Jeremy Weiland

What I'm about to say may surprise you, but I assure you it's the honest truth: in my personal experience, cops are overwhelmingly decent folks. They almost always conduct themselves "professionally" and have generally treated me with respect. I'm not saying stories of law enforcement abuse hasn't affected me--they absolutely have, and I'll get into that. I'm not saying my arsenal of privileges haven't colored my experiences. But as far as my personal dealings, I've encountered very few who were anything but by-the-book and courteous.

Because they are so frequently decent, I'm sometimes tempted to reconcile the profession of policing with the kind of free society I dream about. After all, I have several friends and family who are police officers, and I'm loathe to let ideology darken my opinions of them as individuals. I want to believe policing is possible outside the hegemony of a state, and that these people can be meaningful participants in a stateless community.

But I never persist in that belief very long. I cannot think of any acceptable justification for the existence of law enforcement as an institution at all. The entire enterprise is abominable, root and branch. There is no escaping the conclusion that, everywhere they exist, police are mercenary occupiers serving a power hostile to the authentic human flourishing. As I intend to show, so long as our society exhibits privilege and injustice, I cannot pretend law enforcement does not prop it up in some fundamental manner.

It is the transformation of the function of policing into a profession that chiefly offends me. It's as ridiculous as professionalizing the role of the voter in a democracy. I'm sure contractors or bureuacrats could devise a way to vote more efficiently than any of us flesh-and-blood folks can, but wouldn't that defeat the point? It's crucial to a democracy that everybody vote; it's what makes it a democracy (putting aside whether such formal democratic governance is desirable).

In the same way all eligble members must vote in order for a democracy to be most legitimate and authentic, being a member of a free, self-governing, non-authoritarian community necessarily entails policing on the part of every community member. After all, more is implied by "community" than mere proximity of domiciles. Rather, communities should comprise a population unit bound by shared values, a coherent body brought together and made distinct by the identity emerging from individual lives. When you surrender using coercion as an organizing principle, what other basis is there for collectivity?

These shared values do not ensure there will never be conflict, or even that these communities will always work. They do, however, ensure that the costs, side-effects, and consequences of that community's values will be legible to the people themselves. If you want racism in your community, well, you'll have to do the dirty business of pushing around people yourself--no passing laws and hiring cops to do it for you. If you want to enforce unequal distribution of wealth, you can't hire goons to keep your neighbors fenced off in squalor. Whatever problems face the community, at least the community cannot ignore them.

Professionalizing the policing of communities encourages people to promote values--such as through monopoly law--without fully internalizing the costs of doing so. These costs accrue not just monetarily; they are costs incurred through inconvenience, through mental calcuation, averting one's eyes, and psychological coping, through the inalienable duties of community membership, through the inability to simply ignore the reality of your fellow man. If you outsource this, you don't just concentrate power in a class of people with obscene incentives to abuse it. You also outsource your ability to learn whether or not your community actually functions at all. And you will be hostage to the police because you're afraid to fully accept and participate in the consequences of your way of life. Shouldn't that tell you something about your community?

I don't understand why anarchists of all stripes don't speak more about the degree to which anarchism is necessarily incompatible with mediating institutions like the police. It seems to me that speaking only of what people can expect to get from a stateless society smacks of typical individualist myopia. Abolishing constituted authority confers the duty to regulate and manage personally, relying on everybody to step up and do their part.

You can't hold the responsibilities of human freedom without unfiltered, direct information about the conditions underwhich that freedom exists. To be free in a particular context must entail being aware of that particular context. Anarchism, sans ideology, is ultimately about being present, directly experiencing the collective reality, noticing the fluid conditions that are equally capable of frustrating and liberating us all. Any political principles following from that approach downright empirical facts.

Anarchism prefigures a world in which people go about human business in all its facets, without mediation or privilege. Self-government doesn't merely devolve the operations of governance, such as the parliamentary or legal, to the common man. It changes the nature of what we mean by government, transforming it from a formality of institutions running parallel to society into a day-to-day individual duty, a constant emergence and critique of society, not in spite of the people's confluence and conviviality but as its logical product.

We find ourselves held hostage by police and their increasing demands for more intrusive, more arresting, more egregious domination because we know our communities cannot work on their own. So we put up with the arrogance, the abuse, the concentration of unaccountable power. Anarchists should point out not only that this is wrong and evil but that it is also an abdication, a surrender to the state that imperils us all and leads to our disenfranchisement. It is the destruction of community.

But as much as stories of rampant police misconduct have brought about these insights, the certainty of power's abuse is not the most important or even novel argument against professional police. They aren't simply dangerous; their existence is a sign that your community is egregiously out of balance with itself. It's a clue that your values aren't in sync with your life.

A community doesn't require guards wielding lethal force to maintain itself. It doesn't have to protect those with more privilege, power, or wealth from those with less. The very fact that you have to constantly protect power and privilege in first place, let alone do so by hiring the goon squad, tells you whatever arrangements you wish to protect are artificial, illegitimate, and unsustainable.

If community wealth is imbalanced, of course you will have crime. If you have a subclass of people who are disrespected consistently by the community's values, of course you will have violence. If you refuse to engage directly with your neighbors, of course you'll need an armed mediation squad to protect you and yours from them and theirs. And if your reaction to this is to wall yourself off from it with a professional cleanup crew, mopping up the trail of blood and pain your chosen existence creates, of course it will persist. To solve a problem you have to first face it.

The police don't create injustice, inequality, suffering, poverty, and crime; those things will probably happen anywhere to some degree. All that they do is make it possible for these conditions to continue and intensify without being addressed, without letting those horrors interrupt business as usual too much. "Bad people" exist, but I see no evidence that the police has some sort of unique ability to identify them, so prevalent are they in the halls of power.

By cleaning up the problems our laws, practices, and values create for us, they make our collective dysfunction possible. We don't need to actually respond to the damage we cause; we just pay to manage it, and this default attitude makes all the crises of modern life seem intractible. The police allow us to pretend this dehumanization is just the way the world is, instead of what we ask them to institute as an alternative to dealing with it ourselves.

It's like a town living behind a dam that can't hold; every time it floods, the solution is a bigger, better, more expensive dam, instead of just moving to a place that doesn't require a dam. Similarly, it's as if the police manufacture the community's need for their services, with our all too frequently enthusiastic blessing. While I criticize the individuals who choose the crappy profession of law enforcement for not self-regulating more, I'm sympathetic to their predicament to defend an indefensible and unsustainable order. There's no way to do it but with brutal violence, ubiquitious threats, and raw, unaccountable power.

Professional police create the illusion that we can be passive consumers of government. It is the indispensible institution of the modern state, the lynchpin of its inherent authoritarianism that the honest anarchist intuitively recognizes. Any future stateless society with a professional police class will inevitably end up as bad or worse, since it will distort popular assent to the status quo with the illusion of stability. You cannot alienate your agency to personally produce the society you wish to participate in.

The only alternative to hierarchy, authority, and privilege is to reclaim our inalienable duty to be the police ourselves, to be members of a horizontal community, to be the exemplars of the values we claim to hold dear, and to face danger and suffering squarely. Anything less is an amusement park, a simulcrum of community that sells us tickets to a cage. That kind of farce has nothing to do with the anarchist project, which concerns humans and the communities that emerge from their congress.

