I am looking forward with great anticipation to the recording of stylist Fariza Rodriguez’s lecture “Power dressing” about the influence of a person’s appearance on people’s perception, and how to use this, particularly for the Russian opposition. The lecture will be this coming Sunday, August 4, in St. Petersburg, so if anyone is from there, or the surrounding area, you can try to snag the last remaining spots.
The lecture is organized by the Tea Club; all registration is handled through them.
The action on July 27, of course, looked quite inspiring. Even if nothing more remarkable happens until the elections, and opposition candidates are still not allowed to run, the pro-government candidates still have little to look forward to in these elections. Moreover, it is quite likely that this will lead to changes in the election law: signatures may be allowed via government services, election deposits may be brought back, the collection threshold may be significantly lowered, or graphological expertise may be abolished — in short, the authorities will have to take measures to curb such scandals in the future, as it is too costly for them otherwise.
So, the Muscovites did well; it is only fitting that, as residents of the capital of a highly centralized state, they show increased opposition — and they did, while simultaneously demonstrating civilized behavior.
Now let’s talk a bit about tactics. Honestly, the provided snippet of the manual reminded me of War and Peace: Die erste Kolonne marschiert… die zweite Kolonne marschiert — the battle plan for Austerlitz. It is impossible to ensure a clear, disciplined behavior of large masses of people without full-scale combat coordination. A conditional National Guard can train for a long time to form their little boxes, run in lines, and so on. For people who have not trained in advance, only the simplest tactics work, such as “let’s go there and block the road,” “link arms,” “move through alleys to such-and-such a square,” and so on.
A person who comes to an unauthorized action can be quite inventive in terms of external representation; they came to create a picture and get impressions, which is what they are doing. They understand the overall goal of the action quite well, are able to identify provocateurs, and are generally very motivated — it is important not to waste their enthusiasm on meaningless nonsense. Using July 27 as an example, it is clear that without leaders, people stirred up the entire city center for several hours, but as soon as the police released the “guests of honor” and the latter began giving orders, everyone ended up localized in one square, surrounded and arrested.
Of course, if the protest becomes multi-day, people will allow themselves increasingly complex coordination and division of labor. Relatively disciplined groups of more or less constant composition and similar things will appear.
If you look at the protests in Yerevan, there was a headquarters, but it doesn’t seem like they dealt closely with tactical issues like “who leads people to which street to block traffic”; rather, they issued general appeals within some kind of campaign plan. In Russia, one cannot rely on the existence of a headquarters, because anyone who sticks their head out will be immediately imprisoned. Therefore, a much more decentralized tactic without hard clashes is forced here, until the security forces are exhausted. Only then can conditional protest leaders be used in that capacity to conduct negotiations.
And, of course, it is important for the protesters to maintain the loyalty of the passive part of Muscovites, because constant street protests in a large city inevitably create inconvenience. A war between the authorities and society is one thing, but an intra-civil conflict is something entirely different, and it is not worth letting it get to that.
I slightly supplemented the day before yesterday’s article with the response to Alexander Elesev. The supplement includes an advertisement for Alexander Litreev’s new project and a mysterious wish not to eat yellow snow.
I am also duplicating here from the article a mention of collecting ideas on applying the doctrine of deterrence to the state.
If you have fresh, interesting ideas regarding what non-violent threats and mechanisms for their implementation could be used by a citizen against government officials of various ranks, please share them in the comments or via private message. Authors of the most successful ideas can expect a reward in bitcoins.
Also, since the opportunity arose, I got to know the Dobroum project better, which turned out to be a quite interesting phenomenon, and I would like to tell you more about it.
Like my project, Dobroum is built around its own website, but it has significantly greater penetration into various social networks, of which the most developed and interesting is the YouTube channel (almost 20 thousand subscribers). The website states that Alexander was inspired to create the project by Freedomain Radio — a channel by Canadian blogger Stephan Molyneux, who is quite scandalous in the English-speaking world and is only occasionally mentioned by Mikhail Svetov in the Russian-speaking one. I am practically unfamiliar with the content of Molyneux’s ideas, except for a very laconic Wikipedia page, so I will not attempt to judge the continuity between Elesev and Molyneux in ideological terms.
