Автор: Анкап-тян

Street processions. Recommendations.

Tomorrow, January 31, we take to the streets again. After January 23, we see a fairly clear tactic from the regime: to make coordination as difficult as possible and to knock out all organizers, as well as those who theoretically could be organizers, even if they aren’t currently exposed but were noticed in something similar in the past. In the locations where the protests are held, communication will be jammed, public transport movement will be restricted, sidewalks and roads will be blocked, and establishments will be closed.

Navalny’s headquarters continues to insist that the upcoming action be peaceful. That is, it is suggested not to kick the security forces in the stomach, even if their visors fog up.

How is it proposed to behave within the restrictions imposed on us by the enemy, and those imposed on us by our own command?

  1. This is not the final decisive battle, but simply one of the episodes of a very long confrontation to come.
  2. But tomorrow we must perform more vividly than a week ago.
  3. Most likely, slightly more people will come out, but that is not of particular importance.
  4. We need to demonstrate determination, but at the same time sustain minimal losses.
  5. Therefore, the main emphasis is placed precisely on safety.
  6. Anonymity. Unobtrusive clothing that hides identifying features; definitely wear masks, no badges or other accessories that make identification easier.
  7. Come in groups. If you don’t have your own company, try to attach yourself to someone. You must not remain alone and unsupervised.
  8. Do not stand in squares; move continuously as a dense mass, do not let yourselves be surrounded or split; if the cops try to break into the ranks—link arms.
  9. During detention attempts, grab those being detained, surround the resulting scuffle, and demand that the cops leave without their prize.
  10. Film only the cops on camera. Under no circumstances film your own. Demand that journalists only film wide shots, and only from behind. No interviews—tell them to fuck off. And use profanity specifically, so there is no temptation to broadcast it. The best thing you can do with a pro-government channel journalist is to secretly push them toward the cops and immediately vanish into the crowd.
  11. Do not bring posters. Unless that poster is on plywood, and the plywood is on a sturdy stake. You never know, it might come in handy.
  12. Regarding weapons. Use them only to prevent detention, and only when it is not being recorded by cameras. Stream and gel sprays are good. Aerosols are bad (your own people may suffer).
  13. Banners are needed only for orientation, to understand where the head and tail of the column are. The banner-bearer should not walk on the edge—they are a primary target for detention. If the banner-bearer is detained anyway, take the flag from them, if they don’t think to throw it far into the crowd themselves. Let someone else carry the flag. It is stupid to take the flag with you into the police van.
  14. Chants—keep them to a minimum; it is better to loudly greet friendly motorists who are honking. Chants can also be used to notify the rear ranks of important details of the situation. “Putin is a dick!” is a bad chant. “Cops on the right!” is a good one.
  15. When the end point of the march is reached, you must immediately and very quickly disperse in different directions, but not individually, but in several columns, according to the number of possible directions of movement at the finish point. This is the most dangerous stage of the action; it would be a pity to complete the entire route only to end up in a police van at the very end.
  16. If the cops are waiting at the finish point, do not go there at all—it is better to turn off beforehand and go far to the side, and only end the action at a safe distance from the enemy.

All these recommendations are for the regions. The two capitals have their own specifics, huge experience with such actions, plus a completely different scale; they will figure it out themselves.

As for banal things, like how to behave in the police department, I’ll leave that to the lawyers. First of all, try not to end up there.

Yes, this is all preparation for a past war. If tomorrow we are met not with batons but with water cannons, gas, and rubber bullets, little of these recommendations will be useful. If the situation proves to be that abnormal, you should simply get as far away from the action site as possible, because it will mean that next time you will need to bring completely different equipment.

It is better to repost this text from anonymous accounts.

I’m not calling for this yet, although I really want to, of course

Claims against Navalny

Supporters of political stability have many grievances against Alexei Navalny. If you ignore the anecdotal stuff, like “State Department agent” and “he would have stolen even more in their place,” and start asking in more detail, something curious emerges. If Navalny had overthrown Putin back in 2012, simply by preventing him from taking a third term, kicked both him and Medvedev out of the Kremlin, sat on the throne himself, befriended Europe, refrained from lending to Yanukovych, refrained from seizing Crimea, stopped inflating spending on the security forces and directed it toward social welfare instead—then in 2018, they would have voted for his second term and been champions of stability, asking “who, if not Navalny?” And they would have grumbled about gay parades in hushed tones, because there would be no reason to rock the boat.

