How Mikhail Svetov Dug Himself In

Miss Liberty

After Zalina Marshenkulova on Svetov’s show got drunk and just chatted about life instead of having a proper discussion, I didn’t expect her to prove herself to be a good debater, but I hoped for the best. But, my Goddess, how wrong I was! Of course, over three years, Zalina has become better at conveying her thoughts, and instead of wine, there was now water on the table in front of her, but the main factor in her success at the debates was still Svetov himself. It was enough to let him speak freely, and he dug his own grave, much like Rudoy did in the debates with Prosvirnin.

I consider the subject of the debate itself to be Svetov’s strangest and stupidest mistake. The title was promising: “Feminism: a struggle for rights or privileges?” But Mikhail didn’t particularly try to talk about the struggle, the rights, or the privileges. Already in the opening speech, I suspected something was wrong when he reduced his presentation to the trivialization of problems by feminists and some flaws in how Zalina managed her Twitter. This wouldn’t have been scary if it hadn’t turned out later that these essentially exhausted all his grievances with Zalina and feminism.

Mikhail came to talk about feminism, but spent the entire debate on how his opponent behaves on social networks; it was petty. Especially since he describes his own Twitter primarily as a private space and explicitly says that his influence on the discourse is greatly exaggerated, otherwise, he claims, we would have lived in a wonderful Russia of the future long ago. As a result of such an approach, Zalina’s rhetoric was often reduced to discussing tweets. As a viewer, I wanted to see a struggle between two points of view here and now, not archaeological excavations of someone’s posts and explanations for their words.

My favorite quote from the past debate:

While women die of anorexia, in the same way men die of melancholy. I absolutely do not want to draw an equal sign here, because both, of course, are tragic

Mikhail Svetov, fighter against the trivialization of problems

The phrase is so funny and wild that I can only address the men: don’t be melancholy, men, you are great!!!

I imagine the scene: a typical anorexic girl, who has spent several stints in psychiatric hospitals, destroyed all her internal organs, ends her fleeting life from dystrophy. And next to her, a man dies of melancholy, like poor Hachiko, because the girls wouldn’t give it to him, an incel, and therefore life is over. May the Goddess preserve you, two victims of social injustice, femine!

Svetov could have tried to return Zalina’s serve about death from anorexia, even with a take about similar problems among men, but not to cite melancholy as an example: no, damn it, men don’t die from torture in prison, their psyche isn’t maimed in the army, they aren’t bullied if they are fat or, conversely, scrawny. Melancholy is the main scourge of men!

Svetov’s story about men who ruin their lives for the sake of building a career looked about as convincing. And this in the context of discussing labor inequality! Like, don’t rush into the labor market, girls, it’s scary here, destinies are broken here, stay home, take care of your appearance. According to Svetov, it turns out that the most terrible male problems are some vague melancholy and their own privileges.

Speaking of privileges, by the way. What a topic for debate was missed! How I would have liked to see a competent analysis of the feminist myth about privileges. It is here that the feminist discourse about the all-pervasive patriarchy and the methods of fighting it is weakest. I would have liked to hear about the harm of legal privileges: Svetov only slightly touched upon the topic of maternity leave, and yes, Zalina answered the question about positive discrimination manifested in the leniency of cops toward girls at rallies. And yet, the struggle for benefits is exactly that part of the feminist discourse that can be most convincingly dismantled specifically from the positions of libertarian ideology.

Alas, the debates turned out sluggish, Svetov looked even weaker than in the argument with Kagarlitsky, and for a conversation at such a level, the high-ranking debating parties had no need to rent a hall — they could have exchanged barbs in cozy Twitter with equal success.

Interview with Mikhail Pozharsky on Libertarian Band

While I was relaxing in Germany, the well-known and highly respected libertarian Mikhail Pozharsky visited Novosibirsk to give a lecture. It is a great pity that the lecture itself was not recorded, and consequently, I was unable to listen to it. Fortunately, the Libertarian Band studio team caught Mikhail before his presentation and conducted a fairly thorough interview.

In my opinion, it turned out to be very interesting; thanks to Katya Khudoleva for the questions. It’s great that the studio proves itself to be a quite viable team, even when someone is away for a while. I would have asked different questions, but I’m not sure the result would have been better.

Perhaps Ancapistan is better built in fourth-world countries after all?

Well, let’s say, in Somalia, Micronesia, and other failed states, since it is easier there to achieve a more or less even balance of the potential for violence with relatively small resource expenditures (conventionally speaking, buying a Kalashnikov) due to the absence of an overwhelmingly powerful agent enforcing a monopoly on violence in that territory, as well as the culture of servility and economic structure that has formed around it?