Alexander himself pushes two main ideas in his videos and articles:
As his primary method, Alexander uses “reasoning from first principles,” in other words, deduction in the spirit of Rothbard. At the same time, as we see from the IQ case, he tends to trust research in the natural sciences and draw conclusions about the desired organization of society based on them, which is dangerously close to various scientistic social engineering practices so popular in the 20th century. Ideas of spontaneous orders and an evolutionary approach are not close to him, as far as I can judge.
Alexander lives in the USA, so this point should be kept in mind when he discusses Russian events. On the other hand, his videos concerning American problems specifically are very interesting.
In general, I subscribed to his YouTube channel, but I decided not to subscribe to the Telegram — there is too much ephemeral content there for my taste, and I am already close to the limit of my perception capabilities; I have to be very careful with subscriptions so as not to spend too much energy on scrolling. But of course, you decide for yourselves. In any case, among Russian-language channels, this is a fairly unique and quite pleasant example of such a slightly naive liberal-conservatism.
Bitarch, Ancap-tyan
Every time we mention the deterrence doctrine, it sparks a discussion. The first time, we spoke with the host of the Antistate channel, and now it has caught the attention of Alexander Elesev, the host of the Dobroum channel. Thus, the idea is controversial, and it is worth continuing to provide clarity, but not for too long, so that the reader does not get bored.
Alexander is far from the first person to voice this reproach: “You intend to fight the state; it’s useless, you will be declared terrorists and destroyed like the militants in Chechnya.”
However, the deterrence doctrine has nothing to do with war. If it can be used with the word “war” at all, then only as “cold.” The confrontation between the USSR and the USA in the 20th century, often called the “Cold War,” was in fact a manifestation of DD.
War is a conflict between several parties, the goal of which is to impose one’s will on the opponent. War is generally conducted by violent means (even if it is a cyberwar, there is an infringement on property). War can be waged until a peace treaty is concluded or until one of the parties completely loses its agency.
Deterrence is also a situation of conflict, but the main goal of deterrence is to make the use of aggressive violence disadvantageous for the opponent. Deterrence in itself is not violence, but only the threat of some damage, which may not be associated with violence at all, if we are talking, for example, about reputational damage. For example, you may not like that a gay couple is walking hand in hand, and you may want to throw filth at them. If they are unarmed, you will easily do so and receive moral satisfaction. But if they are armed, besides moral satisfaction, you have a non-illusory chance of catching a bullet. Weighing the benefits and costs, you will likely prefer not to interfere in other people’s affairs and send the filth you carefully prepared where it belongs: down the drain. Also, you might decide not to stand in the way of even unarmed gays if the name of the previous attacker is currently being dragged through the mud on every corner in the most unpleasant way. In this case, the fear of non-violent punishment will work as a deterrence mechanism.
Another important difference between DD and war: as long as deterrence takes place, there are winners, but no losers. Everyone continues to live their life, without violence and coercion to act, because deterrence is coercion to inaction. In the case we are discussing, when a person carries out secession and unilaterally exits the jurisdiction of the state, he does not overthrow the government and does not call for its overthrow. He does not interact with the state at all and suggests that state representatives reciprocate.
Let’s imagine this situation as a game and draw a simple matrix that describes this game:
If the official does not hinder the secession, his loss is minimal: from slight irritation to dismissal. If he successfully hinders it, the gain is also minimal: from slight moral satisfaction to a professional reward. If a person does not care about deterring the state but encounters no opposition, his gain is maximal. If he has to take deterrence measures and no opposition occurs, the gain decreases. Finally, if the person suffered from state opposition, or the official suffered as a result of the realization of the threat stated by the person, they lose to the maximum, and roughly to the same extent.