In short, the main grievance “vatniks” have with Navalny is that he is weak and indecisive, and therefore unworthy of sitting on the tsarist throne. Instead of allowing himself to be beaten in the squares, he should have smashed the Kremlin with tanks; then he would be a respected man, not some lowlife. It is easy to see that this position is very close to the position of the well-known liberal extremist Arkady Babchenko, who still reminisces about the warm December of 2011 and expresses readiness to return to Russia only in an Abrams tank as part of a NATO peacekeeping contingent.

Alexei Navalny returned to Russia not at the head of a loyal guard, but on a shitty low-cost carrier; he was immediately punished for this stupidity, and rightly so. And if our leader is so dear to us, why the hell haven’t we freed him yet, and instead boast that on January 23rd the police seized a record number of people? Are we masochists? Is this why we went out? What do we actually plan to do to free Alexei? Where is the storming of Matrosskaya Tishina? Or do we think that they, the supporters of political stability, will defend Putin? No way! If Akela cannot protect himself, he has no business leading the pack.

That is the kind of interesting conversation I had recently, and I was unable to give my interlocutor satisfactory answers. Not only because I am not great at oral debates, but because essentially I have nothing to object with. Navalny and his team behave as if they haven’t even considered overthrowing the regime; Navalny seems perfectly content to spend another ten years playing Mandela and wait until Putin either dies on his own or becomes completely decrepit, hands over the throne, and his successor engages in national reconciliation by releasing Navalny and allowing him to run in the elections. Because even if they are looking at the Belarusian scenario, there was no need to return to Russia for that—hang out with Tikhanovskaya, meet with world leaders, push for sanctions, push for the freezing of the accounts of Putin’s cronies, rather than sitting in a cell. The cell is for Putin, not for you.

When Navalny and his associates try to explain why the hell Alexei rushed back to Russia, they bleat about moral duty. It is roughly like riding out on a white horse into machine-gun fire just to wave a papakha hat and send the army into a psychological attack because “the truth is on our side,” meaning we’ll overwhelm them by throwing hats at them.

So, I’ve suddenly found this touching unity with the supporters of the “strong hand.” As for tomorrow, I will try to post my thoughts on what I would like to see at the upcoming Sunday action.

Us. Here. Power!
Putin. Resign!
Give us. A Constituent. Assembly!

Do we need to actively implement UBI from below?

Should we actively promote actions that contribute to PNBP within the framework of current law? For example, the acquisition of hunting rifles or gas pistols, martial arts training (and which ones?), the creation of voluntary militias to counter criminal violence, etc.? In general, does it mean that every “ideological” libertarian should possess at least some weapon or combat skills?

Continuing regarding self-organized people’s militias. If their goal is to apprehend actors of unorganized violence (hooligans, bandits, etc.) and hand them over to the state, can they be considered a successful example of a first step toward PNBP under statism?

Muscovite

In short, yes, we should, and yes, they can. Now, in more detail.

The key condition for maintaining anarchic social orders is a mass readiness to personally exercise one’s rights and an unwillingness to delegate them to anyone without serious benefit. Therefore, naturally, skills for ensuring both personal and public security through cooperation greatly help to push out of one’s head the idea of the state as something vitally necessary.

Now let’s go through specific activities.

Martial Arts — I am not particularly well-versed in them, but the main benefit is removing the psychological block before inflicting pain on another, and the fear of having pain inflicted on you. So, contact martial arts are preferable; otherwise, it’s just a variety of gymnastics, which, however, is also useful.

Knife. The most effective tool for kitchen disputes, and doubtfully effective on the street in an equal fight. It is intended, essentially, for a surprise attack or improvised self-defense with whatever is at hand. Therefore, specifically training with a knife is unlikely to be very relevant if the readiness to strike can be developed in some other way.

Pepper Spray. In conditions of a ban on rifled short-barreled firearms, it is the primary means of street self-defense; it works, as we saw on January 23, even against a buffed OMON officer. The skills for use are simple. The effect is easily verified even on oneself: the consequences are instant, and there is no long-term harm to health.

Civilian Firearms. They cannot be used on people, and one cannot train on people, so the only thing they are good for is developing skills on targets, assuming these skills might come in handy at the moment when you stop caring about what is “forbidden.” An additional downside to owning legal weapons is that they are seized after two administrative offenses, which can be received for literally anything; thus, the possession of a weapon motivates one to stay quiet and not stir—and this particular skill is rather harmful to train for building an ancap society.