The collective responses to the dramatic revelations of NSA mass surveillance feel like the well-worn plot of a classic movie. The story reminds me of the government's admission a few years back that Iraq did not, after all, have weapons of mass destruction. By the time it was admitted, everybody had already figured out the emperor was naked. But there was something about the formal acknowledgement that gave us permission to finally wrestle with the reality we had already suspected overwhelmingly.

Those of us who make a habit of dissent have gotten used to this frustrating complacency. It demonstrates that we as a social body don't trust ourselves, that the complex of media, government, academia, and business -- otherwise known as the state -- that proports to lead us can be better described as creating and curating our reality. This insight renders many radicals outright misanthropic, but I tend to approach our apathy sympathetically, regarding our behavior as a kind of learned helplessness inculcated by decades of spiritually arresting mediation. When political expediency necessitates disclosure, we don't know what to do with it, much like paroled prisoners who don't know how to live on the outside.

So when the school assembly is over and the principal has made her announcements, thank God the pundits are there to round us up and lead us back to our homerooms, single file. Our passive consumption of pundits' reactions give us a false sense of agency, as if somehow the variety of spins from which to choose is itself empowering. After all, we don't have time in our busy lives to mentally deal with this, let alone exercise our inherent duty to apprehend it. Better to signal our relevancy by choosing our coping mechanism from a buffet of cynicism, jingoist indignation, reformist compromise, or handwringing resignation.

And so it is with the NSA story. As far as I can tell, we're being provided a number of templates that can help us integrate this newly certified reality into our individual matrices, including:

1. Mass surveillance is an acceptable encroachment on our privacy.
2. Mass surveillance requires appropriate oversight or a national conversation to protect our privacy.
3. Mass surveillance is an unacceptable encroachment on our privacy.

You didn't see it, but you just got jammed. The way we're encouraged to cope with this is to make it about privacy: to turn inwards, take stock of our personal inner domain, and decide just how much of our lives can be offered up to the state. Large scale, bureaucratic intrusion into our personal lives is a given, but we can fill out a customer response card if we have any comments about the degree of the intrusion. If this is about privacy, the onus is on us to define its limits, to guide our servant institutions to the right policies that will protect our newly cordoned-off personal space.

It's in this way that pundits can claim that our ubiquitous sharing on social media validates such large scale, coordinated exploitation. Just like the rape victim was "asking for it" because of what she wore at the time of her attack, we're "asking for it" because our online sharing habits have been deemed unjudicious. They switch from condemning the aggressor to blaming the victim, and they do it because facing up to the cultural inertia behind the aggression risks exposing the perniciousness of the status quo. And so they invent a clever distraction about what the limits of privacy should be -- as if that were the only limits with which we should be concerned. It's like fighting rape by starting a conversation about the definition of tasteful attire.

Well, let me provide a counterspin that I hope is destablizing: when it comes to this matter, I don't give a goddamn about privacy. It's no more relevant to this story than the big paychecks NSA contractors haul in. Privacy, like fatcat military industrial intelligence complex profiteering, is an important issue without a doubt, but it's not at the center of this matter. The scandal is not about privacy, or whisteblowing, or whether Edward Snowden was a bad neighbor, or whether he had enough education to work within the NSA, or whether the media should have published the story, or the decline of community, or any of that. Anybody who makes the conversation about those issues are welcome to; they should find another room to talk in, though, lest they hijack the real conversation.

This is about state-sponsored spying, not personal privacy. The U.S. government has decided the best, most defensible way to fight whatever it deems threatening (now or in the future) is not to create a dossier on every human being on the planet -- that would be totalitarian! Instead they're merely building the infrastructure that enables them to do so both at will and retroactively. All they're doing is merely collecting anonymous "metadata". That's true insofar as it goes (though as a programmer I must protest the abuse of the term "metadata", which typicaly refers to "data about data", whereas phone numbers, emails, Facebook likes and the like are "data about us") but, like most spin, the argument routes around the point with expert precision.

The danger is not so much that government officials are currently investigating you (not that they aren't). It's that if they ever decide they'd like to, they already have your entire history of communication. Normally, an investigation would begin with the gathering of evidence. The cost and effort of beginning to collect evidence is a small and insufficient but important bureaucratic deterrent against starting arbitrary persecutions. However, now an investigation begins with merely bothering to look at the evidence already gathered. Essentially, they started the investigation into you years ago, but it's proceeding on autopilot, waiting for a government spy caring to look.

Imagine, if you will, the NSA claiming the authority to search and catalog the contents of every home on the planet preemptively, but promising never to look at it unless absolutely necessary. The justification is that, in case you're ever accused of a crime in the future, they don't need to assume the burden of getting a warrant or actually searching for what they want to find. They already started it ahead of time, they already have the evidence, and they can just go back and mine that evidence for a crime. Maybe the crime validates the accusation. Maybe along the way they find a totally separate crime. The point is that the investigation is preassembled, a keyword search away from being an actual indictment. If they can create a dossier anytime they want with minimal effort, that's functionally the same as keeping one on you right now.

There's a reason NSA is not in law enforcement: there's nothing limited or legal about the above. It has absolutely, positively zero to do with rights or the law as we understand them. They do what the CIA does to its targets: extralegal gathering of evidence for exploitation at a time of the government's choosing. That is espionage, and there's a reason we abhor it being done to people who are not part of the spy game, let alone people who are supposed to watch over the very government running the spy game.

Yet the most pundits can offer is a shallow, parochial debate about some bourgeois, neutered conception of privacy. For them, this is only about the exact nature of our freedom to share with sufficient insularity pictures of cats, what we had for lunch, and silly memes. Now we need to all sit around indian style and figure out the kind of Stasi with which we'd be most comfortable, what kinds of checks and balances, safeguards and oversight would allow us a good night's monitored sleep.

Don't be fooled. The onus is not on us to properly circumscribe the boundaries of our private lives. The onus is on them to explain the way their leviathan, totalitarian institutions spill out of the confines they agreed to obey, those charters that give them their existence in the first place, the enumerated powers they claim separate them from totalitarian regimes or organized crime syndicates. The lesson here that no pundit will mention is that the state is inherently a scam. This domestic spying on us is but one facet of the overall institutional hegemony that dominates us and teaches us helplessness.

It's understable to feel powerless when massive bureuacracies continually body check your sense of self. If you'd rather ignore the reality of what our world is becoming, fine. But you don't have to accept the turnkey distractions of the punditry. Who knows, one day you may decide that this time they went too far, and if that happens, you'll need a sense of judgment and agency that hasn't completely atrophied.

This passage from the interview of Julian Assange by Google CEO Eric Schmidt exemplifies the kind of radicalism I most admire. Notice the lack of a clean, rationalist philosophy or any sanctimonious univeralist moral bravado.

I looked at something that I had seen going on with the world. Which is that I thought there were too many unjust acts... And I wanted there to be more just acts, and fewer unjust acts. And one can sort of say, well what are your philosophical axioms for this? And I say I do not need to consider them. This is simply my temperament. And it is an axiom because it is that way. And so that avoids, then, getting into further unhelpful discussions about why you want to do something. It is enough that I do.