What can we see from this matrix?
If the game is a one-time event, then the person, wishing to maximize gain, relies on luck and applies no measures to deter the state. The official, however, wishing to maximize gain, hinders the secession and receives a reward from superiors.
If the game is repeated time and again with the same or new players, then the person more and more often incurs additional costs and chooses the deterrence doctrine, and the official, fearing this circumstance more and more, more and more often closes their eyes to the secession, preferring a small loss to a large one.
Nevertheless, there will still be free riders in society who prefer not to take any measures. If the officials are sufficiently frightened, the bluff will work.
An example of a similar game is the interaction between citizens who have the possibility of concealed carry and criminals. A weapon works as a tool of deterrence, and in a society where a citizen has the right to armed self-defense, violent crimes decrease. At the same time, unarmed free riders benefit from such a positive externality as increased safety, without spending on weapons themselves — but only as long as there are not too many of them.
A gun is a very compact and convenient deterrence tool against a person or a small group of people, but not against the state. That is exactly why we propose various more or less successful options for protection from the state, available both to organizations like ECU and to individuals.
Based on theoretical calculations that do not contradict historical examples, we indicate that the optimal deterrence doctrine against the state is the threat to specific functionaries who make decisions or execute them.
It is quite rightly pointed out to us that if the threat looks too intimidating, the state figures may take the risk of being under attack for a while and begin preventive purges, in other words, start a war. Similarly, harsh opposition to low-level security forces can cause a feeling of solidarity with fallen comrades. To minimize the danger of such an outcome, we suggest, first, to maximize the anonymity of those carrying out the threats, and second, to make threats non-lethal whenever possible, emphasizing ridicule and other types of humiliation, or, in the worst case, property damage. Here, one really wants to refer to the project announced recently by Alexander Litreev with the very telling name Russian Elephant. Alexander regularly deanonymizes various offenders in power, and it seems he now intends to put this on a conveyor belt.
And if we are to delve into philosophical generalizations, then maxims such as “live and let live” and “do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself” are not just good wishes. These are lines from a safety manual, written, as usual, in blood. This is the same kind of life wisdom as “don’t eat yellow snow” (remade by domestic meme-makers into “don’t eat yellow snack,” with an obvious reference to the NAP) — and this wisdom appeared precisely because people have successfully practiced the deterrence doctrine for many centuries.
If you have fresh interesting ideas about what non-violent threats and mechanisms for their implementation could be applied by a citizen against state employees of various ranks, share them in the comments or via DM. Authors of the most successful ideas can expect a reward in bitcoins.
Inglikament Artzebantovsky-Bukht
You have listed three categories of people, of which the first and third would like to change the status quo (currently abortions are legal, and communists are not being thrown from helicopters into the ocean), while the second would wish to maintain it (voluntary intercourse with minors is already restricted). Libertarians are conducting a public campaign to change many things in society, and therefore need very broad public support. But the preferences of different people will inevitably differ, and the more actively you fight for the purity of the ranks, the less support you will have.
In this regard, I would like to recommend reading a post in an interesting channel run by anarchists who clearly have leftism in their history but have somewhat outgrown it (subscribe, by the way, the channel is good). The post analyzes behavioral strategies in conflict for a broad expansive social movement versus a hermetic sect. It notes a curious feature: expansive expansion is usually accompanied by fairly peaceful rhetoric, whereas sectarians are extremely aggressive in their rhetoric, even though their composition and numbers remain stagnant.
The libertarian movement is currently on the rise, so it will inevitably attract various freaks. There is no need to waste energy on internal sectarianism; it is more useful to focus on the unifying traits of your worldview. As for the pedo-hysteria, you can shrug your shoulders and say that personally you do not understand how one can distrust the personal preferences of teenagers so much and approve of state violence for victimless crimes, yet you are ready to cooperate with conservatives on the topic of lowering taxes and many other issues. This is a callback to my recent post, where I fantasized about how hypothetical American libertarians, without having a majority in Congress, nevertheless set the agenda and pass their laws by exploiting the contradictions between socialists and conservatives.