Militias. An excellent legal way to develop skills in team power interaction, without serious risk to health, without a drop in income, while earning real authority among neighbors. If militiamen catch real aggressors rather than violators of public morality, then such associations are certainly worth joining. Again, in far from every case does it make sense to hand detainees over to the state. Judging by certain publications, self-proclaimed law enforcement associations in those remote corners where cops were last seen in the last century are usually inclined to resolve matters on the spot, and legal norms will inevitably emerge from this tradition. Ancap is the decentralization of law, so militias are exactly what the doctor ordered.

The obvious downside of militias is the disgusting smell of officialdom already emanating from the phrase “voluntary people’s militia.” Here, of course, it would be good to organize everything so as to practice doublethink less, but that is difficult to guarantee.

How militiamen would like to see themselves
And how it looks at best

Has it really begun?

Today’s rallies dispelled my melancholy. Many people came out; the crowd was angry and cheerful. There were far more cops than in previous years. They worked without brutality, but with enough determination. People were learning how to link arms on the fly, trying to beat back their own. There were few posters and flags; they didn’t come out to show off, but to push with their mass.

Videos where cops are sprayed with pepper, pelted with snowballs, or simply punched in the face are particularly motivating. I cowardly took the spray out of my pocket before leaving, but next time I will definitely bring it. And perhaps I will even look for an occasion to use it. It feels that this time, if criminal cases are filed, they won’t be fabricated or based on plastic cups, but for real. And I have a strange feeling that such cases will likely fuel the people rather than intimidate them. Yes, of course, I am recording this now while the trail is hot and the adrenaline-fueled memories are fresh. But people are already mentally preparing to come out in a week, if not sooner, and their adrenaline-fueled memories are also fresh. So, an escalation on the part of the protesters is quite likely, and that is exactly what is needed for a chance of success.

Special thanks to that young man, who remains unknown to me, who prevented my detention by grabbing me and shouting, “Hands off, she’s my girlfriend!” And the cop, characteristically, took his hands off. That’s how the homstead works)))

This is Moscow, I think. Unfortunately, we didn’t have such inspiring footage.

I wanted to make an extremist post, but something didn’t work out

In 2017, Navalny released a film about Medvedev that unexpectedly took off and brought a huge number of new faces onto the streets. Back then, many expected that the most important film—about Putin—was about to be released. We had to wait almost four years, but now we have a double blow: one about Putin’s palace, which is very effective and capable of igniting a new audience, and one about the FSB poisoners, which had a serious effect even on long-time observers.

On January 23, like most of my Russian readers, I will go out into the street to demonstrate my disagreement with Navalny being held in prison. This is a simple warning that the boundary between the extremely undesirable and the completely unacceptable today lies somewhere around “imprisoning a public politician of international standing through lawlessness on a live broadcast.” The use of violence against people in uniform or state property is not endorsed. But there is also an emphasis on the unwillingness to coordinate the protest itself in any form with representatives of the regime.

For its part, the regime is predictably demonstrating that it does not recognize our right to such a demonstration and will most likely not listen. This manifests in preemptive arrests of everyone who is presumed not only to intend to go out but is also capable of participating in the coordination of protest actions. Those who are administratively dependent are being assigned various chores for Saturday on a mass scale, students are warned of expulsion, loyalists invent horror stories about police shooting to kill, and Roskomnadzor-chan is scrubbing communities from VKontakte and videos from TikTok—in general, the direction of work is more or less clear.

Effectively, we are now at a fork between the Ukrainian and Belarusian scenarios. And I would, of course, prefer the Ukrainian one, but the Belarusian one seems more likely to me. I don’t know what other cards Navalny’s team has in their hand, but I suspect that the strongest ones have already been played, and the Ukrainian scenario requires the ability to raise the stakes significantly. In short, I am going tomorrow with a heavy heart and without much hope, not even for victory, but for at least some improvement in the situation. If no unpleasant surprises occur, tomorrow I will try to reflect in another post on what it felt like. And so, a channel about theory turns into a chronicle of some petty squabbling…

The stylistics of 2021 differ noticeably from 2020: people look back at the rules less and less

As time goes on, I am more and more surprised that there are still people convinced that the state benefits citizens by creating norms, thereby increasing the predictability of life. But if there is anything one can be sure of, it is that the state constantly violates its own norms, and from time to time changes them to legalize these violations. The game can also be played in reverse: if people massively and consciously violate a norm, it will eventually be softened or abolished—but until then, it will ruin the lives of a vast number of people, and when the norm changes, they won’t even bother to offer a fleeting apology.