The rest of the interview has some fascinating insights, anecdotes, and theory on networks, social movements, politics and conspiracies, technology, and even ontology (never knew URLs were so deep). Highly, highly recommended!

I have wanted to write about the issue of "women in tech" for a long time, and now donglegate has elevated the matter to a level I can no longer ignore. It's like a train wreck from which you can't look away, but the underlying tension speaks to a broader conflict in the tech community. While I find Amanda Blum's excellent post on the matter pretty authoritative, I don't want to focus on Adria Richards' behavior, but instead talk about the background issue of sexism and gender parity in the technology community that informed her behavior.

So, first off: are women and minorities underprivileged in the technology sector? Of course; they are underprivileged in almost every sector of society. Biases, hostile environments, outdated socially constructed roles, bigotry and outright discrimination are pervasive in our community, as they are in most communities. And it doesn't just suck for our community because it's manifestly unjust, but also because it hurts us and our work.

We technologists can write all the code, build all the gadgets, run all the software we want--but if people can't use it, if it doesn't actually solve their problems, if it doesn't speak to their diverse experiences, then it's useless. As women become an ever larger user base, we require their perspective as first-class citizens in the creation of software, hardware, and other high tech products that have become so important. We need to listen to them, sure, but they should also be part of our community as creators themselves, possessing the same skills and ability to pursue their vision in concert with, or independent of, male technologists.

None of this is particularly controversial in the ongoing conversation about women in tech, though I think the ways in which people pursue it often undermines authentic progress. In a field that has experienced such dramatic upheavals on such a regular basis, why has this rather common problem persisted? I want to bring up a few points about institutional power and the nature of community that I believe have been overlooked thus far. I seek to absolve us men of neither our failures in the past nor our responsibility to work towards a more just, compassionate, and inclusive community. But can we do better, and if so, how exactly?

Which tech community?

Consider that those who understand the problem as simply "not enough women in the technology community" are being too reductive and simplistic. "The tech community" is a vague, expansive, and shifting concept by which people mean different things. Sometimes it means programmers, hardware technicians, and other highly technically skilled people who associate through online fora, mailing lists, IRC, etc. Other times it means almost anyone with a smartphone, bloggers, social media users, "enthusiasts" of certain tech brands, tech journalists without any specialized knowledge, etc.

First of all, one should be clear about the specific community to which one is referring when discussing gender parity in tech, because it determines what the prerequisites for respect are. Hackers, developers, and other folks with specific technical skills are known for respecting competency. For decades they were the misfits and outcasts who fiddled and experimented, forging a community out of the successes and failures of this often marginalized and forgotten activity. "Open source" as we know it is largely an outgrowth of people who took personal responsibility for the software they used, building a bottom-up meritocracy out of this sorely needed--but unappreciated and uncompensated--labor.

Nowadays, being a "nerd", a "geek", or a "hacker" is looked upon favorably. This has more to do with the money, influence, and outright power that high tech, startups, and non-traditional technology activities of all kinds command in our society; it's not some nerdy arc of history bending towards us. It's important to remember that many of our tech forefathers were themselves socially marginalized. But now you're seeing more people who don't have the skills wanting to associate with that crowd (Portlandia parodied this hilariously, and got the requisite sexism critique).

Now, are women the only party fudging their tech credentials to get a seat at the table? Absolutely not--not even a little bit. There are plenty of skilled women in our industry, but they are often invisible to us. In addition to the standard discrimination all women experience, they often face humiliating assumptions that their participation in the community is merely on the periphery as girlfriends or "booth babes". When they are doing technical work, they often have to deal with bigotry and disrespect from their colleagues.

If there's a weakness to the point I'm making here, it's that I and other men in tech have often dropped the ball in maintaining the emphasis on skill as a measure of merit and respect. It's not always about sexism, but we have often not extended the same compassion to others that we benefited from as noobs. Programmers focus on communicating with compilers and interpreters, and we could spare some effort to work on communicating with human beings who may not be operating on our precise protocol.

Secondly, the phenomenon of unskilled women identifying as members of the tech community is especially sad because I suspect women have long been tracked into careers on the periphery, careers that require more "emotional labor" or "people skills" like management, customer support, and other less-than-technical fields. These roles lend themselves much more to building the organization than building the product itself, and they are consequently more dependent on workplace politics. Indeed, computer operators were chiefly female at our industry's inception--right up until it was discovered that what they were doing was not mere secretary work but took real skill. When bosses (not technologists themselves) systematically exclude a certain type of person, we should not be shocked when it affects the accompanying culture.

In fact, if I had to guess I'd say that unskilled, wannabe males have been infiltrating the tech community in greater numbers and for longer. However, doesn't this therefore mean the gender parity problem isn't some situation unique to bonafide geeks? Instead, this is a situation where a wider social problem is manifesting in a part of society precisely because it has gotten more diverse.

Finally, all this injustice may have had a quite unfortunate side effect: women in tech placed excessive emphasis on the organizational bureaucracy to the detriment of building technical skills, for the very reason that the chief obstacles have been political, not technical. Has the systematic disadvantages experienced by women convinced many to elevate skill in leveraging managerial power over the technical skill that confers legitimacy in our community?

That wouldn't be entirely their fault, given our community's failures to be sufficiently accommodating. But it also suggests this isn't as simple as pure sexism. This is also an issue of class and workplace control, the same constructs that always pit management against labor and induce people to place business interests and career advancement over the actual work and those who do it.

The industry versus the community

I think this alignment with the formal tech industry against the informal tech community might best explain why Richards addressed the situation by reporting it to conference authorities rather than addressing them directly, as well as why so many women in tech would never behave that way. After all, "developer evangelists" don't write production code much as far as I know. They tend to play a role closer to media personalities or spokespeople, selling to the newly powerful market of software developers, system administrators, and other technologists. Perhaps this is why Richards and many women instinctively appeal to corporate managers, government agencies, academic departments, etc. to champion advancement and equality for women, when the history shows women have every reason to be uniquely and especially hostile towards these centers of concentrated power.

Indeed, if the tech community as a community can be characterized by anything, it is not their rejection of women so much as a disdain for how they are managed. Whether in business, academia, government, non-profits, or other organizations, technologists often feel stifled and let down by the way their skills are employed, the frequency with which their experience and insight are overridden by raw power. They often deal with management grudgingly and derisively (see Dilbert). This is an attitude that singles out power, not women, as the enemies, those who hold the purse strings, boss us around to do what amounts to busy work, taint cool and useful projects with the need to turn a buck, bully us into conforming with byzantine and meaningless top-down policies written by lawyers, and generally make what should be a limitless endeavor appear to be pretty fucking limited on a regular basis.

I believe that's why much of the tech community--male and female alike--chafes at Richards' actions. It's not simply about taking diversity and justice seriously. It's how one pursues those goals and the class with which one instinctively aligns. We techies know arbitrary, under-explained, superficial, imposed demands when we see them, and that's not how members of a genuine community of equals behave or how mistakes and bugs are exposed.

