Gangsters in Blue

My first audio commentary for the Center for a Stateless Society. Check it out, over there.

Tweet, tweet! I'm a dangerous anarchist bird!

I’ll probably be producing a couple of these per week, with Brad Spangler backing me up both as writer and as alternate reader.

It’s a bit creepy voicing this, given the arrests of Elliot Madison and Michael Wallschlaeger, and the raid on Madison’s home, since I was doing much the same thing for a couple of evenings: listening to Pittsburgh-area police scanner traffic over the internet, and repeating interesting information to several relevant hashtags on Twitter.

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I am absolutely tickled to learn that I was “largely responsible for organizing the riot[s]” in Pittsburgh around the G-20 summit and related protests. From Flopping Aces, crossposted from Peter Lajoie’s blog:

Another Anarchist who was largely responsible for organizing the riot from Twitter was Mike Gogulski of nostate.com. A self-described, “Future stateless person,” Gogulski is an unabashed anarchist who no longer lives or works in the U.S. but has vowed to overthrow the current system of society. Through Twitter on his cellphone he was able to coordinate fellow protesters’ movements by tweeting where police officers were, where they were going, and what they were planning to do. Anyone who wanted to see these tweets just had to look at a feed entitled “#resistg20.”

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is indeed possible to exhibit astounding levels of cluelessness by picking up a few scattered bits of information, and then doing your own little paint-by-numbers in between.

For Peter’s benefit, I’ll point out a few things wrong with what he wrote:

Rioting policeman assaults citizen at G20 protest in Pittsburgh. Photo by Foo Conner.

• The “riots” were almost entirely police riots. With the exception of some property damage (reported to have been largely caused by a single person), nearly all of the violence was either committed or instigated by police. No shock here. Protest is now a national security threat.
• I don’t have a “cellphone”. We call them “mobile phones” over here in Slovakia.
• I wasn’t a protester.
• I don’t do vows.
• I’m already a stateless person.
• I don’t know anyone who was involved in the protests.
• If I’ve ever been to Pittsburgh, it was only because the city was en route to someplace else.

What I was doing for a large number of hours was monitoring a Pittsburgh-area police/fire/EMS radio scanner linked up to an internet audio feed, and then repeating information I heard there to Twitter. For example:

• # (scanner) “All TAC Teams: Meet @ 5th & Oakland Ave” #resistg20 #g20 6:14 AM Sep 26th
• # Corrected: (scanner) arrest reported at Bouquet and Forbes #g20 #resistg20 6:13 AM Sep 26th
• # (scanner) arrest reported at (uncopy) and Forbes #g20 #resistg20 6:13 AM Sep 26th
• # (scanner) “hammer and anvil up on tennyson … clear the tower” #g20 #resistg20 6:10 AM Sep 26th
• # (scanner) one SWAT commander called “Oscar Mike”, code for “off air, in action for a while” http://bit.ly/2h2or4 #g20 #resistg20 6:08 AM Sep 26th
• # (scanner) “Waiting for booking team for 9 people now” (loc unknown) #g20 #resistg20 6:05 AM Sep 26th
• # (scanner) “Large crowd forming at Oakland and Forbes” “Bringing LRAD down for dispersal” #g20 #resistg20 6:01 AM Sep 26th

And so on. Some of these tweets were picked up by others on the #resistg20 hashtag and who had followed me, and repeated to others, some of whom may have been subscribing to their tweets or hashtags via their mobile, er, cell phones.

Who knows what effect any of this had. Hopefully, getting information on police movements, plans and locations out via Twitter to a few folks on the scene helped some avoid getting gassed, beaten, subjected to head-splitting sonic weapons emissions and/or arrested.

Related posts

• Rejecting Authority at Police State Checkpoint (0)
• Rejecting Authority at Police State Checkpoint #2 (0)
• University of Pittsburgh student: “With the police … you’re supposed to feel safe.” (3)
• Horrors of the present (4)
• About (0)

Feeling safer yet, America?