You are constantly constrained by absurd, impossible norms handed down from above, and you either tolerate it or fight it (the latter is called “engaging in politics”). If you fight, the norms constrain you even further. It doesn’t matter whether you are a cog in the state machine or a completely private individual: there will be absurd norms for everyone. Simply depending on your weight in the class hierarchy, you will have to exert different efforts to evade the execution of some inconvenient norm with impunity or to get it abolished.

Today, the most convenient way for the state to introduce arbitrary restrictions is, of course, covid. Any business can be closed, any offline activity banned, arbitrary expenses can be imposed on people, or passport control, detention centers, and courts can even be merged into one. Millions bear the costs of covid itself; billions bear the costs of covid-related bans. But the suffering of billions in no way helps to save millions; they simply suffer along for the ride.

You have read three paragraphs of whining, which means that the situation with Navalny has left me stunned. I need to at least outline an answer to the question “what to do.” Navalny claims that taking to the streets works best. And how does it work? You go out. You get beaten. You go out. You are fined. You go out. You are imprisoned. Everyone around discusses the failure of the protest. The country becomes a pariah, the economy crashes, and those who are beaten, fined, and imprisoned become poor even faster. This goes on for about twenty years, then a miracle happens, and the regime becomes loose enough to collapse. By this time, only the most inert and incompetent remain in the country, while the clever ones have long since settled abroad.

Of course, any oppositionist would prefer everything to be resolved more quickly. A peaceful rally suddenly turns unpeaceful, the National Guard is driven from the squares, the order to bring in tanks is sabotaged, and suddenly the Prime Minister announces that the President has passed away suddenly and invites the opposition to jointly form a government of national reconciliation. But for now, it is not customary to call for such a thing aloud: the level of bitterness is insufficient. For us, a refusal to authorize a rally is still considered a valid reason to cancel it.

If you count on changing the situation in the country through rallies, at least expand the circle of protesters. Is the person already a regular? Leave them alone, look for a newcomer. It is pleasant to see familiar faces in the crowd, but it is far more useful to see new ones. If authorization was denied due to covid, that is a reason to rally not only for that but also for the abolition of covid restrictions. But it is better, of course, to fundamentally not notify the authorities of the intention to take to the streets. Let them monitor social networks instead of hoping that everything will be told to them voluntarily.

And, of course, if you intend to become regulars at protest actions, you will have to get rid of real estate, cars, and bank accounts—everything that can be seized for refusing to pay a fine. Or do you intend to pay the fines? Really? Do you want to overthrow the regime or feed it? In a while, they will start trying to fire protesters on a mass scale. This is a reason to get ahead of the game by asking employers to fire you and hire you in the same position under the table.

You can do none of this, of course, and just quietly grumble and keep a low profile. Then the inertial scenario described in the paragraph about twenty years will work.

I make a poor politician; I have never known how to motivate people to perform heroic deeds…

When the legal is illegal, it’s better to look to the shadows

If the aggressor kills the property owner, does the property pass to him?

Someone

Property is, as is fashionable to explain nowadays, a bundle of rights. Moreover, an awful lot of these rights can be invented: the more complex the legal relations in society, the more of these rights there are, the harder they are to distinguish, and the more they intertwine. For example, I can visit a friend and sit down to work at a computer that he rents along with the apartment using his parents’ money, where I pay for access to the computer with a kiss. I use a pirated operating system and type the text of an article promised to a client, for which I have received an advance payment. In this regard, can the friend’s parents, the owner of the apartment with the computer, and the employees of the operating system manufacturer also demand a kiss from me, and exactly what share of the kiss? Can I, instead of a kiss, send the guy to my client so that the client can kiss him himself, since he has such an urgency that I have to work anywhere at an odd hour? The answers to these questions seem obvious only if we have some roughly similar notions of what is proper in our minds.

But notions of what is proper depend quite heavily on context. If I kill an opponent in a computer game, and the game implies the possibility of looting the corpse, then the transfer of the deceased’s property to me causes no particular dispute. If the same rules apply in a live-action role-playing game, then my ownership of the killed person’s property can also be quite legal. Finally, if I participate in such an unpleasant variety of role-playing games as a real war, then the appropriation of weapons, ammunition, and various souvenirs from the body of the killed person there also does not cause misunderstanding among those around.

