official state media for a secessionist republic of one
Politics
I am on Prometheus’s side here.
Caption: FIRE WANTS TO BE FREE.
Prometheus has stolen fire from the gods!
Well, sort of.
I mean, when you use a fire to make another fire, the first fire doesn’t go away.
So really, it’s more like sharing.
(Via Thaddeus Russell.)
An 18-year-old skater died yesterday after Miami Beach Police officers caught him tagging a building and then Tasered him.
Details about the death are still murky, but what is clear is that Israel Hernandez died before dawn Tuesday morning after cops caught him spray painting near 71st Street and Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. Police have yet to comment on the killing, but an officer near the scene confirmed that cops had fatally Tasered someone. Hernandez’s friends on the Miami Beach skate scene are devastated.
“I just cant believe it,” says best friend Rafael Lynch, on the verge of tears. “I still have his hat and his board. They still smell like him. It’s crazy.”
Update: MBPD has released a statement and incident report confirming that Hernandez died after being Tasered. Police chased Hernandez after catching him tagging a building and used the electronic weapon [sic –RG] when he refused to stop.
–Michael E. Miller, Teenager Israel Hernandez Dies After Miami Beach Cops Catch Him Tagging, Taser Him
Miami New Times (Aug 7, 2013).
From GT 2011-01-28: Non-Lethal Force (Cont’d):
As such, police in general, and police assault forces especially, are trained to enter every encounter with the goal of
taking control of the situation,by means of setting up confrontations in situations (no-knock raids, late-night forced-entry raids, etc.) where their chosen targets are most likely to be disoriented and easily terrorized, and by responding with maximal force in the volatile, disorienting confrontations that they create. For the sake of this maximal-force approach, they are equipped with an arsenal of weapons ranging from tasers and clubs to handguns and assault rifles, up to, and including, military helicopters and tanks. Worse, with all these weapons, they have institutionalized a culture of fact-free assertion and lies about highly dangerous weapons that they consider to be categoricallynon-lethal— and thus to be used as a first resort, in virtually any situation, as long as it might give the cops atactical advantageover people who they intend to bring under their control (whether or not these people have ever committed any crime at all). These weapons continue to be used with no hesitation and no restraint, and continue to be callednon-lethal force,no matter how many people are killed by them. There are, for example,tasers,portable electric torture devices which were originally sold as a less-deadly alternative to using a hand-gun in potentially life-threatening confrontations, but which cops now freely use for as part ofpain compliancetechniques[1] in everyday confrontations with the public. This would be bad enough on its own, but part of the reason they are used so freely is because they take no real exertion for cops to use, and are consistently billed asnon-lethalby police and media, even though there are hundreds of documented cases of people dying after being subjected to repeated taser shocks.
Donated by Kazuo Nikawa
1,600m from the hypocenter
Kan-on BridgeKengo Nikawa (then, 59) was exposed to the bomb crossing the Kan-on Bridge by bike going from his home to his assigned building demolition site in the center of the city. He suffered major burns on his right shoulder, back, and head and took refuge in Kochi-mura Saiki-gun. He died on August 22. Kengo was never without this precious watch given him by his son, Kazuo.
Sixty eight years ago today, on August 6, 1945, at 8:15 in the morning, the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay
dropped an atomic bomb over the center of the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Hiroshima was the first target ever attacked with nuclear weapons in the history of the world.
The bomb exploded about 200 yards over the city, creating a 13 kiloton explosion, a fireball, a shock-wave, and a burst of radiation. On the day that the bomb was dropped, there were about 255,000 people living in Hiroshima.
The explosion completely incinerated everything within a one mile radius of the city center. The shock-wave and the fires ignited by the explosion damaged or completely destroyed about nine-tenths of the buildings in the city. Somewhere between 70,000 and 80,000 people–that is, about one third of the entire population of the city–died immediately. The heat of the explosion vaporized or burned alive many of those closest to ground zero. Others were killed by the force of the shock-wave or crushed under collapsing buildings. Many more died from acute radiation poisoning
–that is, from the effects of having their internal organs burned away in the intense radiation from the blast.
By December 1945, thousands more had died from their injuries, from radiation poisoning, or from cancers related to the radioactive burst or the fallout. It is estimated that the atomic bombing killed about 140,000 people, and left thousands more with permanent disabilities.
