what's the Patriot Act all about?

in my last post i gave an example of how the state "exploit[s] fear to increase the power of the state at the expense of personal liberty, and then immediately use[s] that increased power in ways other than how it was originally justified." for another especially vivid example see this graph.

it ain't my system!

Justin laments that "our system" produces people with idiotic ideas. Naturally that's what the system will produce, because the system isn't "ours." It's Theirs. And one thing They do is employ people to spout ideas that are idiotic, in the sense that the ideas fail to accurately describe reality and/or are internally inconsistent, but useful, in the sense that the ideas help to preserve and expand Their power.

hippies and small farmers have unfair advantage say men with guns

People organize to get the food they want. They leave giant corporations out of the process, so those corporations send men with guns to steal that food. This is called "leveling the playing field for producers" by the government. Ha!

Steal from Work Day!

Is today!

the greatest evils: atheism and anarchism

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the outgoing Archbishop of Westminster, says that atheism is the "greatest of evils."

Murphy-O'Connor's comment is an excellent example of the moral depravity of the Catholic Church, depravity which generalizes to most religious institutions and belief systems. Actions, not words or thoughts, are the proper basis for moral judgment. I think people understand that basic principle rather instinctively, and that it takes a huge amount of indoctrination to convince people of anything else, which is quite a feat really. The Catholic Church is a particularly amazing example. An organization that includes large numbers of men who sexually abuse children and that systematically shields these pedophile rapists from the law has managed to position itself as a moral authority, holding as their highest virtue the unquestioning belief in obvious absurdities.

How can that have happened? Like most questions, there are multiple layers of answers.

Many people who recognize the absurdity I'm pointing out attempt to answer the question by just saying the people are stupid, or evil, or both. I understand their frustration but I think they're wrong. My ultimate explanation is that I think that most people are basically good and basically smart, but have a huge blind spot: they conform and obey far too easily. A small number of wicked people take advantage of this, thus consolidating vast amounts of power for themselves, which they use to further reinforce those tendencies towards conformity and obedience. Such people rise to the top of power structures like religions, using the power of those institutions toward their own ends. Look at the history of any religion and you'll see this basic pattern.

There are proximate explanations that I think are also important and worth investigating, meaning the mechanisms by which the indoctrination takes place. The methods of religious indoctrination are obvious, even to religious people when they examine religions or cults besides their own (i.e. outside of their blind spots): start as young as possible, regularly force people to publicly affirm their loyalty and belief in the dogma, discourage critical thinking and exposure to outside thought, etc. How and why some people are able to resist these measures are important questions.

Note that the phenomena of wicked people rising to the top of power structures applies equally well to government and business; politicians are crooked and CEOs are ruthlessly amoral, as everyone understands, albeit with blind spots for "their" guys. And note that the methods of religious indoctrination are also used by the state, most notably through the "education" system, but in numerous other ways. These parallels between religion and state, and the interconnectedness and mutually reinforcing nature of these two morally depraved institutions, are among the reasons why, to me, anarchism and atheism are closely related moral positions.

Man renounces US Citizenship, becomes stateless

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.

###

Congratulations, Michael.

and 64% of prisoners break prison rules!

I gotta agree with the professor:

so 64% of american students cheat. let me say this: that would be bad if education were not compulsory. if i enter into a contest - a sporting event, a game of chess or poker - because i want to play, then to cheat is disgusting. but if you put a gun to my head and make me play, then i have no obligation to abide by the rules; no one should blame me if i do whatever i can get away with. indeed, under such circumstances, cheating would be a nice little act of resistance. i think it's deeply reprehensible when an author plagiarizes, but if writing books were compulsory, plagiarism would be understandable and at worst morally neutral. in other words, compulsory education abrogates anything we might think of as educational ethics: destroys it, vitiates it, suspends it. that's one reason (of many) why compulsory education is an absurd concept, or merely a contradiction in terms. our educational institutions teach that capitulation is the essence of honor, which of course is exactly the center of our moral training of young people. if they come out of that cheaters, you're getting what you deserve, what you're begging for.

an open challenge

FACT: If you pay taxes in the United States, you've made financial contributions to the following:

• Illegal wars of aggression that kill, maim, and displace millions of civilians.
• Illegal abduction and torture of people who have not been charged with any crime.
• Illegal surveillance of domestic communications.