Put aside the distinction between a sexual and a sexist joke. Put aside misunderstandings about the context of "forking". These disputes will happen even without underlying bigotry, and dragging power into it is neither healthy for the community nor how these issues can be resolved. So maybe Richards' behavior shows that she herself doesn't feel part of this community, not that she is a marginalized member.

That could be because of her gender, but it might have more to do with her lack of real participation in our community of skilled technologists. One demonstrates this not by merely "appreciating technology" or "evangelizing for software development" but actively tinkering with it, pushing it, writing it, building it with ever more elegance and ingenuity, creating the open source, bottom-up infrastructure that leads to community, congeniality, respect, and the best possible solutions and standards. Her lack of participation doesn't mean she doesn't deserve respect as a human being; it might very well mean that she doesn't deserve respect as a member of the tech community.

Nothing I'm arguing should be construed as an apology for misogyny in our ranks. I've seen it myself, and have indeed looked for it and expected to find it because plenty of it exists in society at large. Techies are not some special breed of enlightened human.

What it does mean, however, is that looking for a solution from the tech industry--corporations, policies, conferences, and all the constructs duly organized by money and power--is not only utterly mistaken, but it risks casting reform as something that the business folks must impose upon the nerds and geeks, as if through their cleverly crafted anti-discrimination policies, lawyerly anti-harassment tips, and mechanistic affirmative action programs they can or would want to truly empower more people. It's fighting for justice from the top-down rather than from the bottom-up, and the latter has a better history than the former. None of us, in other words, should trust the man.

The elitism inherent in this hierarchical answer to bigotry does little but subvert the meritocracy and decentralized character of our community. Such heavy handed measures will only backfire to the detriment of all, the more marginalized and the less marginalized alike. And when they fail, it will not be seen as a failure of tactics and philosophy, but rather as a reason to keep doing the same thing with broader license and ever more draconian vigor. They can't understand that fighting one kind of oppression by ratcheting up another kind of oppression is a recipe for, well, more oppression, and more confusion about who's doing it and why.

Bottom up, peer to peer justice

What is the solution to the gender imbalance in tech, the lingering misogyny, the unfairness and imbalance of power? I'm not certain, but I think it includes the following:

• As the people who actually write the code, run the servers, build the gadgets, etc. we need to take charge of getting more people involved as equal, skilled peers, especially those from diverse backgrounds representing a variety of world views. The community creating technology needs to look like, understand, and represent all the people using technology. We can do this without subverting the emphasis on quality that the tech community's meritocracy and respect for competence has championed thus far.

• The manner in which Playhaven and Sendgrid reflexively fired those involved underlines our desperate need for more control over our careers. We have to distance ourselves from mercurial, bottom line, gray flannel corporations that only seek profit--not just for our own personal freedom, but for the freedom to be a community that can tackle sticky issues like sexism. These institutions, mere abstractions of human behavior, are programmed to see social justice in terms that will always reduce people to homogeneous, shallow, easily managed units of labor, which disempowers us all. We need to depend on ourselves for our livelihoods, since nothing promotes an appreciation for competence over superficial details like one's need to put food on the table. Better yet, let's form a culture of worker cooperatives that can not only help others achieve independence and build solidarity amongst our community but also host the conversations outside the earshot of bosses, managers, and those who just want to capture the community we've built. Finally, and most importantly:

• A genuinely free and open conversation about gender, race, and class on our own terms, as human individuals, is sorely needed. It can no longer be subordinated to the special interests of the managerial class or the academic humanists. Just as women should be equal participants in tech, we should be equal participants in figuring out how to be a more just community. Our meritocratic legacy suggests the community's potential to be a truly flat, peer-to-peer forum for a variety of concerns, minimizing the noise of power and hierarchy drowning out the signal of honesty. We might be able to pave the way towards the kind of frank, difficult, honest, and searching exchanges that will help us all see how equally vulnerable and alike we are as human beings. And we can show other industries how to go about doing this without lazily outsourcing the struggle to the managerial class's top-down policy wonks, who only care about justice when and if it affects business as usual.

On that final point: those who have turned gender parity into a rallying cry often grossly understate how nuanced and complicated this coming together is. So you have formulaic presentations like "Anti-Oppression 101" in which some admittedly well-meaning activists represent the struggle as simply changing some personal habits and doing a few things differently. They understand a complicated human matter in terms of statistics and institutional signifiers: how many women are being hired or graduating in our field, or how many reports of discrimination are made? Is it really so simple?

This glosses over the formative role that power and privilege of a non-gender variety play in reinforcing the sexist status quo. Few are asking about the class issues that are arguably more prevalent in tech, or whether getting any gender hired into management shifts the net disempowerment in our industry. By leaving the issue of hierarchy and institutional power totally untouched, those who push a narrow "women in tech" message ignore the crucial ingredient in all oppression: power. Reducing the struggle to a few easy things you can do that won't disrupt your career cannot combat entrenched, organized privileges that sustain the poisonous elements that marginalize people in our field. No, this is revolutionary stuff, and you have to start by liberating yourself.

A truly egalitarian, meritocratic tech community will only thrive once it has built an alternative, parallel tech industry that completely embraces open source, peer-to-peer culture. We must not only take responsibility; we must control our labor and its product so it can be fully leveraged against those ends we choose. Deposing capitalist control of what should be a barrier-breaking, genuinely liberatory community is the only way we can hope to lead the charge for true equality (for more on capitalist faux-egalitarianism, see this essay criticizing from a leftist perspective what we often call "political correctness").

Technology is now an integral part of every institution, from supra-national organizations to families. Those who can operate it have a unique kind of privilege, if you will, that will last no longer than it can be deskilled and commodified by capital. We could choose to leverage this against bigotry on our own terms, without giving the glory to some preening, entitled CEO going through the motions, or some hypocrite who thinks hierarchy is A-OK so long as a person who looks like oneself has a seat at the table. We can see that decentralized, non-hierarchical political groups like LulzSec, Anonymous, and Wikileaks have emerged to take the fight to entrenched power, even as they show how much work we have to do on ourselves still. If we truly care about making our community more just, it means we have to do it ourselves and get rid of all the reactionary, incompatible obstacles that hold us back, those within and without.

This article by Bruce Levine argues that many if not most diagnoses of depression, ADHD, ODD, etc. are actually the psychopathologization of anti-authoritarians. This excerpt really rings true to me:

Many people with severe anxiety and/or depression are also anti-authoritarians. Often a major pain of their lives that fuels their anxiety and/or depression is fear that their contempt for illegitimate authorities will cause them to be financially and socially marginalized; but they fear that compliance with such illegitimate authorities will cause them existential death.

It's scary to think that some of our best and brightest are probably being medicated into mediocrity, but I posted the above excerpt for all my friends who wrestle with these issues. Kissing the boots of some jackass has always felt like a small death to me, but I've had the support from family to deal with it in a healthy manner. My mom always told me that getting through the public school system was a game I had to play, since she knew I found it intolerable and incredibly dumb.