L29Ah (the question is accompanied by a donation of 0.00013567btc)

I will remind the readers that the balance of the potential for violence is one of the criteria for the stability of a stateless society according to Hirschleifer. Other criteria are a stable community composition and the absence of a significant number of people pushed to the brink of survival. Indeed, some secluded tropical paradise where coconuts fall right at your feet and where peaceful, smiling natives with Kalashnikovs live can easily build an anarchic society. But it is not enough to have anarchy; what is desired specifically is anarcho-capitalism.

And anarcho-capitalism requires a bit more than the absence of a state. It requires capitalism, which means commodity-money relations. So our imaginary tropical paradise will need a full-fledged commodity economy integrated into global trade. But international trade requires international recognition, and that is a serious limitation.

While composing his Meganesian cycle, Aleksandr Rozov particularly emphasized that the stateless society in the Pacific Ocean is being built not by real natives, but by outsiders. In reality, they are full-fledged white people with the notions of property, freedom, and law appropriate for white people—they simply deny the state. They only pretend to be natives in order to legitimize their claims in the eyes of the international community and avoid becoming pariahs leading a miserable existence under economic sanctions.

In real life, a similar project of anarcho-colonialism was attempted by the Seasteading Institute, but it encountered numerous legislative and technological restrictions, and now, judging by the website, it has degenerated from a libertarian project into something smelling of eco-activism.

So it is hard to say what is easier: to ensure the transition to anarchy in a capitalist state, to ensure the transition to capitalism in a failed state, or to organize a “freedom landing” in some toy state in Oceania. One thing can be said for sure: the matter is not limited solely to the balance of the potential for violence.

A white man with an automatic rifle in a tropical paradise

Mechanics of Freedom, Chapter 3.1

Usually, when I start working on the translation of another part of David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, I stall for a long time. He precedes each part with a poetic opus of his own composition, where the wit of the content is compensated for by the clunkiness of the form. Fortunately, this time I managed to deal with the poems relatively quickly. In them, David naively wonders how the world order manages to exist in such harmony despite the government’s disregard for these things, and how government services themselves only provoke a smirk: as if this public good is not very much of a good.

What is anarchy? What is the state? In this chapter, Friedman defines what he intends to rail against throughout the rest of the part, while leaving the clarification of all the philosophical murk to Lysander Spooner.

I recently read about the Summerhill school, the idea of which was the non-violent education of children.

“At Summerhill school, students choose for themselves which lessons to attend. Furthermore, there is no grading system of any kind. No punishment is incurred for skipping classes” (Wikipedia). Can this school be called a kind of libertarian project?

2R

Recently, the left-anarchist channel Prometheus posted an article about anarchism and education, which is, in turn, a summary of an article by Ekaterina Tolkacheva titled A Little Anarchism for the Education System. It discusses Summerhill and many other similar projects specifically as examples of the implementation of a libertarian approach.

From what I quickly googled about Summerhill, it is clear that it is one of the most consistently libertarian educational projects, where a child’s freedom is limited only by the fact that they are physically in a boarding school, but otherwise engage in whatever they please. As far as can be judged from the excerpts I found from the book “Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing” by the school’s founder A.S. Neill, the earlier a child entered the school, the more eagerness they showed for activities: children infected by compulsory education needed time to regain their taste for learning.

Graduates of the school usually turned out to be people with an entrepreneurial streak, or geeks whom no one hindered from pursuing only what they enjoyed, and they continued to specialize in this in their adult lives. At the same time, no absolute geniuses graduated from the school: whether this is a characteristic of the educational methodology, or whether the modest number of students—no more than a hundred children of all ages—played a role.

Thus, I can suggest that this school was far ahead of its time: in the industrial era, a different type of graduate was in demand, but now it is precisely such people who are mainly needed. Ekaterina Schulmann discusses this, for example, in an interview with the publication “Takie Dela”. She describes the problems of the modern Russian school in light of changing trends in society—but does not provide recipes, because she does not know them. However, one of the recipes is boarding schools like Summerhill. Perhaps this is even better than homeschooling, because parents’ pedagogical abilities can be modest.

The main drawback of Summerhill is that such education cannot be mass-market. Therefore, the only real alternative to modern compulsory secondary education is simply the total abolition of its compulsory nature. In modern society, a person has an incredibly long childhood. During this time, the minimally necessary skills for further adult life are acquired even from aimless surfing on the internet, simple housework, and communicating with friends. Those who desire more will find extremely motivated teachers in various “Summerhills.” And for those who cannot afford such things, online courses will remain. The experience of Summerhill shows that when a child is left to their own devices, they eagerly absorb new information; it is enough for them to know that they will obtain their knowledge at the moment they seek it.

Of course, there are many professions for which compliance with strict standards is necessary. In a system of free education, it is sufficient that these standards be known. Those children interested in a profession will know exactly what to achieve, and once they master the required amount of knowledge, they will simply take an open exam. No state regulations are needed for this; professional standards are ultimately dictated by employers.