FACT: If you refuse to pay taxes, men with guns will likely force you into a cage for an extended period of time.

THE CHALLENGE: Defend this system.

HINT: Offering "you're free to vote for people who will change these policies, or to run for office yourself" as a defense is the equivalent of saying "these policies are fine with me as long as a slim majority of the voting population supports candidates who say it is ok for the state to lock you in a cage for refusing to fund its illegal and immoral activities."

Kill your TV

If I could pick any imaginary superhero power, I think I'd choose the ability to peacefully destroy every television in the world. Liberate some minds and whatnot.

Seriously y'all, get rid of your fucking TVs. Everything is better.

spending someone else's money

I haven't looked at the numbers recently as to exactly how much the Iraq invasion and occupation has cost, but I'd guess offhand that $10,000 per US taxpayer is the right ballpark. Maybe double that. Now, if the idiot Emperor had gone before the nation and announced that we were going to war and that it was going to cost each of you 5 figures, there's no fucking way he could have pulled it off. Everyone would have gone ape shit, no matter how much we all just wanted to kill some brown people.

Of course he didn't do that because he doesn't have to. They never have to. They can just go to war whenever the fuck they want, and we have to pay for it no matter what we think of it. This is morally wrong. I can think of no possible justification for the government forcibly taking taxes out of every paycheck before I even get it, and using that money to pay for a war that I don't approve of. And it is a betrayal of every tax payer that these fucking clowns can just spend as much as they want and borrow the difference if tax revenues don't cover it. That borrowing is offensive enough when we aren't using it to slaughter families while they sleep and anally rape shackled prisoners who've been locked up without charges for 5 years. But that's exactly what we are using our credit to pay for. The depths of depravity of our government are beyond words.

The only way to opt out of the whole sickening mess without risking imprisonment is to leave the country. I was able to do that, but that's a really fucking hard option to choose, no matter how pissed off you are. And it fucking sucks that it had to come to that.

Of course up here the same logic applies. There is just a significant difference in the amount of damage being done with the income the government steals.

sweet freedom

No more cell phone for me. We have a house line and there's a phone in my lab on campus, and that's it. I won't be instantly reachable all the time, but I expect that somehow life will continue.

see, it works!

Here are some success stories about people more or less trying to do things like I'd suggest.

adspar's how to

Mox:

Adspar I'd like to see a post on what the options are for people who, like yourself, have principled objections to the laws they are subjected to. I know you're moving to Canada (and believe me, I have a lot of respect for someone who's really willing to move rather than support a regime they don't agree with), but I have the suspicion (given your recent anarchist bent) that Canada won't really scratch your political itch (even though it will be much better). What does one do when there is no nation (or region for non-statists) where one can go to that is well-aligned with one's own political ideals?

I'll start off with a few links that do a better job of answering the question than I will:

http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2007/03/stop_traffic.html
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2007/10/break-goddamned-rules.html
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2007/11/you-may-as-well-break-goddamned-rules.html
http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2007/10/sunday-sermon.html
http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2007/10/children-of-revolution-part-one-zillion.html
http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2007/10/grve.html
http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2007/10/yutes.html
http://ajbenjaminjrbeta.blogspot.com/2008/03/stop-traffic.html

Next I'll note that previous posts here have offered answers to the question. I've tagged some of them with "Raging Against the Machine" to make them easier to find. There are probably more posts in the archives that deserve that tag, so I'll add them as I come across them.

I really would recommend reading the material at all of those links, but here are my own thoughts on the matter without any quoting of those other people or my previous entries.

---

The first thing you need to do, after recognizing the set of problems we're confronted with, is to realize two key points. 1) You're going to be confronted with these problems in almost all aspects of life on a daily basis, and 2) that you aren't going to solve these problems. There's no magical catharsis here. So the way I see it, all anyone can do is make the best of things, which involves some combination of fight and flight. Some of my suggestions for each are below.