I never realized at the time how much such a simple acknowledgement of my reality helped me. There was little she could do about the bureaucratic hell of public schooling, but she could at least let me know that I wasn't crazy. What drives people over the edge isn't the madness of the world so much as denying the madness. Surrounded by people playing a shallow and insincere part, one comes to believe that the elusive happiness we seek is a matter of submission and giving up.

That's why those winks and nods from other folks, signalling that they see the fnords too, mean` so much. If you have the strength to acknowledge what's going on, it doesn't mean you're crazy -- it means you are needed more than ever. We must support each other by simply bearing witness to the reality around us, so that people can keep that inner fire alive and avoid the existential death of surrender and conformity.

I thought this up on the car ride to Asheville, when I was trying to keep myself awake.

And I'm cowed to be an American
Where the drones are watching me
And I won't forget the men who died
In that no-knock raid last week
And I'll gladly lay down on the ground
With my arms behind my back
'Cause there ain't no doubt that I'm under arrest
God help the USA

This gist referred to by the Devise wiki is no longer accurate as far as I can tell. So I wanted to share my approach for how to use devise in a situation where user documents are embedded in account documents, especially in the scenario where your account has a subdomain assigned to it.

Obviously, the first thing you need to do is make sure you always have access to the current account as keyed by the subdomain. This means a before filter on any controller that runs under the subdomain that loads in your account. The idea is that once you load the account, you never have to pull it from the database again:

class AccountSubdomainController < ApplicationController
  before_filter :current_account

protected
  def current_account
    @account ||= params[:current_account] ||= get_account_by_subdomain
    params[:user][:current_account] = @account if params[:user]
    @account
  end

  def get_account_by_subdomain
    Account.where(:subdomain => request.subdomain.downcase).first
  end
end

If you're not using an account-specific subdomain, just modify this to pull out the account from the URL or something.

Once we have our account, we need to inject the current account into the params to keep it over the whole request. We also need them in the users subhash if authentication is currently being run. That means you need to define current_account in your authentication keys, either in the devise.rb initializer or on your model's devise invocation:

config.authentication_keys = [:email, :current_account]

This tells devise to use not only the email request parameter but also the current_account parameter to look up users. Now we just need to override the lookup method for authentication:

  def self.find_for_database_authentication(conditions)
    acct = conditions[:current_account] || Account.where("users.email" => conditions[:email]).first
    acct && acct.users.where(:email => conditions[:email]).first
  end

That's sufficient for the initial login, but if you stop there your app will authenticate correctly, store the user in the session, but never be able to pull it back out. We need to a way to get to the params to pull that current_account out and provide it to the user model for a proper lookup. This is where shit gets a little hacky, because we're going to create an initializer that overrides how Warden does something:

class Warden::SessionSerializer
  def deserialize(keys)
    klass_name, *args = keys

    # add current account into mix so we don't have to pull it from the db again!
    args << params[:current_account] if params[:current_account]

    begin
      klass = ActiveSupport::Inflector.constantize(klass_name)
      if klass.respond_to? :serialize_from_session
        klass.serialize_from_session(*args)
      else
        Rails.logger.warn "[Devise] Stored serialized class #{klass_name} seems not to be Devise enabled anymore. Did you do that on purpose?"
        nil
      end
    rescue NameError => e
      if e.message =~ /uninitialized constant/
        Rails.logger.debug "[Devise] Trying to deserialize invalid class #{klass_name}"
        nil
      else
        raise
      end
    end
  end
end

That's the link between the current_account in the request and our user model. Now we just need a way to use it, and instead of using self.find like that old gist, we'd be better off implementing this on our model:

def self.serialize_from_session(*args)
  key, salt, account = args
  single_key = key.is_a?(Array) ? key.first : key
  account.users.find single_key
end

You should be all set now. Note that this hack has not been well tested, but I thought it was high time somebody shared a different approach. Please advise if you have criticisms or a better way.

I often hear defenders of "Right to Work" (RTW) laws say that unions are collusive and extortive in a way that is simply unfair to employers. Neither workers nor management should be forced to negotiate through unions, and RTW laws simply level the playing field by ensuring that employees can always negotiate directly with management. The point of labor unions, to the mind of RTW supporters, is to exploit the Wagner Act that forces all parties to negotiate in good faith, and to thereby move wages and benefits up in a way a free market in labor would never allow. The aforementioned article on RTW even compares unions with Mafia protection rackets in this regard.

To describe this line of reasoning as selective would be a gross understatement. After all, let's assume that labor unions are as evil as the RTW lobby says they are. Even granting that for the sake of argument, labor is not the only interest engaging in collective bargaining. What about the individuals involved in the employing corporation? Aren't these businesses effectively "capital unions" exploiting incorporation laws to achieve a better bargaining position relative to labor? Isn't the reason why investors pool their resources and form businesses to get better deals in the market through economies of scale? Isn't that why they try to get investors rather than simply borrowing all the money for their start-up costs--to spread the risk and the reward?

So unions of labor are only one side of this story; to emphasize collusion on the workers' side is to leave another form of collusion totally unaddressed. Corporations are capital unions, organizations whose members work together to negotiate wages and benefits (and other costs, of course) downwards to get the best return for themselves. Why is one form of collusion wrong and the other not?

I'd add that, in historical comparison to labor unions, corporations are much more fully creatures of the state. While labor unions have existed for much of their history in legally unrecognized forms, arising from the spontaneous organizing efforts of workers themselves, government-granted incorporation has always been a necessarily statist activity. There's nothing free market about dictating to the market that corporations must be dealt with on their own, special terms. Conferring limited liability, entity status, and other privileges on corporations is intervention to skew the market, a crime that can only be laid at the feet of the state and the capitalists that run it.

I view this RTW movement as not only the argument that capital gets to deal with labor in a privileged manner, but also a defense of the entire balance of power between employers and employees. It's about more than just authoritarianism and a system that favors capital over labor; it's also about the legal codification of class distinctions inherent in the structure of production. To the extent capitalists decry so-called "class warfare," I believe they are trying to gloss over the privileged terms on which they want to do business, allowing them to claim there are no classes of consequence while entrenching them further. That allows them to safely defer to the market, while ensuring it always delivers the balance of power they desire.

After all, if RTW folks truly believe that each and every worker deserves the right to negotiate individually with the capital union, why stop there? Why not also grant each and every shareholder, investor, creditor, and other owner of the corporate capital union the right to negotiate individually with the worker himself or his labor union? Why should both the worker and the owner be forced to deal with the extractive, exploitative management class as the exclusive agent of the corporation? If it's unfair for the labor union to monopolize labor relative to a given employer, isn't it equally unfair for the capital union to monopolize capital relative to a given employee?

The reason is that capital unions are politically and legally favored in labor negotiations, because they have always been favored. Our entire political economy is built around doing business on their terms. If you want a genuinely free market in labor, you can start by ridding yourself of the biased narratives that explain how collective barganing is virtuous and crucial for those with money, but unnecessary and evil for those who don't.

A few minutes ago Tasha and I said our tearful goodbyes to our friend and companion for the last twelve years, our beagle Tela. Tela wasn't just a wonderful, cheerful, cuddly dog whom we doted on; her life intersected with our relationship so completely that it is difficult to picture us without her. We always told her that we were a couple, but that she made us a family.

