of his against drug prohibition. start your argument in the right place. start from where you want to be. dont compromise for the benefit of the righteous puritans. we should demand the freedom to put as much of whatever we like into our of fucking bodies because we own those bodies and noone else has the right to control us. start the argument from that point. if thats what floats your boat start off by saying that yes you do want to inject crack into your eyeballs. dont give into the bullshit compromise that the libertarian debate has something to do with medicinal marijuana or access to unregulated prescriptions. likewise, as Jan Paulson (unknown facebook user/commenter as far as i know) says above, do the same with gun ownership. dont plead like a pathetic serf for the right to control vermin or hunt for food!? start from where you want to be. you have the right to protect yourself and whats more, noone has the right to prevent you from doing so.

Wednesday 10 August 2011

could anarchy really be any worse?!

the most frequent reaction i get to most of my economic/social/political ideas is 'but there'd be anarchy! rioting on the streets, looting!'

well, well well.

many many people in london have just had the deeply unnerving lesson that the state cannot guarantee their security.

alot of people's faith in the state rests on widely held assumptions about the perfect, total and absolute nature of the state.

what we have seen in the last few days is the truth. actual reality. when i suggest anarchism, total individual freedom, even after i explain that we can have (and have had in history) law, order, security, and police without the state people eventually object 'but without state law and order there would be nothing stopping me from burgling or murdering you in the first place!' to which i answer - there is nothing 'stopping' me doing that to you right now. the state does not act like gravity. it reacts to crime occasionally but it does not 'stop' it. the state is not an absolute force of nature or physics. the mere existence of the state police does not stop crime.

people think it does. they think law and order are perfect absolutes. you may have heard that people's fear of crime is massively over inflated in relation to actual crime levels. i worked in the physical security market encountering the effects and truth of crime on a daily basis for years and i can tell you this is very true. the reason why, on any given day in your entire life, you have not been burgled is not because plod were stood by your front door pushing away the violent hordes. it is simply because there just isnt very much crime. if youre reading this you must realise how woefully ineffectual the police are, surely. do you really believe they have any effect on anything? is the fact that you may never have been burgled purely and directly due to the actions of the police or is it simply because there just is not much burglary going on? is the fact that you may have not been mugged every day because a personal copper precedes you on every stroll you take? no its because there are not very many muggers and there is very little mugging. perception versus reality.

but all the sheep lie asleep in their beds safe in the knowledge that the state keeps them safe. it provides security. not even 'security forces' or 'services' but people truly do believe the state just envelopes them in a cuddly blanket of safeness. we've got a state - nothing bad can happen. this abstract notion of security that just emerges from the equally abstract state like a gas.

what these riots and their rapid and wide spreading shows is that even a tax funded national monopoly police force has near zero effect (not because theyre soft or the wrong person is in number 10 - the french riot police are fucking brutal and they still have immense riots). the state does NOTHING. the reason why we tend to have peaceful stable secure lives is because that just happens. i do not mean that there is no need for security services. on the contrary i imagine that in anarcho-libertopia there will be many more times private security personnel than there are now police - what i mean is that we do not need a state to protect us from a fear that is largely imagined. usually there are not riots. in new york when the police went on strike crime rates dropped. the london riots are almost because of the police. youve got a state and there is still looting!
the state does not exist. it is an abstract concept. i dont walk around knifing people left right and centre because the state is there. i just dont stab people. most people dont. most of the time. not because of the state. they just dont.
the state does nothing.

as we have seen it only takes the slightest little spark to reveal to some people this truth. i mean that it only took a few arabian riots in the news a month ago to create a general background thought. it only took the unopposed looting of a 'contraversial' tesco's in bristol's lefty epicentre a few weeks back to add a uk context to this background feeling. and then it only took a police shooting and the ever present fuel of race relations to kick off whole litany of deeply smouldering problems. the kids in birmingham saw that there just isnt anything stopping criminal behaviour in the events of the first night in london. and so they kicked off on the second night. they saw, in their unthinking miseducated ignorance, a truth that noone else can. blinded by a thousand years of the 'benevolent' state none of the academics, journalists, politicians, intellectuals, chattering classes or even bloggers can see that it is not the state that generates, nurtures or protects peaceful voluntary interaction. these fabian subsidised feral scumbags saw within hours that the state's justification from security is complete bullshit.

