Life, Love, and Liberty

I just sent some of my cash to the Crossroads Infoshop and Radical Bookstore. I am worried about whether it’ll survive or not, so I am doing a post to solict donations for them.

Please consider donating to them. You can find a link to the donation page on the site.

LabourStart informed me of two important things today.

And I quote:

ZIMBABWE: UNION LEADERS ARRESTED

Unions around the world are condemning the arrests yesterday of Lovemore Motombo and Wellington Chibebe, respectively President and General Secretary of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). The two trade union leaders were charged with “inciting people to rise against the government and reporting falsehoods about people being killed” in speeches given on May Day.

The International Trade Union Confederation’s statement is here:

http://www.ituc-csi.org/spip.php?article2107

The IUF is calling for messages of protest to be sent to the Mugabe regime:

http://www.iuf.org/den5018

And the Education International is concerned about rising violence directed against teachers in Zimbabwe, noting that many teachers in rural areas are being killed, maimed, tortured and abused. Read more here:

http://www.ei-ie.org/en/news/show.php?id=771&theme=rights&country=zimbabwe

I haven’t been following the recent events in Zimbabwe, but I know a repressive action when I see one. And these arrests are most definitely a cause for concern. I urge people to investigate the incidents.

You should also consider this message:

BURMA: UNIONS APPEAL FOR HELP FOLLOWING CYCLONE

Unions have begun to raise money to support the Burmese people following the catastrophic cyclone which hit the country several days ago. Here are links you can follow to donate in your country.

USA:
http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/05/06/help-provide-relief-to-burmese-workers/

UK:
http://www.tuc.org.uk/international/tuc-14740-f0.cfm

Australia:
http://www.apheda.org.au/news/1210217214_29405.html

If your national trade union center is raising money, let us know and we’ll publish the link on LabourStart.

Show these folks that mutual aid can work!

You might be tired of hearing about pain, death, and evil by now. And if you’re not, then there’s no need to worry. I’ll have plenty to say on those topics in the future.

In the meantime, you should go listen to the sweet sounds of The Jackson Five. My favorite song is “I Want You Back”.

In reading this, I ask that people please understand the horror of what I went through. I was literally locked up, and at the mercy of doctors complicit in a psycharistic-state alliance. All I wanted was to go home, and I had to spend nearly all of a day waiting for them to approve my transfer to the hospital that my psycharistist is connected to. If I had not been working with him, then they may have held me for a longer period of time.

I’ve prefaced it with two quotes.

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”

~ Ayn Rand

“Of all social theories Anarchism alone steadfastly proclaims that society exists for man, not man for society. The sole legitimate purpose of society is to serve the needs and advance the aspiration of the individual. Only by doing so can it justify its existence and be an aid to progress and culture.

The political parties and men savagely scrambling for power will scorn me as hopelessly out of tune with our time. I cheerfully admit the charge. I find comfort in the assurance that their hysteria lacks enduring quality. Their hosanna is but of the hour.

Man’s yearning for liberation from all authority and power will never be soothed by their cracked song. Man’s quest for freedom from every shackle is eternal. It must and will go on.”

~ Emma Goldman

I now know the meaning of confinement much more acutely. I now know the state’s destructive power much more personally. And I have had my convictions against coercion and anti-individualist ethics strengthened.

There is no justification for a therapy based on guns — metaphorically, of course — and bondage. In the future, I refuse to deal with any therapist or social worker who refuses to renounce their monstrous “right” to have me civilly committed. Whether they know it or not, they are my enemies. They are the people who accept the fundamental ideas that are destroying America and other parts of the world. They prop up the legitimacy of the creeds of morally mandatory self-sacrifice, the nationalization of human beings, and the exercise of coercive domination in the name of benevolence and charity.

Don’t you see the connection between the mentality that can justify the military draft, and the mentality that can justify coercive commitment? Both of them are based on the fundamental conceptual premise that human beings do not belong to themselves, but to the society that they happen to live in. And it doesn’t change a damn thing when you dress it up in the language of helping the person being coerced. There is no equal power balance between the psycharistist and the person on the receiving end, so the talk of consent is all a sham. Most likely designed to help monsters sleep at night.

And they are monsters. Never forget it, and don’t let a Christian sense of “love thy neighbor” make you feel guilt for being profoundly angry at them.

In light of what they help make possible, they have earned it. And the path forward for the world is away from their anti-individualist ethics. The world needs an intellectual revolution in favor of the supremacy of individual rights and individual thought. The friend of liberty and individual rights is simultaneously the foe of the racially motivated lynch mob, the tyrannical employer who mandates intrusive drug testing, and the vice cop who helps destroy the life of a sex worker. And this promotion of individual self-determination should make no distinctions between private or public tyranny.

When the peoples of the world become consistent friends of liberty, then I will dance and make merry, until I can do so no more. Please consider joining us today! Not for my sake, but for your own.

