This reminds me of a quote from Children of Dune…

“Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class — whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.”

In San Francisco, a woman who campaigned against institutionalised fraud and coercion by strip club owners found the police involving themselves in a child custody dispute; she subsequently had the child taken away from her.

Institutions such as governments and corporations are in the last analysis shells within which are simply individual people. These institutions present a black box to those outside the institutional networks, but within the networks the boundaries between one institution and another aren’t always as important as personal connexions, which may cross institutional boundaries. At the very top one sees interlocking directorates and family dynasties. Most bureaucrats I’ve known who have any degree of personal energy function primarily by knowing useful people in other organisation; their immediate duties are as much the means and the end to them.

A feudal lord might raise his first son to inherit an estate, a second to become the bishop, all the while trading his daughters off to form connexions with other families. I see little reason to expect a congealed corporatist society to work very differently.

I recall watching a friend’s prostitution case in the Bay Area. The judge, the prosecutor, and my friend’s lawyer all knew each other and spent most of the time using legalese to essentially gossip- high of flattery, low on substance. The lawyer would run from courtroom to courtroom, talking with other lawyers about which judge could be arranged at one time and trading favours and bits of information in what approximated a ritual. Laws were invoked, but not as a set of principles to be applied- rather, it was a question of getting the right subsection to apply at the right place and time. One needed a lawyer, the reason had little to do with a need for legal knowledge. Rather, in a lawyer one paid for an insider to social networks who would for a certain period of time pull connexions and play the r00lz in your favour. The entire place clearly understood that this was the way things really worked but left it unmentioned.

In a system where most cases are settled not by trial but by informal plea-bargaining it makes sense that everything becomes a matter of who you know and who likes you. The laws anchor the system, but they’re applied to craft the outcome desired by whoever wins the game of push.

In another case, a victim I also knew first hand told me she walked in on the defence and prosecuting attorneys chatting about how to handle her case in ways which were distinctly not in her interest. They apparently saw each other constantly and their loyalty to their social set far exceeded concern for either justice or (in the defence attorney’s case) the client’s interests. The victim was being charged with excuse crimes covering a desire by San Jose authorites to get at a transgendered woman who had caused trouble for the principle at her daughter’s school. She was sexually abused in a jail, harassed in her home by police, and the courts and every lawyer she met with quickly found a reason to pretend she wasn’t there. The establishment just locked up and refused to admit anything unseemly was happening. The woman in question eventually fled the country and when I last knew her was hiding in Australia,

I don’t know what is going on in your case, and I wouldn’t label this persecution without further evidence. But I’ve heard enough stories from very credible sources to know that this kind of corruption and targeted persecution is very much a reality in contemporary America. The real use of power has only a loose relation to the written laws, and the real social networks have a similarly loose relation to formal organisational structures. Political targeting becomes easily possible not because of any special conspiracy but because fitting institutional duties to the needs of one’s clique within an utterly unprincipled but politically homogenous class is just business as usual.

All it would take is some federal employee with an assignment or a grudge who knew people who knew people. We know that social anarchist groups do get watched, harassed, and infiltrated. There were recently some absolutely certain cases of this happening in New Zealand in connexion with the Oct. 16th ‘terrorism’ raids. The anti-globalisation movement has been similarly targeted. It’s amazing how quickly the local fire department can discover building code violations in any building once enough protesters gather within it.

The ALL has rightfully tried to affiliate with social anarchism and is involved with several causes (anarchism, agorism, intellectual property, antiwar, migrants’ rights, radical labour organising, drug decriminalisation, sex work, police brultality) which could very cause it to stand out from garden variety libertarianism in the eyes of the state. So I don’t think it unreasonable to reflect on the suspicious timing of these two absurd shakedowns.

After all, these kinds of tactics would hardly surprise anyone were they to be carried out by the governments of Russia, Thailand, or Mexico. Certainly most of us have become used to thinking of America as a different kind of country, but that was then. In Imperial America the old liberal democratic rules simply don’t apply, and we should adjust out habits, expectations, and rhetoric accordingly. The police arrest without cause and routinely torture; the media lie according to elite necessary; citizens are barred from travel according to secret political lists; a vast prison gulag extracts slave labour from ethnic and political criminals; peaceful protests are shut down and nobody notices. In this context, I think the possibility that the powers-that-be might use cartel finance to harass political dissidents is hardly farfetched. A country on the eve of dictatorship acts much like one.

I don’t think ‘stupidity’ and ‘greed’ are any kind of inherent tendencies which we’re cursed with, or external forces which just happen to us.

I think ‘greed’ is technically a vice of excess ultimately reducible to ignorance of contextual value, but I don’t like the word and don’t get along very well with most people use either the words ‘greed’ or ‘vice’ frequently. I think ‘stupidity’ can mean slowness of thought, an undeveloped or impaired conceptual faculty, or an attempt by consciousness to blot out awareness. Only evasion occurred to me as even a formal possibility here.

I’m aware that my understanding of human beings differs from many popular views. But I find most conventional understandings to be false, harmful, and extremely boring.

So, sure, I’m deeply influenced by Rand. Who have you learned from?

Randian detected! So stupidity and greed can’t just be stupidity and greed, they have to be “evasion”…?