Almost all of the people maimed and killed were civilians. Although there were some minor military bases near Hiroshima, the bomb was dropped on the city center, several miles away from the military bases on the edge of town. Hiroshima was chosen as a target, even though it had little military importance, because It is a good radar target and it is such a size that a large part of the city could be extensively damaged. There are adjacent hills which are likely to produce a focussing effect which would considerably increase the blast damage.
1. Hiroshima was also one of the largest Japanese cities not yet damaged by the American firebombing campaign. Military planners believed it strategically important to demonstrate as much destruction as possible from the blast.
Thomas Ferebee, a bombadier for the United States Army, was the man who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. His commanding officer was the pilot of the Enola Gay, Paul Tibbets. Tibbets and Ferebee were part of the XXI Bomber Command, directed by Curtis LeMay. LeMay planned and executed the atomic bombings at the behest of Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and President Harry Truman.
Kengo Nikawa died on August 22nd, 1945 because of the bombing. This is his pocket watch.
We will never know the names of many of the 140,000 other residents of Hiroshima who were killed by the bombing. We have only estimates because the Japanese government was in a shambles by this point in the war, and countless records, of those that were successfully kept, were consumed by the flames, along with the people whose lives they recorded.
Three days later, on August 9, 1945, CBS broadcast a recorded address by President Harry S. Truman about the atomic bombing. It was broadcast on the same day that the U.S. government sent bombers to incinerate a second city, Nagasaki, with atomic weapons. Here is what Truman said:
Harry S. Truman, August 9, 1945.
We won the race of discovery against the Germans….
In his radio address on August 9, Truman described Hiroshima, a port city of some 255,000 people, as a military base,
and then said, That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.
The bomb was dropped on the city center, far away from military installations.
On that bright morning in August, with a sudden flash, brighter than the sun, the downtown of an industrial city was converted into a scene of hell. The sky went dark, buildings were thrown into the ground, and everything began to burn. People staggered through the ruins, with their eyes blinded, with their clothing burned off their bodies, with their own skin and faces burned off in the heat. Everyone was desperate for water, because they were burning, because everything was unbearably hot. They begged soldiers for water from their canteens; they drowned themselves in cisterns. Later, black rain began to fall from the darkened sky. The people thought it was a deliverance. They tried to catch the black rain on their tongues, or they caught it and drank it out of cups. But they didn’t know that the rain was fallout. They didn’t know that it was full of radiation and as they drank it it was burning them away from the inside. There was no refuge, no sanctuary; there was nobody to help. The city was burning, medical workers were almost all downtown, and so over 90% of the doctors, and over 90% of the nurses, were killed or injured in the bombing. Because of the targeting of the city center, about 85% of the people killed in Hiroshima were civilians — about 120,000 of the 140,000 men, women and children killed — vaporized or carbonized by the heat, crushed to death in the shockwave, burned to death, killed quickly or slowly by radiation poisoning and infections and cancers eating their bodies alive.
Having found the bomb, we have used it.
… on Hiroshima, a military base…
We wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.
We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor …
We have used it … against those who starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war …
We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war.
It is worth remembering that the atomic bombing of the Hiroshima city center — the first ever use of atomic weapons against human targets — a bombing in which the United States government’s forces deliberately targeted a civilian center — a bombing that the United States government carried out with the explicit intention of obliterating an entire city in seconds, in order to break enemy morale
— an attack in which that government’s forces turned weapons on civilians that destroyed 90% of an industrial metropolis, and killed over half of all the people living in it — remains the deadliest act of terrorism in the history of the world.
The audio clip above is from a recording of President Harry S. Truman’s radio report on the Potsdam conference, recorded by CBS on August 9, 1945 in the White House. The song linked to above is a recording of Oppenheimer (1997), by the British composer Jocelyn Pook. The voice that you hear at the beginning is Robert Oppenheimer, in an interview many years after the war, talking about his thoughts at the Trinity test
, the first explosion of an atomic bomb in the history of the world, on July 16th, 1945.