How’s that Obama-charged hope working out for you?

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Pittsburgh Indymedia G20 channel.

Twitter users to follow: @g20actionalert, @resistg20. Hashtags: #resistg2o, #reportg20

Live streaming police/fire/EMS G-20 ops radio traffic from Pittsburgh area here.

G-20 protesters in Pittsburgh 24 September 2009

Resistg20 organizing hub, comms hub. (Lovely, one of their Twitter accounts has been suppressed)

Recent tweets from @resistg20:

1. 40 cops, w/ bus, headed towards friendship park #resistg20

2. From #Pittsburgh to #Greece, fuck the police.

3. A comms facility was raided, but we are still fully operational please continue to submit reports #resistg20

4. RT @heidilore: RT @resistg20 37th and butler, police deployed smoke and gas #resistg20 #g20

5. denny and liberty has 200 protesters rallying #resistg20 #g20

6. Standoff with pigs #resistg20

7. 37th and butler, police deployed smoke and gas #resistg20 #g20

8. TEAR GAS

9. police threatening chemical dispersal at 38th and liberty #resistg20

10. police have given a dispersal order at 36th and liberty and no can hear the order #resistg20 #g20

11. g20pgh: police have given a dispersal order at 36th and liberty and no can hear the order

12. march heading south on 39th #resistg20 #g20

13. no way to get from “strip district” to downtown. use 16th st bridge #resistg20

14. Water cannons on lm38th and liberty. Be careful #resistg20

15. Please remember to Call in your reports to 412-567-1420 as we are having trouble receiving sms. Good luck out there! #resistg20

16. student march has ended at arsenal park #resistg20 #g20

17. student march is making a left onto liberty, police helicopter overhead and cops on the streets watching #resistg20 #g20

18. student march is making a left onto liberty, police helicopter over head and cops on the streets #students and #workers SHUT THE CITY DOWN

19. Police are staging at 21st and smallman near arsenal park #resistg20

20. police staging at 21st and smallman near arsenal park #resistg20 #g20

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It’s not often I feel compelled to write a book review, but reading Gene Callahan’s Puck was quite an adventure!

Described simply as “A Novel” in its subtitle, Puck is really something quite more than that. A fictional story, yes, but also a tour of some of the “weirder” aspects of Gene’s universe — and mine.

Pick, pock, puck!

I won’t try to describe much that goes on, save to say that the story takes places in two parallel(?) universes, and sometimes in the spaces between them. You got your swords ‘n’ wizards fantasy adventure, you got your romance, you got your mystery and intrigue, you got your modern psychological drama, you got your science fiction — everything, indeed, that one could ask for in a modern novel.

But there’s more…

Puck is a book on several different levels. It’s loaded with references to mythology, anarchism, religious traditions, history, the odder bits of physics and a whole bunch of classical literature to boot. I consider myself a fairly learned guy, but Mr. Gene has been treading this planet a bit longer than I have, and his learning shines through brilliantly. To paraphrase another great novelist: this book is like a mirror; if a monkey looks in, no Korzybski looks out.

From page 105:

[Doc and Sophia] shared several passion-filled years, but by the time Doc was finishing graduate school — when the loudest political voices in the Village were proclaiming that AIDS was a government plot against the gay and minority communities, and were fighting pitched battles with the police over control of Tompkin’s Square Park — he had grown disillusioned with what he had come to regard as the posturing of bored, rich kids. It wasn’t that he had no sympathy for their grievances, but rather that he now perceived their activism as more a palliative for their own boredom and frustration than as a real attempt to address the injustices that were their purported motivation. He suspected that their protests were a contemporary manifestation of the same impulse that had motivated Uncle Franz’s Cabala studies. The radicals he knew seemed to believe that if only they could arrange their political slogans in accord with some occult formula, then the ruling elite peacefully would release the reins of power, liberate the masses, dismantle the military-industrial complex, and sow flower gardens over the obsolete missile silos.

