This covers some of my time in New Hampshire, from around July to August 2017.
In general, names have been changed. Information may have been removed or added.
Length is about 3 pages.
First week at work:
Wednesday: ...When I got to work, …………. said she was thinking about taking a second full time job at Planet Fitness. I perked up and said I had just been checking them out... …………. said something might “happen” to her Honda, but hey, she can always get another one, and she gave me a hateful glare. She really doesn’t like me.
[I drove a Honda at the time. Another man started working for …………. through the same staffing agency that I was, around the time that I did. His name was ………….. He was …………. He always stood behind me during morning meetings. Everyone else was usually in a circle. He liked to suck up to the supervisor. One time he got called out for brownnosing, and he replied, "you've got to get it from somewhere." He was a bit narcissistic. After a conversation I had with someone else mentioning four Virginian cities, he came up to me and told me he travels sometimes for …………., and named the same four cities I did, although he struggled to remember the last one.
When I decided to leave, there was a very strong effort from many people, including people I barely spoke with, to find out where I was going. The older man I liked to talk to, …………. asked me directly, and when I said I wasn't going to answer, he said he hoped I would answer before I leave. -2/20]
[During the month of August I moved to the …………., which is a home with several bedrooms in the basement to rent. I thought it was strange the basement shower had a large mirror at the top angled down. While I was there I talked to some other tenants. One of them complained about his experiences with the libertarian community. The other, when I mentioned I liked to listen to Stephan Moleneaux, jumped at the chance to tell me that he had spied on his wife's therapy patients in their home by listening to the vents. He said Stephan had become something of a Nazi. And the two described for me a time they say him speak, how he was so full of himself. It seemed he had a smear style response ready for someone who was influential to me. Also, when I told Dave that [the place I lived in August] was a good example of free staters succeeding, he got angry. Dave, who I will introduce next, I believe had previously been a tenant there. -2/13/20]
8/19/17
I attended the bitcoin meetup. I was nervous. Liam asked me a few questions, which made me nervous. One guy with silver hair who seemed very interested in bitcoin as an investment asked me what the free state project was. When I began to explain it, he seemed disturbed, and told me I might be wasting my life. He asked me if I had any friends up here. I said no, and he said I really seemed to care. Another guy sat next to me. Dave. I asked him a few questions. He is a Budhist, he had a job as a ………….. Now he has no job, but works …………., and doing some of his own writing. He came to [town] out of interest in Bitcoin. He believes it can do some good for the world, because it can’t be inflated. I agreed, and said I didn’t think there had been a time in human history in which people could interact on a platform where harming each other was mathematically impossible. This was his thought as well. He said that phones could be hacked in 15 sec, and even though the platform was secure, maybe someone is waiting for enough people to buy in, and they have already hacked a bunch of phones, and they are going to steal the bitcoin all at the same time. I noted that there is a demand for privacy, so perhaps some defense would be developed. [His eyes flashed, and he seemed inwardly shocked and upset by my answer. It seemed to me he expected to dissuade me with that comment, and hoped I would be. I suspected this was an attempt to reclassify me in a friendlier manner as Brian had done. -2/14/20] Dave asked what I liked to do for work or fun. I said I was trying new things. ... I told him I was here to look into the free state project and Bensonwood, and told him about what timber framing is, and how it is better than balloon framing. I really love timber frame, Japanese and French Tudor. He said he spent some time in Colorado in a tea house doing tea ceremonies. I noted how much I loved how they were built. You didn’t have to put decorations over crap. The construction was the decoration. It was being in a space that had purpose and intention, and that really changed the atmosphere. I said they want to prefab houses like how cars are made. He asked about the cost. I told him right now, Beonsonwood is trying to make their houses cheaper to reach the masses. He asked what role I would take. I told him I did CNC, which he thought was very cool, and I told him about the manufacturing plant they are building, and the cool job I could have there. I asked about his future plans. He is considering leaving [town]. He wanted to go somewhere dryer, and practice being a monk-like person more seriously. Or he might go with some friends in NYC and make a distributed art platform with a crypto currency. He tried to explain it, and I got confused. I asked where I might learn more about crypto currencies, and he didn’t really have a good resource. He uses reddit.