Tela came into our lives because I needed a present for Tasha when she graduated from college. She was actually promised to Tasha before she was even born, and ended up being born on Tasha's graduation day. Tasha would be going back home to start building her pottery business, and I still had another year or so of school. So my mom got me in touch with a breeder in my hometown, and they arranged for us to come visit the litter once it arrived.

If you think beagles are cute, you need to experience beagle puppies. Tela was from a litter of six or seven, but all of them died but her and her brother. Tasha connected with her instantly; she was mostly black with brown and white areas, and she had a little Hitler-moustache-like marking under her nose. If I hadn't been a broke student living in a non-pet-friendly apartment, I might have taken her brother. As it was, we certified ourselves as decent people to the breeders, and a week later we picked her up on the way back from a Disco Biscuits show (Tela is a Phish song, I was kind of a hippie back then).

We took her to my apartment in Fredericksburg and, after playing with her a bit, put her in a crate and went to dinner. That was the last time we ever tried to crate Tela; she did not like and let us know by leaving a mess for us when we got back. Luckily she was so goddamn cute it didn't matter. We still have the photograph of her that first night of hers with us, scared and sitting on (what was to her) a giant pillow on the bed. Matt was actually her first babysitter, as we left her with him the next day at the apartment he and I shared.

Tasha lived in Mathews on her own for the next year, but just about every weekend they came up to visit and hide out in my non-pet-friendly apartment. We spent a lot of time walking around Fredericksburg, and Tela broke hearts left and right. Tasha and I also went on our first backpacking trip together, and we brought little Tela--probably not a good idea in retrospect, since the elevation changes were pretty bad for us, let alone a little puppy. However, as the consummate hound, Tela loved trails, and held her own the whole time. The only exception was a flash storm where we all got drenched, and Tasha made a makeshift sling out of a towel and carried Tela against her chest like a baby carrier for the next hour or so.

One fixture of Tela's life was The Poddery, where Tasha worked for many years. It was on fourty acres of rural land in Mathews, and Tela could roam around to her hearts content. Everywhere else she was on a leash or fenced in, so this was a big deal. She would wander off for hours, but when we'd call, inevitably she'd coming racing back, often smelling like something really, really smelly she got into. She also socialized with the resident German Shepherd, LeRoy, and they were good friends.

Until recently, Tela spent time in Mathews when we needed to leave her and travel. Tasha's parents would watch her, and she grew mighty close to them. Tasha's dad can't hear high pitched noises, so Tela's whining never got her any food, and she eventually stopped whining altogether around him. This was also helped by the fact that he always gave her a great meal after he ate. Tela turned Tasha's dad into a dog person, and they ended up adopting a hound puppy that we found abandoned in Mathews. That puppy grew to be six times Tela's size, but there was never any doubt who was in charge. I should mention that she was not an anarchist like me, but a natural ruler.

Tela never liked getting in water. One time in Mathews, we were at the beach swimming in an area where the outgoing tide left little islands. We really wanted to see Tela swim, so I did something mean--I went out to one of the little islands and whimpered and whined like I was hurt. Tela started whining back at me, and then jumped in and doggie-paddled over to me, crying the whole way. I was so heartbroken after that that the only other time I made her swim was when I was canoeing with her at The Poddery, and the guy with me capsized the canoe (to operate a potato cannon, but that's not germaine). Everybody went underwater in a flash, and when I bobbed up and got my bearings, I could see Tela paddling and crying. I put her on land and she instantly peed. Good girl!

One thing that was tough was that she never liked car trips. We used to take her to Shenandoah National Forest often for backpacking and hiking, but she got really nervous and panty in the car. It might be because, one time, we put her in the front seat while Tasha changed in the back after a hike, and she got her collar caught on a piece of metal in my car and almost choked to death. After that, Tasha always insisted we remove her collar when we left her alone.

Tasha and I moved to Tappahannock to be in between her work and mine, so we were basically out in a cornfield for over three years. This afforded Tela many opportunities to spot and chase rabbits, and we had some good places to walk as well. Once when we were walking down a road by a cornfield, a puppy lept out and went up to Tela. Tela never really got along with other dogs well, especially ones she didn't know, but she helped me find an entire litter that had been abandonded. We were able to place them all in good homes, ensuring that Tela could be the only baby again, which was exactly how she liked it.

Tela was part of our wedding party, and her outfit actually cost more than mine! We got married at The Poddery, so it was someplace where we all could become a real family on paper. This was right after we had moved to Richmond, when Tela was really maturing and had fully developed her personality. She really liked cuddling and comfort, and would snuggle down the bottom of the bed to find it. She loved belly rubs, smelling things, and of course, FOOD. Her greed for food was a force of nature, and we were never quite able to stop her from whining while we ate--the best we could do was get her not to whine but merely tremble violently in anticipation of some treat when we were done.

When we finally moved into our house, Tela made it her own. She staked out exactly where she wanted to nap, where she wanted to sleep, and where she wanted to roam outside, which just happened to be the area we fenced in for her. Tasha's sister and brother-in-law, Kristal and John, moved into the neighborhood a few blocks away with their dachshund, Boudin, who was just about exactly the same size. We went on a lot of walks around Springhill, down Buttermilk Trail and across Belle Isle. I really appreciate where we live because it afforded Tela wonderful walks during the last years of her life.

Unfortunately, Tela had been diagnosed with weak kidneys years ago, and this caught up with her in late September. She eventually went blind for a few weeks until we got her hypertension under control, but her recovery was tepid. Her once voratious and ever-present appetite disappeared, and we couldn't get her to eat, let alone take her medicine. Eventually she became so lethargic and obviously unhappy that we finally knew it was time to say goodbye. Our vet graciously offered to come to our house and put her to sleep. She died with Tasha's arms around her and her chin resting on my hand as I looked into her eyes.

I never had a pet growing up. Tela was not only my first dog, but the first person (yes, she is a person, just not human) who was completely dependent on me. But she was also the first creature I ever encountered who loved me so wordlessly that I had to open my heart completely, without any thinking or intellectualizing. I wonder if I'd ever let myself down if I saw myself the way she obviously always saw me. There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that dogs, and probably lots of animals, are sentient beings who have personalities and feel love. And her expert taste in comfort inspired us to make her house a home. She will be dearly, dearly missed by Tasha, me, her family, and all who knew her.

Marat
these cells of the inner self 
are worse than the deepest stone dungeon 
and as long as they are locked 
all your revolution remains 
only a prison mutiny 
to be put down
by corrupted fellow prisoners

The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, by Peter Weiss, Athenium. 1965

I'm a big fan of Glenn Greenwald; just about every position he takes is anti-authoritarian, liberal in the best sense, and based on rule of law (which, in this age, is as close to fairness as one can expect). However, he wrote an article on the Chick-fil-a controversy that bugs me. On the narrow question of whether governments should be able to punish corporations for political advocacy, I agree with him that such punishment is unconstitutional. I take issue with his reasoning, though.