Fight (a.k.a. disrupt the system)

• Learn as much as you can about these problems, and speak about what you learn to anyone who will listen (and some people who won't). Spread the message. Knowledge is power. Raise awareness. Educate. Advocate. Inspire. All that shit. It matters.
• Call things what they really are. Up isn't down; black isn't white. Don't let words become meaningless. The US Military isn't fighting a war in Iraq; they're occupiers. America isn't a" democracy" in any meaningful sense. The Department of Defense doesn't defend; the Department of Education doesn't educate; the Homeland Security Department doesn't make us more secure; the Department of Justice doesn't provide justice. Intelligent design isn't science. There's nothing conservative about neo-conservatism, and there's nothing liberal about neo-liberalism. Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama aren't anti-war. John McCain isn't a straight-shooter. Public Relations is propaganda. The Bible is a work of fiction. Declaring "war" on an abstract noun or certain kinds of chemicals literally makes no sense. The President of the United States is sworn to protect and defend the Constitution, not the nation. NAFTA isn't a "Free" "Trade" "Agreement." Collateral damage means innocent people were slaughtered. Enhanced interrogation techniques means fucking torture. Call things what they really are. Words mean something, and have tremendous power. The lies stop at you.
  
• Paper currency passes through your hands on a daily basis. It could look different when it leaves your possession. Lots of other people will see it. For example, should religious messages be legible on government-issued money?
  
• There's an important day for the federal government coming up in 11 days. You probably don't want to risk large fines or imprisonment, but aren't few little innocent mistakes bound to happen in such a confusing process?
• Minimize: driving, taxable income, electricity usage, non-essential purchases, paper trails, interaction with illegitimate authorities (including voting for them), processed food consumption, television, religion.
  

Flight (a.k.a. enjoy life responsibly)

• You'll never find a perfect place, but you can move some place more in line with your ideals, a place where you can be more comfortable with the consequences of your daily decisions. Keep fighting when you get there.
• Immerse yourself in an occupation or hobby (one that doesn't compromise your principles).
• Have sex.
  
• Buy as much of your food as possible from local and sustainable farms. Experiment with new recipes. Eat slowly.
• Self-medicate.
• Play sports. Go camping. Listen to music. Adopt a pet. Take a walk. Read a book. Join a club.
  
• Keep in mind that flight is actually a fight strategy too. You're leading by example, demonstrating that people can be more happy and healthy outside of the fucked up system.
  

Why I won't vote: Sham Democracy

Perhaps the most important factor in my decision not to vote is that democracy is a sham in the United States. Business interests, not popular opinion, control the machinery of government, regardless of which button we push every four years (I'll leave a discussion of how votes literally don't even count for another entry). Elections are an elaborate charade providing the illusion of choice, but issues of public concern are carefully avoided. The policies enacted by our federal government are widely opposed by the public, and yet incumbents rarely lose congressional elections. As a result of the way campaigns are conducted, with the mind-melting techniques of the public relations industry, public awareness of the positions of candidates on issues is abysmally low, while voters increasingly cite "character" or "values" as the reason for their selections. (Here's what I think about the character and values of politicians.)

To quote Noam Chomsky's discussion of public opinion and public policy in his 2006 book Failed States:

A large majority of the public believe that the United States should accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the World Court, sign the Kyoto protocols, allow the United Nations to take the lead in international crisis, and rely on diplomatic and economic measures more than military ones in the "war on terror." Similar majorities believe the United States should resort to force only if there is "strong evidence that the country is in imminent danger of being attacked," thus rejecting the bipartisan consensus on "preemptive war" and adopting the rather conventional interpretation of the UN Charter reiterated by the UN's High-level Panel of December 2004 and the UN World Summit a year later. A small majority of the population even favors giving up Security Council vetoes, so that the United States would follow the UN's lead even if it is not the preference of the US state managers. On domestic issues, overwhelming majorities favor expansion of government programs: primarily health care (80 percent), but also funding for education and Social Security. Similar results on domestic issues have long been found in these studies conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (CCFR). As noted, other mainstream polls report that large majorities support guaranteed health care, even if it would raise taxes. Not only does the US government stand apart from the rest of the world on many crucial issues, but even from its own population.