in a recent episode of some cop drama that my girlfriend follows there was the story of an evil lunatic who strolled into crowded public places such as railway station concourses and started smashing random people to death with a hammer. the truth is that there is absolutely nothing stopping anyone from doing this at any time.




anyway having laboured that rather abstract notion and probably failed to convey my point ill move on

could anarchy have been any worse than the state in the last few days? imagine...

noone to coercively prevent you from defending yourself and others

noone to coercively prevent you from buying, owning and operating any tool you want....
including tools for the job of defense (gun is a scary word but should be no more scary than hammer, kitchen knife, circular saw, spoon or any other lethal unlicensed tool)

noone to coercively limit where you can live through irrational, unjust and hugely overlooked 'planning' laws. cities are largely creations of the state but i shall leave this for another post. i imagine few people living in hackney really dreamed of ending up there.

noone to coercively extort your property, hard earned by yourself through voluntary transactions, and use it to subsidise socially and individually damaging policies. education, housing etc.

noone to coercively extort your property so that you can no longer provide the basic essentials of life such as physical security (the number of victims ive met that knew they should have spent on gates and fences etc but could not afford it on top of 40-60% taxes) and no im not just a gate installer)

noone with the power to unnaturally mix people up. all the talk about 'these kids must be coming from another area' is bollocks. everyone deceives themselves that they live in a nice part of town when in reality they probably dont and even if they do some socialist fifty years ago probably built a fucking 'estate' bang in the middle of a natural and functioning area (i detest the prevalence of the word 'communities' in the news - the only 'community' i want to be a part of is one that i want to be a part of. not one through accident of geography.) egalitarians may not like it but in a natural human world you would not have sink estates next to peaceful productive homes. every single part of the uk has a fucking council estate. every single village, no matter how fancy the other inhabitants consider themselves to be, has a completely unnatural enclave of alien problem causing, tax-subsidised people bang in the middle. i dont care what colour they are - im extremely egalitarian in my hatred - some of the worst scum i have ever seen are white. why this happened if not by some mad intentional political design of social engineering i have no idea.

so as i have briefly outline above there are several policies inherrent to every social-democratic state, no matter its team colours, that caused or at the very least exacerbated the recent riots. but now let us consider what may have happened in an anarchy in reaction...

remember back at the beginning some black guy was shot by some white guys in fancy outfits? now i am not about to speculate or politically revise what may or may not have happened in that case but my point is that what are the chances that a whole bunch of black people would continue to voluntarily subscribe to the services of a largely white security company with, at best, a history of dubious conduct and laughable public relations?
im not called milliband or livingston so i wont excuse or justify abuse of property rights (everything is based on property rights - from the security of your hubcaps to your arsehole) but i will say that without the possibility of voluntarily changing service providers and given the impossibility of political change (voting, blogging, campaigning, petitions, even revolutions - economic choice theory explains why they never work) these people had no way of changing anything. a pointless, irrational outburst of violence is only really understood from this point of view.
i mean if the trolley attendant at tescos runs over my foot i dont piss around trying to get him sacked - i just go to asda. it never comes to this because the pressure is always there. this pressure is not there with the state which explains why its always so unutterably shit at everything.
if my boyfriend was shot erroneously by my security service or they failed to uphold their contractual obligations regarding the protection of my shop i would immediately take my money elsewhere. if, on the other hand, they were free to force me to pay then they could do whatever the fuck they wanted. its a wonder why they dont really.

as with the egyptian protests (no i am not likening the mindless thuggery in the uk to political protest) the egyptian people realised that absent the state they could provide all the services we are continually told can only be provided by coercively funded uniforms. i posted back then (and ranty kindly reblogged it) that the egyptians were running their own refuse collections, providing their own neighbourhood security and even funding and operating a field hospital and media centre in tahrir square. in london over the last few days some people (notably not the anglo-saxon fuckers with the benefit of hundreds of years of indoctrination against autonomy) have provided their own neighbourhood security in response to the revelation that the state barely exists. what us pathetic statist whities have done is to piss around pretending to clean up ffs. yes, its lots of fun  to jump on the trendy bandwagon of flash mob social networking 'happenings' and get in the paper holding a mop/broom but it is no more than childsplay. as with diy in almost any area these big groups of dumb fuckwits would have been better off doing what they are best at for that period of time and then paying the money they earned to people who are best at cleaning up. diy is the most economically insane thing anyone can do (with the only caveat being that if you actually enjoy it then it can be seen as an entertainment expense).
(i should leave it for another post but anyone who earns more than any given specialist should fucking well leave it to the specialist do do it faster, better and cheaper. from toilet cleaning to dentistry. economies of scale and specialisation of labour apply just as much to your personal life as they do to arguments against socialism.