When I read miserable, belligerently statist exercizes in punitive nationalism like this article (content warning: violent xenophobia, ill-informed conservative legalism, ethnic slurs all over comments threads)[1] at a conservatarian website that calls itself the Personal Liberty Digest,
I have to wonder what the words personal liberty
mean to them, and what it is about ever more statist policies spawned by globalists and liberals
[sic] that they actually object to. Apparently not much, since whatever personal liberty
might have meant goes right into the garbage as soon as some political official says there oughta be a law, or some border cop says Ihre Papiere, bitte.
And whatever it is in statist policies
that they object to, it doesn’t, apparently, include the creation and maintenance of a massive police state required to corral millions of people, denying them the most basic freedoms of individual movement, demanding papers and national identification as a permission slip for working, or just for existing within those borders, and then — if any of the people fenced out by political force should try to evade these purely political restrictions, and assert their ability to peacefully live, work, and move onto property whose owners have opened their doors and welcomed them to come onto — sending border cops to hunt them down, break into their homes and workplaces with guns drawn, disappear them into hellhole detention centers,
put them through a special due-process free deportation system, and then force them out of their homes and jobs, all for the sake of nothing more than a government-demanded legal status. And when those who try to exercise their personal liberty to move, live and work are attacked and punished by the state, the overwhelming response is to spit in their face and sneer at them for breaking the law.
When I read page after page of conservative commenters, many of whom speak in praise of small government
shouting Illegal is illegal!
and comparing undocumented immigrants to trespassers[2] and toss out sarcastic quips about how we wouldn’t want them to feel bad about themselves for breaking the law
, then I wouldn’t dare speculate about what we
would or wouldn’t want, but — speaking only for myself — I can only say that of course I don’t want anybody to feel bad for breaking border laws. Nobody should feel bad about that because there is nothing wrong with immigrants, either documented or undocumented, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with breaking unjust or tyrannical laws. Such laws ought to be broken; they deserve no notice at all, except to ridicule them, and to trample them underfoot. Of course, perhaps you don’t agree that government border laws are unjust or tyrannical; but if not, you ought to give up pretending to care about personal liberty
or statism
at all, and just take some pride in the bullying, authoritarian big-government nationalism that you evidently enjoy so much.
When I read commenters angrily insisting that They invaded our country [sic] by the millions without a shot fired. . .
then I have to wonder what invasion
even means to these people. Without a shot fired!
Of course, this just means, without force,
and hence, without invading.
The country is where you are from, homie; it’s not “your” country in the sense of being your personal or exclusive property. Personal liberty means that you get to decide who comes onto your personal property, not that you get to command other people about where else they can go or where else is off limits; immigrants move from one place to another, and in the homes or the apartments they move into, in the places where they work, in the businesses they buy from, the landlord or the boss or the owner has explicitly chosen to open their doors and welcome them onto their property.
When people move from one place to another without using violence, without trespassing on others’ land, and go to places where they’ve been invited to stay by mutual agreement with the property owner, that’s not an invasion
in any meaningful sense of the word, any more than I invaded
Michigan after I graduated from college, or any more than I invade
the Waffle House when I go there to get some hash browns.
And when I read commenters trotting out the last-ditch talking point that undocumented immigrants ought to be punished and stigmatized because they ILLEGALLY entered as opposed to the thousands who are STILL waiting in line to do it LEGALLY!!!!!!!”
, I don’t know what to make of the proposal that if thousands of people are jerked around over the course of more than a decade by cruel, capricious, obviously broken and massively unfair immigration requirements, then everybody else should be jerked around by the same cruel, capricious, obviously broken and massively unfair immigration quotas, no matter what, forever. You know, just to be fair. In reality, telling people to wait in the queue is, for the overwhelming majority of people in the world, telling them to wait forever, because it is literally impossible for most people in the world to successfully gain residency status in the USA.
Ben Bullard, the author of the original post, describes himself in his bio by saying that Reconciling the concept of individual sovereignty with conscientious participation in the modern American political process is a continuing preoccupation
for him. Apparently the way that the two are reconciled is to toss out the concept of individual sovereignty in favor of a properly politic notion of national sovereignty, writing — as far as I can tell completely without irony — that Immigration — legal or not — is an enormously difficult phenomenon to attempt to control. But if there's national will to address it as a problem that threatens the foundations of a society, then a Nation has every right to do so.