Read with caution, ready to remember just how flimsy your paradigms are, and just how liable they are to slip, like flimsy masks, off the face of reality.

Puck you! Puck me! Puck everyone!

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At least for the moment, Jason Talley still has Twitter access.

I’m unlikely to be able to follow this closely, so follow Jason on Twitter (@JDTalley) and Pete (@peteeyre) if you haven’t already. Also, tracking the #MHD tag on Twitter is a way to get the news, especially if the boys go silent.

From Jason’s tweets, reverse-chronological:

1. We will now be escorted into a new holding area. This time it’s the U.S. government. 16 minutes ago
2. Reinforcements have been called. Homeland Security vehicle is now blocking MARV. 19 minutes ago
3. U.S. Border Guard told @peteeyre to stop recording or his camera would be confiscated. 21 minutes ago
4. Now we are getting hassled by U.S. Border Guards in Detroit. #MHD 23 minutes ago
5. Canadian border guards are tossing our motorhome again. I just cleaned it. about 2 hours ago
6. We’re in the no man’s land between Detroit and Windsor, Canada… on accident. Wrong turns suck. about 2 hours ago

Gak.

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I’m really overdue for this.

I want to express HUGE gratitude and give big, big thanks to the people of the Language of Liberty Institute and the others who made the LLI Liberty and Entrepeneurship Camp in Martin, Slovakia possible.

You are:

• Mary Lou Gutscher — Top organizatrix, cruise director, mama bear
• Glenn Cripe — Flow steerer, piano man, inspirational focus
• Andy Eyschen — Co-[redacted], [redacted] of [redacted] and [redacted]
  
• Radovan Ďurana — Semi-detached Master of All Things, glue man
• Dušan Viluda — Súdruh, kolaborant, opatrovateľ, spolupracovník a kamarát všestkým

At the camp, I made a bunch of new friends, met several new co-conspirators, a collaborator, a couple of secret society bothers, at least two business partners and a handful of new comrades.

None of this would have been possible without your dedication and perseverance. I have great luck to have been able to ride along in the wake of the energy you mustered and deployed, and to have thus made such connections.

Major thanks to all of you for making the week in Martin something amazing — something brilliant.

Milý súdruh Dušan! Okrem toho, že Ti srdečne ďakujem, poprosil by som, aby si mohol viezť moje poďakovanie aj Barborke, ktorá nás dala takú dokonalú a povznášajúcu demonštráciu slobody (i naozaj šikovnosti a zručnosti) v akcii! Zároveň ďakujem Tvojmu synovi aj ostatným zamestnancom hotela. Súčasne, uvidíme sa, kedy môžeme sa rozprávať na tému toho obchodého nápadu… že?

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With the passing of the smoking ban, Virginia demonstrates that, when it comes to individual liberty, its ongoing urbanization renders it just another Mid-Atlantic nanny state like New Jersey, Maryland, and New York. I don’t need to rehash the libertarian arguments against smoking bans in private establishments. I will, however, note the following:

• Despite an email sent out by a minority of Republicans in the legislature, this ban passed with bipartisan support.
• Republicans are the worst advocates of libertarian policy imaginable. They’re all too eager to go along to get along. And if they do have some moderate libertarian positions, they usually shoot their consistency in the foot by being moral policemen to the max (see my thoughts on the Blackburn vs. Stoch race).
• We erroneously and self-righteously frame this issue in simplistic terms of “rights” and “freedom” and “liberty”, a language that nanny staters learned long ago to turn around on us. Nobody is against “freedom” or “liberty” or “rights”, so this approach does not capture the essence of the controversy. If this were about abstractions like “rights”, there are far more egregious government intrusions that would have been rejected long ago. No, we are against bans on peaceful behavior because they are enforced by men trained to hurt and kill us – period.