anyway i ask you would you rather pay your council tax for the 'terrifying' british bobby or pay for an ex squaddy? yeah even if you like that bit of the state that wears camo, you could still do without the police. a pc costs way more than a squaddy but is undoubtedly less able to perform the core function of the provision of security  the pc may have been on more fabian courses but the squaddy will be fitter, have better awareness, reactions and presence.
if, like me, you dont think the state is much good at anything and even if it were that would be as imoral as rape then go for the free market option. you can get 4 security guards for the cost of one pc. each and every street in the country could have a full time private security guard dedicated to patrolling just that area 24/7 for less than it costs to have one guy in an antiquated uniform sat in an office 'covering' a whole town.
or if, for some reason you dont like the rational choice of the market then why not go for the communties option - i would rather pay a super local community contribution or even reciprocate in kind in some kind of militia. i would rather have the amateur Turks, Kurds and Sikhs of london protecting me than the dumb fucks that enjoy dressing up like GI joe.

ill post some links to works explaining voluntary legal systems one of these days. the thing to remember is that once you break the rules you want applied in defence of yourself then your protection agency will no longer be commercially able to uphold those rules on your behalf. in short once you loot a shop noone will prevent the shop owner shooting you.

in short without the state this probably would not have happened.
if it had happened it would have been dealt with effectively, efficiently and expediently.
AND you, as an individual, would have been free to do as you fucking well wanted. there would be no need for 'consensus' no need for tedious media 'examination' no need for more money to be TAKEN from you.
if you wanted to change police you could do instantly. if you wanted to move to the country you could do. if you wanted to spend all your money on guns you could do. if you wanted to build a 20ft wall around your family you could do.


Could anarchy really be any worse than this?

Wednesday 3 August 2011

oi socialists and other fans of violence, coercion and the state

as ever i am desperately trying to avoid 'the news'. i wouldnt even say that i avoid mainstream media now as even bloggers, largely divorced from costly primary sources of information such as interviews etc, are only really capable of a non mainstream view of a news agenda dictated by the mainstream. theirs is merely a differing take on the same mainstream stories. anyways i am caught in a near impossible struggle, desperately attempting to avoid whatever bullshit our ruling class want to promote.

(as a side note, a man whom i had considered to be pretty aware expressed dismay in reaction to my assertion that it is a legal condition of state broadcasting licenses that tv and radio companies run a certain number of news reports in a given period. thus their thought control is more pervasive than it otherwise would be)

all that said i am aware of the current shrieks of the ignorant unthinking entitlement parasites. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/aug/02/charities-fight-survival-funds-slashed
for the real truth on these 'charities visit http://fakecharities.org/
it aint charity if it aint voluntary.

i would not join the guardian bashing of the blogosphere on such a subject normally but just minutes ago i noticed a tiny detail inside my fridge that prompted this rant.

Primula Cheese

yes the fate of individual human liberty and economic freedom may truly rest in this stuff
allow me to explain. see down the bottom there, see the little sign held by what i assume to be a cheese loving mouse, see what it says? profits go to charity. not just some profits as you may have seen on the odd box of cereal or healthy margarine spread, but all profits.

a month or so ago we had the socialist/statists shrieking in objection to the largest ever single act of voluntary philanthropy in human history. yes a single man, just one human individual voluntarily gave $1 billion dollars to the most needy people on the planet and these armchair altruists screamed blue murder from their islington villas. http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=25098
the blogosphere was awash with criticism of the bbc (i spit on their extortion backed propaganda) newsnight smear against real charity. tweets from idiot socialists were reblogged with gay abandon and much scronful merriment as was right and proper.