In short, if you have signed up for politics, be more flexible; unite around common interests, and you will have plenty of time to fight once you are in the parliament of the Beautiful Russia of the Future discussing a bill to abolish the age of consent. If you manage to gain broad enough support on this issue, you won’t need a helicopter.
In May, Bitarch and I on one side, and Ved Neumann on the other, debated the applicability of the deterrence doctrine to ensure the secession of individuals from the state. Here is a description of the doctrine, and here is a summary article, which also briefly recounts the course of the discussion.
A frequent criticism of the described doctrine was that it remains unknown whether the threat against the key functionaries of the aggressor state will actually be carried out, while the death of a citizen seeking secession could be very swift, leaving them no time to organize retribution. Moreover, if they openly insure themselves somewhere, a sad fate might await the insurance company as well, as a warning against fulfilling various anti-state contracts.
Therefore, today we will talk a bit about how a citizen can ensure the implementation of individual deterrence without putting any outsiders at risk.
The dead hand principle is a kind of threat against a potential aggressor that will be executed only if the potential victim perishes. The most vivid embodiment is a grenade with the pin pulled, held in the very much living hand of the potential victim. Their death will lead to the dead hand relaxing and an explosion occurring. Clearly, a threat based on this principle can be scaled quite arbitrarily, up to a system implementing the automatic launch of intercontinental nuclear missiles in the event of an attack by a potential adversary, without waiting for special commands from a potentially already destroyed command post.
One could fantasize about purely engineering solutions in the spirit of the 20th century that would provide such a threat scheme for a person against the state leadership—for example, by pre-mining residences, deploying rocket launchers, or programmed combat drones, but all this looks disproportionately expensive, clumsy, and unreliable. Our information age implies a slightly different style.
For example, with the appearance of bitcoins, decentralized death betting markets became quite feasible, which is a veiled form of a contract killing. The mechanism is roughly as follows.
On a website that accepts bets on certain events that may or may not happen in real life (for instance, implemented on the Augur protocol), a potential victim of state aggression can place a bet on the death of a certain government official. The size of the bet must be large enough to tempt someone to ensure that very death. The money is bet on the fact that this official already died on some day in the past, which is obviously untrue; therefore, when the official actually dies, this bet will lose, and the winner of the wager will receive it. After the bet is placed, a potential hitman only needs to choose a day to execute the order, bet that the target will die on that specific day, then commit the murder, wait for the oracles to notify the system, receive their winnings, and carefully cash them out. This wager is our grenade, but a dead hand mechanism must still be organized.
One could take a more sophisticated route and place another bet on the same market, this time on one’s own death. If this bet wins, it triggers a smart contract that then places the bet on the official’s death. But it could be simpler: a smart contract that places a bet on the official’s death is given a delayed launch and triggers if it does not receive a cancellation code in time. That’s it; now you can notify the official that, unfortunately, if I accidentally die, your precious life is in great danger, so you had better treat me with the utmost care.
Of course, the more complex the predictions the service allows, the more carefully and moderately the impact can be planned. For example, the trigger could be not only death, but also arrest, and the threat not only death, but the burning of a house, or some other non-lethal nuisance (the most elegant thing I’ve come across was an order to spray a powerful odorant in an official’s residence; a house thoroughly stinking of mercaptans is no longer fit for habitation or sale, yet no one dies even accidentally).
Naturally, to undertake these non-trivial measures, a person must be sufficiently wealthy, but this does not require exorbitant riches, so the task is quite manageable.
The “Daily Friedman” column is back with you! I am publishing the final tenth chapter of The Machinery of Freedom “I Want for Nothing”. In it, David Friedman discusses the harmful idea of designating a special class of needs that have infinite value, as this invalidates the entire concept of freedom.
A compiled file of the first part of the book in epub format will be ready in a while, but for now, the most impatient can read the text on the website.
