From: kurt@eskimo.celestial.com (Kurt Cockrum)
Newsgroups: seattle.general,pnw.general,alt.society.anarchy
Subject: Re: Wanted: Post election comments on Prop. 9
Summary: Prop. 9, an anti-gay measure, just LOST in OR.  A call for a
	Freethinkers War College
Keywords: el-mundo-zurdo(Gloria Anzaldua),immediatism,anarchism,queers,
	feral-humans,freethinkers,[lL]ibertarians,gays-and-other-sex-radicals,
	strategy,tactics,intelligence,psy-ops,deception,disruption,memetics,
	screwing-things-up,aikido,entropy,doxies,orthodoxi
Date: 7 Nov 92 20:07:05 GMT
Organization: >>> Eskimo North (206)-FOR-EVER <<<

In article <1992Nov6.222852.1@fnalo.fnal.gov> maxwell@fnalo.fnal.gov writes:
>Anyone care to comment on the public debate/sentiment in the wake of Prop. 9?
>
>regards.max

Of course! :)  The first thing I want to do is congratulate the people
who worked against the measure.  It's about time the fundies got a
setback, and I congratulate the anti-9 folks for giving it to them --
it's a *major* win!!  Next I want to take this out of the arena
of exclusively gay/lesbian concerns, for that's where the recent prop9
drama was played (IMO), and put it in a larger context of struggle between
the freethinkers (what I call "the Rads" below) and the brain-enslavers
(that otherwise diverse collection of individuals hosting memes that
disable their autonomous free-thinking capabilities, and redirects their
goals towards working to reproduce the meme in other individuals).

The Pro9PodPeople have announced that they will be back in 2 years with
a new, "cleaned up" measure with less inflammatory language, so the fight's
not over.  Very likely they will spend the next 2 years in fundraising and
strategy, exploring and probing weak spots in the up-to-now essentially
defensive strategy of the
Rads (for that's what this fight's about -- basically a civil war between the
Rads (my name for straight, gayles, bi, anarchists,
mind-your-own-business-types,
what-have-you, and-any-body-else-who-can-tolerate-us-in-return-for-our-
reciprocal-toleration) and the Pro9PodPeople, who are none-of-the-above).

Naturally, "our" (the Rads) strategy basically must be to see that
this process (and more generally, others like it) gets
blocked-and/or-disrupted at critical milestones/activities,
generally ensuring that the path for the opposition towards *their* goal
is strewn with as many obstacles, tears and travail as possible.
The highest-level goals boil down to:
1	keep it off the ballot
2	if it gets on the ballot, make it lose
3	formulate, revise, and fine-tune strategy and tactics with the first
	2 goals in mind; they will get *lots* of use.

We somehow have to come up with a toolset of proven strategies, tactics and
tricks for derailing, disrupting the plans of these people, and redirecting
their enormous energy reserves in ways that, if impossible to subvert in ways
beneficial to us, serve at least to dissipate it in ways that cause less harm
than planned by them.  Fomenting internal conflict inside the opposition,
causing them to expend effort and divert resources to internal repairs, is
one example of such a tactic.  Exploiting individual "weaknesses" of
individuals working for the opposition, particularly key players, is another
(time-tested) tool.  The repressive nature of their beliefs, especially
when inculcated during childhood, leaves "hooks" of a disabling nature
(unfulfilled, repressed sexual desires or phobias, or internal demons of
*all* sorts, for example) that, while providing a driving force for much of
their activity, also ought to be exploited *as* *weaknesses* by us.

Their work ought to be made as difficult, painful, unpleasant, obnoxious,
enervating and wearing as our rich, twisted and perverted imaginations
could make it.  Ways and means of accelerating entropy in the vicinity of
their activity centers should be explored.

Such a toolset could be applied against *any* group of a repressive nature.

I think that we should gather intelligence on the Christian Fundies, and
study them just as we study insects or any other real-world thing.
Strategies should be formulated.  Intelligence needs to be gathered (at
possible great risk), collated and evaluated. Tactical skills need to be
acquired and passed on to others.
Plans and scenarios need to produced and archived for possible future use,
just like the US War College does for hypothetical opponents around the world.

We have to acquire, invent, preserve and USE the crucial skills and tools
that we find successful in fighting off the opposition's attacks, and
repair, debug and/or junk those that don't work.

We need to read {Lao,Sun} Tzu, Mushashi, Machiavelli, von Clausewitz and
other strategic thinkers.  Leaven these with some Bob Black, Hakim Bey
and Robert Anton Wilson. :)

My old sensei used to say that one of the secrets of dealing successfully
with an attacker was to figure out what the opponent wanted to do, and
then, instead of *resisting* them, to *help* them.  Now on the face of it
this sounds absurd -- we are being *attacked* -- we don't want to help
our attacker attack us, for heaven's sake -- that's committing suicide.
If somebody takes a swing at me, I'm not going to guide the fist toward
my jaw and help it make contact in the manner the opponent plainly desires;
I've picked the wrong level of abstraction in my zeal to "help"
my opponent, and helped him/her clobber me.  Great for them, not so good for
me :) , so what does this mean?
Well, if a strong and committed attack is made toward you, we can plainly
infer that the opponent *wants* to move in the direction they are going
in (giving them the benefit of the doubt that they aren't just uncoordinated
-- another thing to exploit, but don't let the opponent spoof you), and so,
we are justified in "assisting" them.  In practice, this can result in quite
dramatic acrobatics as the defender senses, blends in with, and *augments*
the attacker's force in a way that nullifies the attack, dissipates the
attacker's energy, wears them down, and eventually they run out of steam.
Ideally, we'd like to make them trip over their own hakama, so to speak
(the hakama is a free-flowing, extremely loose trouser-like outer garment
derived from Japanese traditional garb.  I think it's still used over there).
Incidentally, it also makes skill on the part of the attacker much less of
a decisive factor than it otherwise would be.

Additionally, tactics that deserve *much* greater attention are ridicule,
obscenity, derision, shame, humor, absurdity, parody, outing, gross-outs,
sheer bad taste.  I've always admired the ways out-and-out bigots get handled
by the folks in alt.tasteless, for example.  The sheer diversity of culture
(and by implication, the enormous diversity of cultural defense mechanisms),
and the toleration that is a survival aid on the net is an example that works
*greatly* to our advantage IMO.  I'd be interested to know how much
net.activity helped the anti-9 forces vs how much it helped the pro-9 forces
(and if that's not too valuable a bit of intelligence for the other side! :) .
Rest assured, they will discover the net one day, if they haven't already.

2 years and counting.
-- 
kurt@grogatch.celestial.com (Kurt Cockrum)
Subvert the Anti-Gands!		F-IW	MYOB