i clashed with a friend of a friend on facebook (i know - the shame of it) over this issue at the time. my friend initially questioned why newsnight seemed to be taking a negative view of one of the most laudable acts of generosity ever witnessed. his friend made an ignorant comment in reply implying that this voluntary charity was not proper charity and that only the extortionate state form of altruism by proxy whereby do gooders can externalise the costs of their angelic selflessness counts as virtuous. so i cut him to ribbons in a thousand word waste of my time. in that diatribe i referred him to the RNLI. it is an amazing institution that provides a better service than the state could ever dream of even though it is a not for profit, truly voluntary charity. yes it benefits from state enabled charity status etc but it is impossible to exist on this planet without being in some way affected by the state so lets not be impossibly purist about this. my point is that the RNLI is one of the most perfect examples for the anarchist. not only is it voluntary. not only is it non state. not only is it amazing. but it provides exactly the kind of service that anti-anarchists claim would be impossible without the state. 'how wou;d the police work... how would fires be extinguished... what about ambulances?' the tired, myopic, indoctrinated sheep bleet. the RNLI is the perfect answer. no lengthy explanations of how the US medical health cartel is a million miles away from an anarchist freed market in insurance, law and health services. the RNLI is the perfect answer to so many objections.

i recently added bill gates to my mental list of evidence against objections from the statist quo. he made his evil disgusting fortune (sarcasm) from exploiting the planet's need for a universally compatible operating system. the socialists hate him like they hate everyone who has voluntarily improved the lives of millions of people. i do not refer to his later philanthropy but to his initial improvement of many people's lives when he developed and then dispensed his software. to a socialist this will come as a shock but commerce is the greatest engine for human betterment. that gates did so well that he was able to afford to totally focus on directly improving the lives of people is gravy.

but back to the cheese. why is this anarchist so excited by a tube of scandanavian squeezy cheese? because it has just joined bill gates and the RNLI on my mental list of pro freedom ammunition. together they exemplify three different models of voluntary problem solving. resorting to the violence of the state (taxation is extortion which cannot operate without the threat of violence no matter how deeply forgotten that core principle may be) is the most basic, primitive and barbaric 'solution' to the supposedly impossible problems of human organisation that i am constantly battered with as objections. who would build the roads, how would the hospitals work etc if the answer involves the state then it rests entirely on violence. if youre not into the deontological/ethics/philosophic source of individual freedom then i would argue that it is still the source of your heartfelt desire for freedom but you may not be aware of it. you may never be aware but we all know that taxation just aint right. any solution to social problems etc that involves taxation is based on violence and as such should be right out the window even if it supposedly works better than free market economic (even tho we know this to be complete socialist fantasy).

so before we blindly reach for yet another violent solution at least consider these three models of voluntary peaceful solutions. they are not the only way but now with squeezy cheese as my weapon we have one more argument in favour of human freedom.[

model 1 - the RNLI - a straight forward charity as everyone understands it. some people voluntarily fund it and the charity helps everyone that needs their services.

model 2 - bill gates - a voluntary commercial transaction generated by market forces brings benefit to both sides of the deal. one get cash the other some software. if either didnt feel they benefitted they would not voluntarily enter into the deal. in addition to this the party getting monetarily rich may choose to voluntarily gift some of this cash to worthy causes. yet more voluntary good.

model 3 - Primula and the Kavli Trust

http://primula.co.uk/our_company.html
http://primula.co.uk/good_causes.html
http://www.kavlifondet.no/english/

a company setup by the kind of evil capitalist scum that the socialists hate. the very essence of Atlas Shrugged. some bastard exploited poor scandanavian's need for cheese and mercilessly profitted. if only the government was in charge of cheese. anyway after two generations the evil cheese making capitalist family died out and voluntarily setup a charitable trust to run their company entirely for charity. 100% of Primula profits go to the Kavli Trust charities.
if every bleeding heart socialist got off their backside and put as much effort into making money as Bill Gates, Olav Kavli or John Galt then they too could actually pay for all the selfless acts they seem to desire. they should aim to be the biggest most money making capitalists in the world - even if they favour taxation of the rich and statism in general they should be aiming to become rich in order to contribute ever more to this virtuous extortion. but they dont so i question what they claim to desire. if the thought of riches disgusts them even if they were taxed 80% then they could voluntarily give even more as Primula does. they could give 100% of their profits voluntarily to support all the extortionate interest groups they bleet on about.

hurrah for voluntary socialism