I refuse to support this system and add to the illusion of its legitimacy. I won't vote.

Why I won't vote: Ambition

I've long thought that the only appropriate approach to any election is for people to say what their positions are, what they'd be likely to do if they gain the position, and basically offer their services if the voters decide their approach is best. In other words, people could agree to serve if selected, but wouldn't be trying to win by doing what they think people want. The ideal scenario would be a member of a community reluctantly agreeing to submit himself for consideration at the urging of his peers who believe he'd be a great leader.

Think about every class election you ever saw in school. Did anyone run because they wanted to represent the student body and make sure that their interests were served? Did they genuinely believe that they had a unique and crucial ability to perform this task better than any of their competitors? Of course not. They ran because they were ambitious. They wanted to be popular, or to improve their college application, or make sure the prom could be how they wanted it to be, or whatever other benefits they'd reap. So they said things that they thought people would want to hear.

National elections are the same way, except the ones running are the most ambitious from a group of 300,000,000 instead of a group of 300. By my math that makes them a million times more ambitious. And they aren't competing to see who gets to pick the time of the pep rally; they're trying be the general manager of the largest empire, equipped with the most lethal machinery, in the history of civilization. To even get anywhere close to a position where they have even the slightest shot at running for president, they had to have contorted, conspired, compromised, cheated, lied, backtracked, betrayed, bought off, threatened, punished, and perverted themselves in ways I can't even imagine. And then repeated all of that again after breakfast until lunch. And then again until dinner, and after dinner until bed. And then keep it up continually over several decades. These are the kinds of people I'm supposed to support with my vote?

Time magazine published this article by Michael Kinsley, which A Tiny Revolution highlighted, that draws attention to this problem.

[V]oters are also right to feel that something is phony about democratic politics and that it's getting worse. Even a candidate who agrees with you on all important issues and always has—no dreaded flip-flops—is forced by the conventions of politics to be disingenuous about at least one core issue: why he or she is running.

Ladies and gentlemen, they are running because they are ambitious. No, really, they are. You probably suspected as much. And yet you would abandon any candidate who dared to admit this, or at least they all believe that you would...[T]he purest form of ambition is political ambition, because it represents a desire to rule over other people.

When you hear the presidential candidates carrying on about democracy and freedom, do you ever wonder what they would be saying if they had been born into societies with different values? What if Mitt Romney had come to adulthood in Nazi Germany? What if Hillary Clinton had gone to Moscow State University and married a promising young apparatchik? What if Barack Obama had been born in Kenya, like his father, where even now people are slaughtering one another over a crooked election? Which of them would be the courageous dissidents, risking their lives for the values they talk about freely—in every sense—on the campaign trail? And which would be playing the universal human power game under the local rules, whatever they happened to be?

Without naming names, I believe that most of them would be playing the game. What motivates most politicians, especially those running for President, is closer to your classic will-to-power than to a deep desire to reform the health-care system.

Like most installments in this series, the ambition issue doesn't stand on its own as a make-or-break point in opposition of voting. It basically just falls into what will probably be a common category: why every candidate sucks. I'm extremely reluctant to support candidates who suck. The most viciously ambitious people usually suck a whole lot, and our system is designed to filter only the most supremely viciously ambitious people into contention for national office.

Why I won't vote: Introduction

I'd like to write a series of posts reflecting on why I generally refuse to vote. This seems to be a controversial issue, so I hope people will join the conversation in the comments. I hope my arguments will be persuasive, but my writing style tends to reflect my primary goal of figuring out what is right. I'll try to be polite and considerate and whatnot, but I don't intend to shy away from indelicate truths.