I am posting the ninth chapter of The Machinery of Freedom, “Exploitation and Interest”. Here, David Friedman briefly explains what is wrong with the Marxist teaching about the exploitation of workers’ labor by capitalists, why charging interest is legitimate, and why an inheritance should go to the heir rather than being distributed equally to everyone.
Only one chapter remains until the end of the first part; its translation has already been sent and only needs to be edited. Then, the first part will be posted as a single file for download, and we will move forward. The process is moving briskly; send your money to the wallet 1AFkD2bazCs5YZBBrSD7HsRMWLmRbg6QBo so that it continues cheerfully as well.
If anyone has a publishing house in mind to release a small print run of The Machinery of Freedom on paper, you can start making inquiries in advance to discuss the details, so that upon completion of the translation, no time is wasted on negotiations about publication.
I present for your consideration the translation of the eighth chapter of David Friedman’s treatise “The Machinery of Freedom”: “Monopoly II: State Monopoly for Fun and Profit”. While the previous chapter provided an overview of the types of monopolies, this one describes in more detail some of the mechanisms by which state monopolies are formed and maintained. The illustrative material, naturally, refers to the USA, but the mechanisms are universal enough.
Also, unexpectedly for myself, I have entered a social network as alien to me as VKontakte. One of the readers decided to open a mirror of my channel there. So, if you feel most comfortable exactly there (it’s convenient to comment, share, and all the things for which fines are later imposed and criminal cases are opened) — you are welcome.
Oleja)
Why be modest? Let’s take not just a rich country, but the richest one, after all, it’s so pleasant to talk about other people’s money—any socialist would appreciate that.
So, the USA. The fantastic premise is that socialists left the Democratic Party and conservatives left the Republicans, founding their own parties. The remnants of the two parties merged into the United America party, colloquially known as unionists, while many people defected to the libertarians. In 2032, each of the four parties puts forward its own candidate for president, and a libertarian wins by a tiny margin. Seats in Congress and the Senate are distributed roughly equally among the four parties; the Supreme Court, due to the greater rigidity of its formation mechanism, is represented primarily by unionists diluted with conservatives.
Disagreements between socialists and conservatives reach such a scale that conservatives are ready to vote blindly for any libertarian bill on cutting government spending and deregulation just to spite the socialists, while socialists just as zealously support any libertarian bill regarding the expansion of personal rights to spite the conservatives. Everyone except the conservatives supports measures to expand free trade. Pairs of parties barely manage to push through cuts in defense spending and the abolition of the minimum wage, and so on. In short, thanks to such a fortunate layout and the talent of their party organizer, the libertarians steer the agenda, even though they lack an actual majority.
So where will the budget funds go amidst such active spending cuts, booming economic growth, and the sale of federal property, which, although not massive, is still not insignificant? First and foremost, of course, toward paying off the enormous thirty-trillion national debt. Once the national debt is paid off, a constitutional amendment is adopted prohibiting the creation of new debt, and the Federal Reserve is abolished. After that, since the debts are paid, federal taxes are abolished in full accordance with the constitution: each state supports its own senators and jointly rents the office where the senate meets; each party supports its own congressmen and jointly rents the congress office; the places of embassies are taken by the offices of insurance companies serving the interests of their clients abroad; the armed forces work as hires for logistics companies, protecting maritime trade, as well as for oil companies, protecting rigs in Venezuela and other Sudans, and so on. States keep their own taxes, using them as they please: Commifornium goes wild with social welfare, Alaska with national parks, Vermont subsidizes schools, and New Hampshire simply places a huge porcupine-shaped piggy bank in the center of the state capital, and anyone who wishes drops in as much as they like, taking a selfie and posting it to Instagram—and once a year, the state government breaks the piggy bank, counts the money on camera, and based on the amount collected, adopts the budget for the following year.
In short, once you break it, you build it. If it’s possible to cut spending, then cutting income is no problem at all; you don’t have to worry about that.