It’s time to stop pretending our self-important, philosophical civics lessons wrapped in political activism work. Our outrage at the state, heartfelt as it may be, is not nearly enough to constitute the necessary resistance, nor is the rhetoric it produces adequate to the task of appealing to our fellow man. We have to start showing people that this is not a game: passing superfluous and intrusive laws pits men trained in violence and suppression against peaceful people. Confront the nanny staters directly with the means they’ve chosen to promote their agendas and ask them why they want to threaten, hurt, and even kill us and our fellow human beings. The stakes are too high to treat this as a friendly debate about ideas.

I just about threw my computer across the room when I read this article:

Twitter got a lot of attention from the various press outlets today for its value in following yesterdays rampage by anarchists and the response by police.

One aspect of the social networking service is getting less mention: Its being used to coordinate the violence.

You read that right: Twitter was used to coordinate the violence. Now, let’s set aside the absurdity of this notion that anarchist violence even registered on the same chart as police violence. Maybe they’re confused by incriminating messages, since they usually, you know, have sources for their reports?

Well, there’s this one:

sector 2 requesting backup at kellogg and wabasha, massive amounts of riot cops

And this one:

bringing in delegates at st peter and kellog WIDE OPEN

And this one:

Cops near Excel are searching people’s bags for goggles and gas masks– hide them!

Of course, none of that is violent - and I know there were no others because I monitored the feeds all week (I was a bit obsessive about it). But what are we to make of MPR’s interesting standards for what qualifies as “violence”? Apparently, it’s only ok to have a protest as long as:

• the people at the event you’re protesting don’t hear you,
• you don’t protect yourself from the chemical weapons the police deploy indiscriminately,
• you don’t show solidarity with your fellow protesters.

So what’s the point? Maybe MPR disagrees ever so slightly with Alix’s analysis of this past week’s debacle:

Were they protesting that they have no right to protest?

No, they were committing violence because they have no right to protest. If they had the right to protest, it wouldn’t have been violence!

In order for protests and civil disobedience to work, the media has to capture and disseminate to the public the evidence of the system’s brutality. It was the stories, photos, and newsreels of repression that made the struggles of Indian independence and African American civil rights successful. But if the media really is fully integrated into the authoritarian establishment, then we can expect the tactics of Ghandi and King to fail.

It’s time for us to discard a decades-old tactic that has long since been neutralized by the establishment. We need a new strategy, and many of us need an altogether new goal. We need creativity, innovation, courage, focus, but most of all we need a passion for freedom that can guide our desperation. From now on, let’s stop mourning the passing of the old order, however outraged and angered we are by it. Let us start building the organizations and structures that can move our work forward into new territory.

McCain said:

My friends, if you find faults with our country, make it a better one. If you’re disappointed with the mistakes of government, join its ranks and work to correct them.

Just don’t join it’s ranks from within the Republican party:

Today at the Republican National Convention, as the Ron Paul Delegates were taking a picture in front of the model White House inside the Convention Center, they were surrounded by Secret Service which proceeded to search the bags of all the delegates. They took any and everything related to Ron Paul including signs, buttons, videos, slim jims, cards, even books.

They were followed, surveilled, and harassed. Indeed, even if you make it into the ranks of government, they may still try to hold you back:

Earlier Tuesday, Paul said he was told he could go to the Republican convention floor, but only under very restricted conditions.

The Republican National Committee told Paul he would have to pick up his pass at the gate and couldn’t have any guests.

“Republican congressmen should have a pass to the floor, but they said, ‘Your pass will be at the gate, and we’ll pick it up when you leave, and you can’t take anybody with you,’ ” he said on CNN’s “American Morning.”

And since they’re treating even peaceful protest and civil disobedience as terrorism, they’re leaving us with very few options. Whether we see our role in fixing problems as within, without, or against government, the response is clear: submit or suffer. Make this a better country, but a better country according to our definition, not yours. And don’t make any sudden moves while you’re working on those flaws!