I don’t know what creeps me out more — the capitalization of a Nation
and the frankly collectivist attempt to speak of a unified subject with rights
to command and exclude others; or the unvarnished fascist appeal to solve a systemic political problem by the application of national will.
I do know that neither of these has anything at all to do with respecting the personal liberty of individuals.
You can believe in individual liberty, and freedom from arbitrary political restriction; or you can be a nationalist and a bordercrat. You cannot do both together. Choose.
Borders
illegalwhen describing the specific conditions and activities of north African asylum-seekers and victims of human trafficking in Malta. But Bullard would rather bait his border-policing readers’ sensitivities about being asked to use phrases like
undocumented immigrantsinstead of dehumanizing and politically-charged words like
illegalsor
alienswhen they talk about immigration politics — especially the political targeting of working-class immigrants from Mexico and Central America — to the United States; and so he portrays this very specific and limited request from one office concerning reporting on the specific situation in Malta as some kind of diktat handed down by
the U.N.telling
ushow
weought to talk about immigration, and immigrants, in general, and then easily segues into a really pretty appalling bit of commentary on
the tide of humanity unleashed by the movements of desperate or displaced people.Of course, virtually every single commenter on the post has something to say about Mexican immigration to the U.S., and virtually none have anything to say about the humanitarian situation in north Africa or in Malta.↩
This is actually a re-post, from quite some time ago, from a long, sometimes productive, sometimes tiresome comment thread at Alas, A Blog back around 2006. A conversation about political libertarianism became — as I hope they always will — a conversation about anarchism, and a commenter named Charles (no relation) came around to asking:
I was once an anarchist, but I'm finding myself in complete agreement with nobody.really. Anarchist principles are good cautionary principles to use as limitations on statist power, and they are good guidelines for running small to middling groups, but there are too many questions concerning the structuring of larger groups that they can't meaningfully answer, or that they answer incorrectly.
Nobody.really pointed out that there are always people who behave badly in the absence of government force, some of whom form the worst sort of tyrannical mini-governments. This doesn't require any sort of innate predisposition to do so or anything along those lines, it merely requires a recognition that no community is ever successfully at completely inculcating all of its members with its beliefs and principles. People are capable of coming up with a very wide variety of ways of acting, and behaving horribly and seizing other people's stuff can be an effective method of surviving. People who come up with it are able to make a mess of the lives of everyone around them, and are often enough able to push the culture over into one in which their behavior is acceptable. So, what do you do to stop that?
. . . Creating a permanent structure for how to handle violence, who gets to handle the violence, etc, produces a more stable situation, where when my neighbor decides to take my stuff, I know who to turn to, and I know with reasonable certainty that the powers that be will side with the one who has the legitimate right to the stuff.
Obviously, the powers that be often end up being tyrants, but the question of how to prevent them from becoming tyrants (or how to stop them from being tyrants once they become them) is not really answered by saying let their never be powers that be in the first place.
How, under anarchist principles, do you prevent the rise of tyrants?
–Charles, in comments on Libertarian Follies
Alas, A Blog (March 22, 2006).
To which I replied . . .
Shoot them. Jesus.
If your objection to anarchism is that it does not provide magic wands for resisting evil, then anarchism stands guilty as charged. But so does statism: magic wands like that don't exist, and given the abattoir that was the 20th century, I hardly think that the State has a very good historical record of providing people with the means to stop relentless tyrants.
. . . As a further note on my brusque earlier reply.
Many of the common lines of criticism against anarchist theories succeed only by holding anarchy and anarchists to higher standards than the State or statists are held to. The line of how anarchists intend to stop tyrants (petty or grand) is one of them. Nobody in the world, anarchist or statist, has a perfect theory of how to resist oppression; democratic states, republican states, aristocratic states, constitutional monarchies, absolute monarchies, grand empires, humble city-states, stateless societies (medieval Iceland, medieval Ireland),[1] etc. have all, at some time or another, fallen into tyranny or into civil war; have been conquered in war; have systematized and ritualized forms of violent oppression by one class or caste or sex over another. Revolutions fail; societies decay; things fall apart. Judging from the results of the late unlamented century, most of the powers that be don't even have a good theory of how to stop that: hundreds of millions of people were murdered because major powers engaged in tyranny and imperial warfare, civil war, terror famines, and genocide, and because even when they were not actively doing these things themselves, they were either powerless or unwilling to do anything to stop the others. So while these are reasonable questions to ask of any theory of social life, a bit of recognition that the topic is hard and that it's unfair to hold any theory to the standard of needing a complete solution to the problem of evil, would go a long way.