Greenwald invites us to consider a series of bills that enlist government in punishing corporations for views they express, money they donate to causes, etc. Some examples:

• Congress enacts a law that states: No business incorporated in America, whether for-profit or non-profit, shall be permitted to donate any of its money to groups espousing liberal ideas. Any business found to be in violation of this prohibition shall be guilty of a Class A felony. Corporate donations to groups espousing conservative causes shall still be permissible and legal.
• A city enacts an ordinance that states: Any business found to have donated money to any group that advocates same-sex marriage or abortion rights (including Human Rights Campaign and Planned Parenthood) shall be barred from doing business within the city limits. Businesses shall still be permitted to donate money to groups which advocate against same-sex marriage or against abortion rights.

I agree with him that the above laws are unconstitutional. Government is prohibited from discriminating or giving unequal protection to the free speech rights of corporations as currently settled law stands (that was indeed one of the caveats he made). Indeed, Greenwald took pains to point out that even in the Citizens United case, not one Supreme Court justice questioned the legitimacy of corporate personhood at all (I addressed Greenwald's commentary on this matter in more detail here). I also agree with him that The Nation's Lee Fang takes an unprincipled, politically expedient position against corporate personhood -- one cannot confine one's critiques of the doctrine to only those cases where it acts against one's sense of justice. Nobody wants to be allied with a hack like Fang less than I.

However, I do take issue with Greenwald's notion that protecting corporate rights are constitutive to unbiased government. The imaginary laws he suggests are careful to target particularly contentious political issues that divide our nation. I assume his goal here is to show how Fang's argument could be pressed into the service of a variety of illiberal ends. But why should we only consider narrowly moral issues in light of interventions by government? The examples ably illustrate the heaviness of the hand government uses to skew society to its political vision in general; no need to contain our outrage to only those narrow attempts at referreeing decorum and moral convention.

Indeed, the sole problem I have with Greenwald's thesis is that it doesn't go nearly far enough, constituting a blind spot for certain institutional arrangements he (and not simply the Supreme Court) considers beyond dispute. I would argue that the corporate form owes its very existence as a legitimate legal fiction to government intervention in the first place. Not only that, the intervention was designed to favor a certain view -- in fact a political, even moral, opinion -- of how business should be organized. This view is at least as arbitrary, moralistic and prejudicial as the imaginary laws he righly argues represent state overreach.

As far as I can tell (and I'd be happy to be corrected) Greenwald takes a thoroughly liberal view here that makes a distinction between rational, secular business matters and irrational, polemical moral and religious matters. I hold that this distinction is thoroughly false: government intervention to create and sustain corporate privilege is itself a moral intervention. For example, it has rigged our business environment to prefer capital over labor and business interests over civil interests. That is not just a technical legal matter for our society to work out rationally; rather, I'd argue it circumscribes a great deal of the inequality at the heart of our society's decay.

I'd like to follow Greenwald's lead by imagining the following laws:

• The government may allow people who pay a fee to be held as statutorily immune from personal liability for actions they take. There is no cap on the amount of profit they can make off of said actions, however.
• The government may allow people who pay a fee to do business through fake identities that allow a layer of indirection in the assignment of accountability and the investigation of the real interests behind their dealings.
• The government may allow people who pay a fee to make up their own accounting rules and have special laws about taxes, accounting, and other matters applied to them so that they are regarded on a completely different basis as other of their fellow citizens (or the competition).

In each of the above cases, I have not entirely made up the law as Greenwald did -- these statements more or less describe the current legal environment. Corporations are created by government when people file paperwork and pay a fee. In return, the government grants them ownership over an entity they may govern. This entity confers on them limited liability for their actions, entity status that people are compelled to respect, and the privilege to abide by different standards than those applied to us flesh-and-blood humans. This is just the beginning of the story of how government intervenes through the corporate form to skew society towards an arrangement with moral and ethical consequences. Among other results, this artificially instituted and imbalanced playing field directly contributes to:

• the concentration of wealth in corporate entities which then find their way into our political system,
• the asymmetry between capital and labor that has stripped most people of their bargaining power,
• the externalization of costs onto society at large, most notably through environmental degredation.

The idea that somehow the above situation is a technical, amoral, secular outcome that government is perfectly at liberty to pursue underlies Greenwald's entire argument. It's only when the issue at hand is abortion, or minority rights, or religion, or some other contentious topic on which the elite have not already reached consensus that government must look the other way.

The proper remedy to all of this (besides abolishing the state and privilege at large) is hold all people equal before the law -- whether or not they are principals, managers, or shareholders in some contractually created, legally fictitious business entity. This must entail the end of all government favoritism, including that powerful subsidy embodied in corporate privilege. Nobody should be allowed to manipulate society through government force, neither for moral ends nor business advantage.

But more subtly and importantly, the line liberals draw between secular business matters and religious or moral matters is itself an arbitrary, self-serving reordering of society to their liking that underlies their statist politics. Every group with an agenda thinks theirs is different, but the liberal desire for technocratic, rational secularism is just as much a pre-rational value imposed on society as Christian fundamentalist theocracy would be. We could strike a blow for true equality -- and accomplish a lot of "progressive" ends along the way -- not by encouraging more government picking of winners and losers but by stopping the intervention that has already been going on for a century and a half.

So we're deep in summer here in Richmond, and things are as busy as ever. My consulting business is going well, and I'm about to start work on a few cool projects while continuing work on past ones. Tasha's business is also taking off, and so we are partners in stress -- for once! I'm even considering advertising for an intern as Tasha did, since it would not only be a chance to get some help but to give a computer science student the kind of real-world, practical tools for building a consultancy that I never got.

Last week, Tasha and I saw Wilco in Charlottesville and that was great. Having been a fan of jam bands for so long, I'm used to artists taking big risks on stage and it either paying off wonderfully or crashing. To see such accomplished musicians deliver stunning performances so consistently impresses me -- and the songs are pretty much top notch. After that we went to Baltimore for Artscape, where Tasha sold pottery while I got drunk and walked around the exhibits with our Baltimore friends. It was a fun weekend but not so relaxing.

As far as writing, I have a new piece over at C4SS on my experience with the anarchist pedigree of Occupy Richmond. I'll be expanding on this in a future post. I also am working on my "freedom of religion / defense of the pre-rational" argument. I also just wrote an attack on a developer encroaching on our neighborhood. It's pretty sick how rich developers can subvert city regulations at will, yet I have to go through an ordeal just to put up a picket fence.

Well, that's about all I can think of. Stay tuned for more hopefully -- I'm really trying to post more often!

I've been doing a lot of work on the blog infrastructure lately, including augmenting the tag system and updating my links page. Most of my blogroll and links from the old Wordpress site got lost, so I'm trying to put together something that represents all my interests and the blogs and sites I read and support. I rediscovered lawofone.info which is an awesome web application my friend Tobey Wheelock put together to make the Law of One material indexable, searchable, and categorized. He's also used it to compile his work on relistening to the original sessions and he's picking up some interesting corrections to the original text. It's really cool to see the material go from one guarded by a few people to a crowd-sourced collaborative rediscovery of the source.