I'll say up front that I'll be talking primarily about federal elections, mainly Presidential though Congressional should be basically the same. State and local elections are somewhat different, I'll note specifically if I'm including them in the discussion.

I'll credit the following for contributing greatly to my thoughts on this topic and various matters that will enter the discussion:

Arthur Silber
Who Is IOZ?
Chris Floyd
Noam Chomsky
Jonathan Schwarz
Winter Patriot
Dennis Perrin
politicalcompass.org

This of course is not to say that I agree with all of their views or that they'd agree with everything I'll say, just that they've been very influential to my thinking.

what is a boy to do?

Before the last discussion got out of hand, there seemed like there was a possibility of discussing the merits of an approach to a moral dilemma. I still want to do that. The question, simply posed, is this: given that this country is hopelessly fucked, what is a boy to do?

You might not be on board with the assumption. I'm slightly more interested in the moral issue, but I understand if you first feel the need to figure out what is so fucked and why it is so hopeless. I've explained this somewhat in this post, which also dealt with the question of what to do about it. Read all the links from that post if you want to try to understand where I'm coming from. Beyond that, authors whose writing has influenced my opinion on the matter are most notably Noam Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson. The scholarship of Jared Diamond and Howard Zinn has also contributed. Arthur Silber and Chris Floyd have blogs that relentlessly document how fucked everything is. My arguments are their arguments.

Now, given all of that... now what? Well on more than one occasion Floyd has looked to Thoreau for guidance on the matter, and found an answer that I find convincing: "How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it." Also in that comment thread I link to three items containing ideas that I also find convincing. I'd recommend reading them. Here they are again: (1) Fuck (2) the (3) system.

Based on all of this, I put forth the idea that refraining from working when I don't need to for my immediate survival, thus minimizing my association with the government by avoiding income tax, is some kind of noble form of principled dissent. I fully acknowledge the possibility that there might be convincing arguments against this line of thinking, I don't see that any of them found their way into that discussion, but that doesn't mean they can't exist.

Here is my version of the argument offered against my idea (as opposed to arguments against the underlying assumption, or arguments about details along the way, or various invective):

But some of the theoretical tax dollars I would be paying to the government would have helped people. Needy people.

I'll assume that it is true that some tax dollars pay for things that help people, but I reject that as a compelling argument against my position on a variety of grounds, some of which I mentioned in the comments:

• Illegitimate acquisition of funds
• Immoral use of funds
• violence
• coercion
• torture
• racist behavior
• environmentally destructive policies
• energy
• transportation
• agriculture

It was pointed out that this method of weighing the good against the bad is a utilitarian approach (at least considering everything but the first bullet, to which I'll return later). In spite of repeated dismissals of the value of measuring utility only in "dollars that help" versus "dollars that hurt," there was extended discussion about how the budget is allocated. It isn't that the information about where tax dollars are spent is useless, but that those values need to be weighted in such a subjective way, and with such disparate coefficients, as to render the actual figures trivial values in the moral calculus.

To translate that to an easy example, consider an organization that collects money from its members, and uses 99% of it to give pennies to people on the streets, and 1% of it to fund the murder of small children. Giving people money helps them, and killing hurts. I don't think anyone would argue that tweaking the percentages even by a orders of magnitude would change the moral righteousness of buying into the organization. No matter how many acts of goodness they do, it will never add up to enough to surpass the evil of murder. Lots of little goods don't outweigh a bit of heinous wrong.

Going back to reality, it is obviously my contention that the way our national budget is spent does more harm than good. Whether we spend 40% or 55% or 80% of our tax revenues on social good doesn't really matter as long as we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars to sustain an illegal and immoral occupation of a nation we illegally and immorally invaded and destroyed, as long as we're holding people without charges, as long as we're torturing people, as long as we're conducting warrantless domestic surveillance, as long as millions of nonviolent drug offenders are imprisoned, as long as we're massively subsidizing unnecessary crops that ravage our environment and our health.