Summerhill school

Radically reworked the donations page

Today is a day of serious upheavals: the Russian government has resigned, the US Congress has sent impeachment documents for the president to the Senate, and I have completely rewritten the donations page.

Since the project is anonymous, collecting donations for it has its specifics: money mostly arrives in bitcoins, but I have been repeatedly asked to provide the possibility of payments in fiat as well. Rejoice, a method has been found, and the description is provided.

Topping up a Lightning wallet has now become very simple, fast, and cheap, managed by a new concise Telegram bot.

Previously, various ways of acquiring and using crypto were described across as many as four different pages; now all key things are grouped directly on the “Donations” page, and only the purchase of bitcoins has been left as separate text just in case as an optional supplement.

Mechanics of Freedom, chapters 2.17 and 2.18

Finishing the second part of The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman.

Pollution. This section discusses what measures to reduce government regulation of harmful emissions could lead to an improved environmental situation and certainly to a fairer system of responsibility for pollution.

Fending off the friends of socialism. In this final chapter of the book’s second part, Friedman fires off several arguments demonstrating the fairer nature of capitalism as opposed to socialism. None of them are extensive enough for a separate chapter, which is likely why they were collected this way. The text examines arguments regarding which distribution mechanism ensures greater equality, which society is less prone to corruption, where working conditions are better, and which system is less critically dependent on ideal people.

Containing the stationary bandit, a discussion. Hopefully, the end.

Bitarch’s Column

Holon Synergetic has published an article criticizing the deterrence doctrine, which we write about periodically. Let’s clarify some points.

1) One should not confuse the deterrence doctrine with terrorism. DD is a strategy for increasing the costs of initiating aggression. Methods for increasing costs may not involve the use of physical violence at all. Perhaps Holon has not read all of our articles on DD and missed this one. If DD is non-violent, it is harder for the state to slap a terrorist label on libertarians.

2) No wunderwaffen (robo-bees, genetically modified viruses, and especially doomsday weapons) are required for DD. Relying on wunderwaffen is by no means a libertarian strategy, as they are extremely complex, expensive, and will be available to few (meaning these people will be able to coerce others, ultimately recreating the status quo). For a stable free society according to Hirschleifer, a balance of violence potential (BVP) is needed; that is, weapons and deterrence strategies must be extremely simple and accessible to the maximum number of people.

3) For deterrence weapons, unlike weapons for classical wars, the “shell and armor” competition is practically inapplicable. Unacceptable damage can be inflicted in a million different ways, and new ones are constantly appearing. It is not for nothing that after the appearance of nuclear weapons, people began to talk about nuclear deterrence, rather than the development of a nuclear bomb neutralizer.

To protect against each type of deterrence weapon, separate “armor” is needed. For example, if the deterring party has ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and micro-drones, to intercept a retaliatory strike, one must have air defense/missile defense for each type, and with a large margin. So many ways to cause pain can be devised that even the nearly boundless US military budget would not be enough for defense.

4) An excursion into the history of medieval proto-panarchies shows that the demand for such institutions has existed for a long time, and now the theory is better developed and the technological level is higher. Furthermore, it is not necessary to involve the entire society in DD. Even a few will create a positive externality for others, as the example of the Femgericht perfectly demonstrates.

5) Regarding universal transparency, a standalone deterrence strategy can also be created on its basis. A libertarian jurisdiction might have no weapons for a retaliatory strike against state facilities at all, only many cameras and streaming to the network (to a server that is not subject to censorship and via a channel that cannot be suppressed—for example, Elon Musk’s Starlink, which uses a narrow beam). If a stationary bandit attempts to attack this jurisdiction, the broadcast of the attack to the network with all its juicy moments will deal a blow to the legitimacy of the government (tolerance for violence is currently extremely low, and various human rights activists will begin to undermine the careers of those who ordered the attack). Residents of such a libertarian jurisdiction would not need weapons more complex than household items—only to make the picture more colorful, otherwise the brief “they flew in and rounded them up” show will not gain a critical mass of views.

A similar strategy was successfully used by American black civil rights activists in the 1950s. Black activists sat in seats for whites on buses, refused to give them up at the request of the conductor, and the police arrested them. Public organizations often paid their fines to multiply the number of participants in such actions. Such cases were actively covered in the media, and irritation toward officials supporting segregation began to grow in society. Eventually, the supporters of segregation had to give in.

Rosa Parks, pioneer of trolling bus companies and segregation laws

Discussion on the stationary bandit and the doctrine of deterrence

I commented on Bitark’s column about promoting libertarianism through the theory of the stationary bandit to the effect that this is largely knocking on an open door: the bandit nature of the state is quickly recognized by any interlocutor, and from there, discussions begin about the lesser of two evils. In particular, in Russia, there is a popular theme of appealing to the experience of the nineties of the last century, when there was a dominance of nomadic bandits.