Anyway, Tobey also has a page of interesting quotes and I found one of my favorites. One of the things that really appeals to me about this way of looking at the human condition is that it reconciles waking life with a greater reality in a way that doesn't require you to really believe in any concrete metaphysics or afterlife or anything fancy. The focus is not on heaven or hell but on making the best use of the tool of human incarnation. Getting new agey people to appreciate their mundane human experience -- not in contradiction to but as itself the spiritual teleology they seek -- prioritizes self-knowledge over system- or doctrine-knowledge. Spirituality should be something you engage in to satisfy your own needs, not to conform to a system that will fill in the blanks for you.

So why is our human condition the way it is, if we are all genuinely one? Why do we have these short lives trapped in finite bodies with limited senses if we are, indeed, infinite in reality? Because there is a utility in our ignorance, something we can learn in this constrained experience that we can't learn in any other way:

Let us give the example of the man who sees all the poker hands. He then knows the game. It is but child's play to gamble, for it is no risk. The other hands are known. The possibilities are known and the hand will be played correctly but with no interest.

In time/space and in the true-color green density (in other words, beyond our incarnate reality - JPW), the hands of all are open to the eye. The thoughts, the feelings, the troubles, all these may be seen. There is no deception and no desire for deception. Thus much may be accomplished in harmony but the mind/body/spirit gains little polarity from this interaction.

Let us re-examine this metaphor and multiply it into the longest poker game you can imagine, a lifetime. The cards are love, dislike, limitation, unhappiness, pleasure, etc. They are dealt and re-dealt and re-dealt continuously. You may, during this incarnation begin -- and we stress begin -- to know your own cards. You may begin to find the love within you. You may begin to balance your pleasure, your limitations, etc. However, your only indication of other-selves' cards is to look into the eyes.

You cannot remember your hand, their hands, perhaps even the rules of this game. This game can only be won by those who lose their cards in the melting influence of love; can only be won by those who lay their pleasures, their limitations, their all upon the table face up and say inwardly: "All, all of you players, each other-self, whatever your hand, I love you." This is the game: to know, to accept, to forgive, to balance, and to open the self in love. This cannot be done without the forgetting, for it would carry no weight in the life of the mind/body/spirit beingness totality.

Much of what I advocate politically is but the prerequisites for a society in which such transparency and utter vulnerability could thrive. But I'm also reminded that this is not a political matter, in the final analysis. Rather, it is a matter of the self making a very fundamental choice about what to be and what to manifest. That choice is more important than all the revolutions I could want, and I must keep in mind that I should never let the political overshadow the true transformative power of the will and of love.

So the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is constitutional, according to the Supreme Court. Does it actually conform to the United States Constitution? And does that question actually matter to anarchists? I'd argue "no" on the first question, but I think the latter is a more important question if we are to be effective in building institutions and relationships that serve our interests and crowd out the state's monopoly on legitimacy.

As anarchists, we find ourselves in an environment run by statists who attempt to get away with all manner of illegitimate actions and policies. For us, those acts and policies are not illegitimate because they are inconsistent with the state's own internal rules. We believe there are no rules that can justify the state or its coercive actions.

However, the statists who claim to rule us are in thrall to the myth of the constitution's legitimating power. Of course they get away with a lot that any plain reading of that document prohibits. This is the origin of "loose construction" in the first place: if they could just ignore the constitution to get what they want, they wouldn't bother framing their acts in any construction of the constitution at all. Clearly, the constitution doesn't matter to them in the way it's supposed to, but it does play some sort of role in the state's performative exercise of authority and power.

So we have a situation where the proper homage and respect must be paid to a document that provides the basis for the ruling class's state power. However, that class doesn't always agree about how that power should be wielded. When such a disagreement occurs, it can threaten the continued coherence of the state, which would deny the entire class uninterrupted power and legitimacy and create a window of opportunity for competing narratives of how we might be ruled. There must be an arbiter to resolve this dispute to preserve the overall infrastructure of the state.

In the same way a papal decree arbitarily puts to rest a matter of theological contention within the Catholic church, the Supreme Court can resolve a dispute among the statist political class in a "final" manner. Since the constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation to serve the business class's interests in "interstate commerce", the Supreme Court was designed to resolve disputes between the states in a binding manner. That does have implications for how the government will apprehend us, the people. It doesn't make that binding finality "legitimate" or "just". It just means that to the extent the government operates according to internal rules and policies, we can study its deliberations to gain insight into future encroachments.

Think of anarchist constitutional scholarship as counter-intelligence and strategic analysis. For example, the CIA was intensely interested in the internal disputes and intrigues of the Soviet Kremlin. This wasn't because they were rooting for one side over the other as a matter of justice or morality. It had more to do with trying to predict future policies and acts of that government, since those in charge are the ones who effect those policies and actions. Any interventions by the CIA in this area would have been in service to realpolitik, solely to advantage the U.S.government's interests.

I suggest anarchists think about constitutional law in a similar way. There may be broad, abstract principles of justice and reason embedded in the constitution. But they have little to nothing to do with how the state realizes its own power. We consider the exercise of that power to be a problem regardless of its adherance to an over two hundred year old document. So we should try to predict the political zeitgeist and foresee threats to ourselves and our communities, analyzing these matters in cold, calculating terms rather than in an outraged, indignant matter. Constitutional scholarship has something of a rhyme or reason to it, and it might be helpful to understand as a rear-guard defense against the state while building our own autonomous institutions to meet our needs.

To flip von Clausewitz's aphorism, politics is the continuation of war by other means. Anarchists should regard constitutional politics as nothing less. Obamacare is just another move in the chess game between privilege and the people. The solution to its injustices is not to convince the ruling class that its own myths allow us a bit more freedom; it is to topple our rulers and their myths utterly, building our own solutions, discovering our own sources of transcendent meaning, and defining the legitimate in our own interests. The constitution is of no help there except as a kind of specification document for one of the enemy's weapons.

I have a large Rails 3 project with lots of reusable code in modules. Tests for these modules are placed in test/lib to isolate them from database-heavy model tests. In order to run these tests automatically along with my unit, functional, and integration tests, I implemented the solution described here some time ago. However, at some point over the last year, either Rake or Rails or both broke this (I'm leaning towards Rails, since the new tasks in the Railties gem look much more complex, with special subtasks derived from the Rake::TestTask class). I've been looking for a new approach, and today I got fed up and started fixing it myself.

If you want to run Test::Unit tests in test/lib, try putting the following in lib/tasks/test_lib.rake:

require 'rubygems'
require 'rake'

namespace :test do
  desc "Test lib modules"
  Rake::TestTask.new(:lib) do |t|    
    t.libs << "test"
    t.pattern = 'test/lib/**/*_test.rb'
    t.verbose = true    
  end
end

class Rake::Task
  def overwrite(&block)
    @actions.clear
    enhance(&block)
  end
end

Rake::Task["test:run"].overwrite do
  errors = %w(test:units test:functionals test:integration test:lib).collect do |task|
    begin
      Rake::Task[task].invoke
      nil
    rescue => e
      { :task => task, :exception => e }
    end
  end.compact

  if errors.any?
    puts errors.map { |e| "Errors running #{e[:task]}! #{e[:exception].inspect}" }.join("\n")
    abort
  end
end

For more information on how the test tasks work, examine the source.