And on top of all that, much of the spending that on the surface may appear to be good is actually significantly less good than it appears, if not outright bad. I consider this to be the case for much of our education spending, as I mentioned, and I suspect that it would be the case for just about everything, including the State Department's involvement in the recent World Radiocommunications Conference, which was mentioned in the comments. I imagine this effect is worse than normal under Bush, whose administration has looked at absolutely every agency, program, and crisis as an opportunity to enrich their supporters, bolster their own power, and bludgeon their opposition, all while purporting to help people. Take, for example, two other purported good efforts mentioned - nuclear nonproliferation and environmental protection programs. It is true that money spent in ways that genuinely advance those causes would be doing good, but any money we spend on them and good that results is completely undermined by the way our "defense" policies and arms manufacturing and sales escalate arms proliferation and the way a multitude of our national policies wreak havoc on the environment. Those "good" programs, placed in proper context, are then nothing but pathetic fig leaves for our leaders to point to and pretend they're doing something to help fix the problem.

So, yeah, I don't think the math adds up favorably for the good of the way our tax dollars are spent. But you can even put every bit of all of this utilitarian rambling aside*, because I don't even think there's any justification for this government taxing my income to begin with, because I basically have no say in how they use it. This goes right to the heart of why everything is fucked about this country: because it is no longer the representative democracy it claims to be, though it still goes through the empty motions. Many of the authors I've mentioned have made this case quite convincingly. This essay is one of the best. I don't recognize any right by which an organization can forcibly take my money and give me effectively no say in how it is used. Even if the utilitarian calculus added up in favor of good, taking my money at gunpoint is wrong. Give your government that power, and sooner or later the people running it will start to use it for their own selfish purposes, not the beautiful noble ones they'll claim. A few centuries into the American experiment, and we're well past that point. I'm not sure that any government has ever stayed on the good side of it for long.

I can't imagine someone putting forth a case that substantially undermines the thrust of what I'm saying here, but I'd much prefer to live in a world where they could. But the idea that my opinion is some immobile monolith is hard for me to take seriously, given how wildly my opinions have changed over the last few years. I'm open to good argument, and I've found it from the authors I've cited. I don't like the idea that I live in a country and world that is so hopelessly fucked, but when someone makes that case convincingly, I'm going to accept it. And then at that point I'll try to figure out something to do about it.

And the last point here is to point out that the tragic absurdity of this quote from the comments:

"what really bothers me about your little plan of not working, and your modus operandi in general, is that if you're so convinced that everything is so fucked then do something positive to fix it, or just remove yourself from it entirely and live in a shed in the woods in Canada."

What on earth do you think I'm doing? I can't magically fix everything by myself, and my whole point is that the whole system is impossibly fucked beyond the point of fixing. The only conceivable way, in my estimation, to make anything better is by tearing the system down, and what I can personally do about that at the moment is minimize my contribution to the system, which is what I'm trying to do by avoiding income (I could also consider taking some of the measures mentioned in the "fuck the system" links above). And beyond that all I can do is try to spread awareness and urge more people to do the same.

Given that I'm doing all I can about it, what is really being said in that quote? "Either fix it or go away" reduces to "get the fuck away and shut the fuck up" The very act of acknowledging the unpleasant reality bothers people, so much so that they prefer not to hear it. This creates a pretty fucking vicious natural support for the abhorrent system to which I'm objecting. That would be funny if it weren't so fucking sad.

And yeah, rarely does a day go by when I don't think about running away from all of it.



* - If you wanted, you could structure this point into the utilitarian framework as well, and that might even be implicitly what I'm doing here. I just think it gets to complicated to write about it that way, because then you're talking about one utilitarian decision set depending on the range of possible outcomes of various possible subsequent utilitarian decision sets.

The Dude abides

I don't think I've mentioned this on here before, but I'll do so now. A significant part of why I'm not working right now is political. I don't want to earn income that can be taxed.

As Chris Floyd recently quotes:

How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.

-- Henry David Thoreau

I'm going to avoid such associations as much as possible. I don't believe this government has a right to my money, but I'm not willing to risk a direct challenge to their power. So I just won't work until I have to for pure survival, at which point I hope to be able to earn income without compromising my values.