In response, Bitark suggests in his VKontakte public page turning to Hirshleifer’s 1995 research, which Professor Ausan referenced in his lecture “The Evolution of the Stationary Bandit”

All three conditions for the stability of anarchy according to Hirshleifer were not met in Russia in the nineties, meaning there was no libertarianism in the nineties.

To this, I am forced to state that Bitark is again knocking on an open door, and there is no question that there was libertarianism in the nineties, unless, of course, you are arguing with a troll. The point is that to promote libertarianism through the theory of the stationary bandit, one needs to present arguments on how to prevent the dominance of nomadic bandits after abolishing the stationary one.

Also interesting is the criticism from Vladimir Zolotorev, who quite rightly points out that a stationary bandit is more dangerous than a nomadic one, because he is capable of inflicting far greater damage on society, and at the same time ensures that society is left with no strength to fight any bandits whatsoever. He does not write it explicitly, but it follows from this premise that returning to the era of nomadic bandits is an acceptable price for society to pay for the destruction of the stationary bandit, although, ideally, the choice should be not between stationary and nomadic bandits, but between the presence of a bandit and their absence.

So, we seem to have agreed: the bandit is not needed, let’s get rid of him, we need to ensure a balance of violence potential in society, and we will have stable anarchy. But then, from a reader with the nickname Holon Synergetic, came criticism of the proposed mechanisms of the deterrence doctrine (the text arrived via private channels, and I am publishing it on Telegraph, which serves as a neutral platform).

The text is very long and difficult to perceive, so I will provide a brief explication:

1. As follows from Mazarra’s article on the deterrence doctrine, the translation of which I recently posted, the perception factor is very important for successful deterrence. The opponent must understand that when a potential victim shouts, “I’ll pull your eye over your ass if you take one more step,” the victim is actually ready to carry out their threats because they are backed into a corner and have no way out other than to unleash their arsenals for pulling eyes over asses. At the same time, the potential aggressor must by no means be put in an equally desperate position where they have no choice but to risk an eye and take a step forward. However, the more successfully such a doctrine is implemented, the more often threats will be a bluff—simply for reasons of economy.
2. The state also implements a deterrence doctrine regarding members of society who wish to destroy it. One of the most reliable ways for it is to take society hostage. Every member of society must understand that any threats or, God forbid, real actions against state representatives will only make things worse for a conditional city like Voronezh. Thus, the state invented the concept of extremism, and now extremists are to blame for any tightening of the screws; all these security measures are undertaken precisely to protect society from them. Rare successful actions against the state only confirm that extremism is not a fiction and state security measures are justified.
3. Attempts to propose increasingly technological weapons for fighting state representatives, such as micro-drones and the uberization of violence, will lead to the state starting to protect citizens from micro-drones and uber-violence with great pleasure, and for this, completely totalitarian methods of control over all aspects of life will be required. In the limit, this arms race leads to a situation where doomsday weapons become available to everyone, and then it’s just coffin, coffin, cemetery, game over.
4. As a dessert, there is a historical excursion into medieval Saxony, where something very close to my described concept of uber-retribution was successfully practiced. Nevertheless, the system did not survive its time, like all other medieval elements of panarchy, and gave way to the state monopoly on judgment and punishment. The author suggests thinking about whether such an outcome was inevitable.

The main conclusion I would draw from this tangle of arguments is the following consideration. No single doctrine is a panacea. The state is in the minds. This means that although in some cases the problem of the state can be successfully simplified by cutting off particularly obstructive heads or the threat of such decapitation, the decisive importance still lies with the means of indoctrination in freedom. These, in turn, must be selected individually.

Mechanics of Freedom, Chapters 3.7 and 5.8

In honor of the US-Iran war that never actually started, which for some reason was predicted to have the status of a world war, I am publishing an extraordinary translation of two chapters from David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, dedicated to the problem of the army and defense in a stateless society.

National Defense: A Serious Problem. In this chapter, written shortly after the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops, national defense is considered from the perspective of the economics of public goods; much attention is paid to why the free-rider effect is so pronounced in this sector, and the conclusion is drawn that although there are some prerequisites for a stateless society to be able to defend itself, if it turns out in practice that this is impossible without some minimal state concerned exclusively with defense issues, the “witcher” is ready to accept this lesser evil.

A Serious Problem, Part II. Forty years later, Friedman returned to this topic, and this time he is far more optimistic. The chapter advocates for the “haven’t served, aren’t a man” approach (which girls should also exhibit) and other totalitarian trinkets, because totalitarianism is when everything is done voluntarily, for free, and with songs. At the curtain, the author also skeptically smirked regarding Iran’s military potential, which formally aligns the topic with the agenda of early 2020.