That said, here are some things that anarchists typically stress.
(1) For just about any form of successful oppression, it's hard to see how introducing the State will dampen the problem rather than amplifying it. If there is a discernible ruling class then it's a matter of course that they'll have disproportionate power over the apparatus of the State; if you have a centralized Leviathan that is able to assert and enforce its claims to sole authority then that means a corresponding increase in the capacity of oppressors to violently enforce their will over the oppressed. Without a central state, there is no guarantee that the oppressed will be able to successfully resist the aggression of oppressors, but when a central state with unchallenged police power, military power, intelligence capabilities, etc. is systematically turned against them, the prospects are correspondingly much bleaker. You might say, "But look, what that means is that the oppressed should have access to state power so that they can defend themselves. Wouldn't that be great?" But then you need to (1) figure out how they are going to get it (magic won't do) and (2) how whatever means help them to get it (organizing, moral agitation, cultural change, nonviolent resistance, etc.) wouldn't work just as well, or better, if it were focused on direct action rather than on trying to influence or take control of government decision-making bodies.
(2) As a strategy for resisting potential new forms of oppression, a Leviathan state also seems like a risky strategy at the very best. Tyrants very often solidify their tyranny by taking over centralized structures of power that were already in place; it's much harder to build an effective tyranny from scratch than it is to consolidate power over existing police, intelligence, military, etc. forces and then to turn them to your ends. In anarchy, any projects or organizations for self-defense are voluntary, decentralized, and don't claim a monopoly on legitimate authority; that means that if a tyrant tries to subvert the existing structures there aren't institutional barriers to withdrawing from them and setting up new ones that aren't subject to her or his will. Under territorial states, no such option is available: there's only one target that needs to be seized, and once it's seized, the subjects of the state can't do much of anything about it. The "stability" of an organized power structure is only a virtue if that power structure is, on the whole, benevolent; if it's malevolent then the last thing you want is for its hegemony to be stable and unchallenged. The problem is how to protect yourself from the malefactors once you've already ceded your ability to resist back when times were allegedly good. Actually existing states don't have a very good record on this count.
(3) To be quite frank, nearly no State in all of recorded history (certainly not the United States, for one) could seriously be claimed to be a bunch of ordinary people banding together to protect themselves from marauders. The band of slavers and genocidaires who founded the U.S. government, to take one example, were pretty explicit that they aimed for the federal government to protect and systematize their own marauding against innocent Africans, African-Americans, and Indians not taxed. It's not much different elsewhere — the people who oversee the formation of states are typically powerful and concentrated interests who hope to, and do, turn the newly-formed State to the pursuit of their own interests at the expense of the less powerful. The popular liberal myth of government by compact wouldn't morally justify the State, even if it were true of actually existing governments; but it's not true. The only "compacts" made have been pirate's codes, and nothing more.
(4) The strategic question of how to create, sustain, and defend anarchy is an important one to ask, and a difficult one to answer. But it ought to be understood that it is not, actually, the primary issue involved in whether or not anarchism is true. The primary arguments for anarchism are not strategic arguments, but moral ones; it's not that anarchy is valued because it's useful to attaining some other goods, but rather because violent coercion is wrong, whatever its effects may be, and the princes, potentates, and presidents of the world make claims of authority over other people that can only be, and are, backed up by violent coercion. So demonstrating that there are tricky problems for anarchists to solve doesn't mean that anarchy isn't the right thing to aim for; it just means that what you ought to aim for might be tricky to hit. But nobody said that the right thing has to be easy, or that achieving it has to be effortless. The emancipation of women, civil rights, the abolition of slavery, religious toleration, democracy, etc. have all been difficult propositions, tricky to achieve and difficult to sustain in the face of coordinated and unrelenting resistance. That raises questions about strategy and tactics, but it doesn't provide any reason for thinking that the goal itself ought to be abandoned.