(I threw in that point about opposing both private and public tyranny, because I want the libertarians to see that the oppression of employees by private employers should be met by us with a demand for social justice. In other words: the libertarian philosophy should be connected to a wider philosophical totality concerned with individual self-realization, rather than just starting from the premise that the state must be opposed)

Well, my updates haven’t been daily lately — and I didn’t have enough quotes to keep up the quote of the day feature. I do want to get back to that eventually, but I’ve been suffering a major depression. I even had a suicide attempt that got me involuntarily confined to a mental hospital for a good part of a day.

Needless to say, I wasn’t very pleased. I’ll have a beautiful and passionate denunciation of involuntary commitment written soon. I am hoping it will make me feel happier, because I absolutely adore passionate writing!

Alix Lakehurst of Chicago was kind enough to quote me in one of her recent posts.

Thanks! Alix.

By the way, I’ll be revising and potentially expanding my comment on there in a future post.

Tell me what you think, folks! It’s not done yet, but I am looking to finish it sometime this weekend or next week.

        Sex workers face violence from multiple directions. They not only end up dealing with abusive clients, but they also have to worry about the violence of the state being brought to bear against them. Every year, the violence against sex workers is spoken out against, and this year was no different. The annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers took place last December 17^th. This report was written to bring you the scoop on what went down last year.

        First off, I want to thank all the following organizations for being sponsors. The respective groups were:

1. SWOP (Sex Workers Outreach Project)

2. Desiree Alliance

3. SWANK (Sex Workers Action New York)

4. Scarlet Alliance

5. Stella

6. ESPU (Erotic Service Provider’s Union)

7. SWIRL (Sex Worker’s Internet Radio Lounge)

8. Spread

9. PONY (Prostitutes of New York)

10. Venus Envy

11. Charis

12. Star Light Ministries

13. Lady Monster

14. SWAN (Sex Worker’s Advocacy Network)

SWAN is a coalition of groups from Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. It includes:

Aksion Plus, Albania, www.aksionplus.net
HESED, Bulgaria, www.hesed.bg
Bliss Without Risk, Czech Republic, http://www.rozkosbezrizika.cz/01_htm/100_ENGLISH.htm
MPEE, Hungary, www.prostitualtak.hu
Kovcheg, Kazakhstan, fsz@mail.ru
Tais Plus, Kyrgyzstan, gkurmanova@yandex.ru
Dia+Logos, Latvia, dialogs@diacentrs.lv
I Can Live, Lithuania, www.galiugyventi.lt
HOPS, Macedonia, www.hops.org.mk
Tada, Poland, www.tada.pl
ARAS-Romanian Association Against AIDS, Romania, www.arasnet.ro
Humanitarian Action, Russia, www.humanitarianaction.org
Siberian Initiative, Russia, http://www.sibin.ru
Jazas. Serbia, www.jazas.net
Odyseus, Slovakia, www.ozodyseus.sk
All Ukrainian Association on Harm Reduction, Ukraine, www.uhra.org.ua

(I was able to copy and paste the above list from the SWAN press release on December 17th)

        The events that took place that day occurred in multiple venues. They were not only limited to the United States of America – my current country of residence. And one of them even occurred online – the Sex Worker’s Outreach Project held an online conference.

The essays of Voltairine De Cleyre are wonderfully absorbing, and I have added her to the list of writers whose style I would love to emulate. She combines rigorous logic with some of the most beautiful sentimental and emotional writing that I have ever been privileged enough to read.

Go forth and read Sex Slavery.

The Information Clearing House net digest needs more financial support, so you should consider subscribing. You can reach the subscription page by clicking on this link.

You can’t make this stuff up sometimes, honestly. And I quote:

U.S. Spies Want to Find Terrorists in World of Warcraft

By Ryan Singel

Be careful who you frag. Having eliminated all terrorism in the real world, the U.S. intelligence community is working to develop software that will detect violent extremists infiltrating World of Warcraft and other massive multiplayer games, according to a data-mining report from the Director of National Intelligence.

The Reynard project will begin by profiling online gaming behavior, then potentially move on to its ultimate goal of “automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world.”

* The cultural and behavioral norms of virtual worlds and gaming are generally unstudied. Therefore, Reynard will seek to identify the emerging social, behavioral and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming environments. The project would then apply the lessons learned to determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world.

* If it shows early promise, this small seedling effort may increase its scope to a full project.

Reynard will conduct unclassified research in a public virtual world environment. The research will use publicly available data and will begin with observational studies to establish baseline normative behaviors.

The publicly available report — which was mandated by Congress following earlier concerns over data-mining programs — also mentions several other data-mining initiatives. These include:

* Video Analysis and Content Extraction - software to automatically identify faces, events and objects in video

* Tangram - A system that wants to create surveillance and threat warning system that evaluates known threats and finds unknown threats to issue warnings ahead of an attack

* Knowledge Discovery and Dissemination - This tool is reminiscent of the supposedly-defunct Total Information Awareness program. It seeks to access disparate databases to find patterns of known bad behavior. The program plans to work with domestic law enforcement and Homeland Security.

The report gives no indication why the find-a-terrorist cell in Sims project is called Reynard, though that is a traditional trickster figure in literature.

Photo: CyberExtruder”

Call me crazy, but this seems like something straight out of 1984 — more or less. It feels like a long time since I read that book, but I may have to read it again.

I have fond memories of the first read; very fond memories.