Moreover, military booty may not be limited to things from a corpse. If tomorrow Navalny kills Putin, he could well claim to inherit the presidential post in Russia, and show me that strange person who would dispute this. Prescribe him a triple dose of fantasy.

But as soon as we move into a context where murder is not considered a way of resolving conflict, it ceases to be a legitimate way of acquiring the property of the killed. After that, the entire bundle of rights for the killer will shrink to the factual possession of what he managed to take from the killed, and only for as long as it is not taken away.

Madam President, please choose the dish upon which to place your trophy during the inauguration.

Rodion Belkovich. Blood of Patriots

Some time ago, Rodion Belkovich visited Novosibirsk to present his book “Blood of Patriots.” When I asked if there were plans to publish the text in electronic form, he replied that there weren’t, because “I know you libertarians—you’ll buy one copy and put it in the public domain.” Well, if that’s how it is, so be it. I had to get a paper copy, scan it, format it—and now I am putting it in the public domain. Considering how many footnotes are in the book, it was quite an adventure. The text contains my donation link, in case you decide to thank me for the publication. A link to the author himself could have been included, but he does not keep his details in the public domain, and that is his choice.

Кровь патриотов: введение в интеллектуальную историю американского радикализма

The Litreev and Milov Debate

On January 23, debates between Alexander Litreev and Vladimir Milov will take place on Alexander Plyushchev’s YouTube channel regarding recent events in the USA and various ideological interpretations of what is happening.

Alexander Plyushchev is an Echo of Moscow presenter who recently organized debates between Mikhail Svetov and Maxim Katz on the same topic at an absolutely abysmal technical level, and now, apparently, wants a rematch against the multi-person streaming software.

Alexander Litreev is an Estonian IT entrepreneur known for creating the Red Button mobile app and the Vee VPN service. He is a member of the Tea Club, with whose technical support the debates will be conducted, so I hope that Plyushchev will be able to focus on the show rather than fighting with the audio.

Vladimir Milov is an economic commentator for the Navalny Live channel, and also runs his own YouTube channel. He is a former Deputy Minister of Energy. Co-author of the report Putin. Results and several others, as well as the economic part of Navalny’s presidential program. A fan of Barack Obama, and based on this love, he is ready to love even the late Joe Biden, who served as Vice President under Obama.

The reason for the debates was a tweet by Milov stating that Twitter is a private company, so why, he asks, are libertarians outraged by Trump’s blocking. Litreev replied that Twitter is fully within its rights, while we are all within our rights to be outraged by the blocking from a moral standpoint. Vladimir countered with a question as to whether he would have the right to kill Alexander if he headed a monopoly private military company, while the rest would be left only to be outraged by this from a moral standpoint. Alexander was stunned by such a distortion and invited Vladimir to a debate. The latter initially declined, citing the fact that it didn’t go very well with Svetov, but then changed his mind and agreed. And when Svetov, in turn, began asking to go instead of Litreev, Milov replied, “get in line, young man”.

Thanks to the Tea Club for asking to promote the event; I went into Twitter to figure out where it all came from, and it was fascinating, but where do you get so much time to be in it constantly?

The state wins, anarchism does too

The Anarchy+ channel, from which I continue to draw ideas from time to time, demonstrated a creative application of game theory to the anti-statist movement. As I have mentioned repeatedly, game theory is used not for proofs, but merely as a tool to illustrate the logic of one’s reasoning.

The reasoning there is roughly as follows. We are constantly presented with someone like Mad Max as an example of anarchy, and we get angry and try to show that we are “white and fluffy” and want something entirely different. The proposed model breaks down the outcomes of the war between anarchists and the state into a simple matrix, where our desired state of anarchy is the outcome “anarchism won, the state lost,” and the amorphousness we are warned about is the outcome “the state lost, anarchism lost as well.”

At the end, the article leaves a question hanging regarding what to put in the “state won, anarchists also won” square. If the state is defined as a system of centralized coercion and anarchism as a system of distributed deterrence, the author interprets the win-win situation as unattainable.

Of course, panarchists respond to this: nothing of the sort. Federalization, the transition to a system of extraterritorial contractual jurisdictions or functional overlapping competing jurisdictions, is precisely what the sought-after win-win means. The state wins because it is preserved as a system of centralized coercion, while its legitimacy increases sharply. Anarchism wins because the state is decentralized, the influence of citizens on politics is strengthened due to the drastic simplification of changing jurisdictions, and the state’s susceptibility to systems of distributed deterrence also increases.