We were interrupted by other speakers. When I was leaving, Dave asked if he could walk with me for a bit. I asked him about what the situation was with the free state project there. He said it is basically what I just saw. Those bitcoin meetings are about all that happens. He said there is a bit of cop blocking. I listed some of the other activism, like robinhooding, 420, chalking the sidewalk. He said most of that has stopped. He moved to the free state, but after that, there wasn’t anything else to do. I asked about the rumors that people were not really listening to the community they were reaching out to, but beating them over the head with info. He agreed, but did note that there is better outreach with bitcoin. I noted that the early movers were often unattached young men in jobs that were easy to transition to, like tech jobs, and tended to be the more obnoxious type. I noted there wasn’t really any way for the libertarians to police their own to control their narrative. He said he had fulfilled his duty just by moving, and I reminded him that free staters are supposed to expend the utmost practical effort to create a government that only protects life and property. He told me he believed freedom was really about realizing that everyone has their own morality, libertarian, statist, or whatever, and that is just their subjective beliefs, and freedom was to not be influenced by things that can be changed, external states of what is happening with the government. Freedom is you can be put in jail, and your mental state does not change. It is hard to get and maintain this stoic indifference. I noted that he just described Buddhism, and that it was to be without passion. He said some allow compassion, as a way to encourage others to pursue this detachment, and they can keep being reincarnated to try to alleviate the suffering of others, and in that way it allows for activism. He was walking me to a place that looked like apartments, so I changed directions. I said I was not a Buddhist. I believed people were eternal, and had value, and that if there was an injustice in the temporal world, it was still wrong, because it was against someone that mattered, and I shouldn’t ignore it. Murder, theft, rape, fraud, will always be there to some degree, but it is a good thing to try to create conditions that don’t promote those things. He asked me how justice would be enforced. I told him about how common law was created. He asked if that had to do with the Magna Carta. I told him no, that I think was Charles the 1st being forced by his citizens to give them some rights. Common law was well before. When people would have disputes with each other, they would ask someone they both respected in the community to arbitrate, and they would agree to abide by this person’s ruling. When that ruling was published, everyone else could decide if they liked it, and could choose to use this person’s arbitration services in the future. No one could know if they might be accused, or accuser, so there was a natural incentive to choose someone who would give equal rulings. So the law that emerged was chosen by the free market, and was very equal, and that is common law. I told him about a chapter in Rothbard’s book A New Liberty which explains how some other of these systems worked, like an ancient Irish one. Then I explained how the king wanted to get into the justice business, and required anyone who wanted to have a case heard to go through his courts with his judges, and pay him something. People didn’t want to do that, because the king was coming in with his own interests that were not the interests of the parties involved, so they tried to continue outside of it, but he enforced it. He set up Reeves of the Shire, which became the Sheriffs. Fast forward, the Puritans were harassing people for all kinds of petty moralistic reasons. People got sick of it and disbanded the police forces and only left the Sheriffs with arresting power. If he wanted to arrest someone, he would have to find enough people in the community who thought it was important enough to get off their butts and risk their lives and go catch that person. And if he couldn’t, he would have to go catch them himself. That was the system that was brought to America. They didn’t go all the way back to common law. Sheriffs are a constitutional office. We didn’t have organized police forces for the first 60 years. They would have been considered a standing army in the early understanding of the constitution. Then you have places like Dubai which instituted common law in an area controlled by Sharia, and they have become fabulously wealthy off of that. I told Dave that this was my view, and why I am not a Buddhist. He smiled brightly and said it was a good view. He thought it would not be scalable. I suggested maybe as Ethereum brings contracts into their exchanges, maybe there would be some fuzzy areas in those contracts and people would like an arbiter to review them. And people could use cell 411 if they know someone they trust who knows them, their house, and their dog to come clear their house if they were worried. Dave said he doesn’t use cell 411 for anything. I said neither do I, but it is just a way to pre record an alert and send it out to people whom you have predetermined to send that alert to. So you have to find the people you want to organize that with. He said he would still rather call the police if his house was broken into. I said then he has a community problem. He mused that it wasn’t a technology problem, it was a people problem. I told him what I would do if I were him is I would sell consultations to people to teach them how to use Bitcoin. You have all these people who are techies and all these people who don’t know anything about it. I suggested going to the library and teaching workshops to the community. I explained that the people who were effective and staying were renting rooms or running a vending machine. They were making money off of what they do. So if you want to spread the knowledge of bitcoin, it should be profitable. One person could teach 20 people what it is, how to download a wallet and get started, you could make $200 that hour, and then there are 20 people walking around who use it. The merchants who use bitcoin would want to encourage this as well. He said his outreach has been mostly to the vendors, but I noted it needs to be both, because you’ve got to have people who would like to use bitcoin at these places. I get up to leave, and ask him if he has any more questions or curiosities. He says he is wondering where I am going. I say it is a secret. “A secret place.” “No, it’s not a secret place.” He asks if it is Washington DC, but then says he could ask all day but won’t. I talk a little bit about Bensonwood, and some of their new innovative ideas, like open build, and how it will make innovating things like utilities much easier. [Before we parted ways, he blurted something out, which seemed to be pressing on him. He said "Just don't care about anything." Looking back it is clear what he meant. In a harassment campaign, stress responses you give are used like official permission to continue hitting that nerve. This means you are threatened in apparently any way possible, even ways that fall under the legal definition of torture. -2/14/20] He said our paths may cross, life takes many turns. He said he doesn’t get out and meet people. He stays by himself. He likes to fly under the radar. People don’t even know where he lives. He supposed he would still need people. I said you always need people unless you can go out in the woods and build a mud hut and start a fire. I shook his hand and he thanked me.
The Next Sunday. Once again I came 10 minutes fashionably late. I don’t know when I got to be so fashionable. Dave waved to me. The Libertarian party president looked very nervous to see me. I sat across from him. He said I looked familiar, and I told him I had been to Porcfest and attended his panel. He and his wife told me silly stories of their move and asked me the basics, where I worked, what my plans were. They had to leave. Next to them were Liam and his friend the [business man]. They both deliberately and abruptly got up and sat one chair over next to me. Liam asked me pointed questions about what sort of work I did. He said that there weren’t a lot of people at Porcfest, and like any movement, it seemed to have peaked, and there wasn’t as much attention on it. He mentioned considering going to a civil disobedience rally, talked to [the business man] about his upcoming hearing where he faces a year in jail for contempt of cop, basically nothing, and the freestater who was just killed in a car accident. His conversation was intentional, but directed to what end? Was he trying to scare me away? Was he testing my resolve? Seeing what kind of trouble I would be? He asked me what kind of activism I was interested in. I told him I was interested in something like Agorism, but not the civil disobedience that these guys did. [The business man] got very defensive at that. His accusations were unfounded [I added]. I explained how I was interested in developing alternatives to government in the way that homeschooling is an alternative to public school, but as I was in manufacturing and construction so that is where I would be focusing. He asked me if I was planning on building a tiny home in NH. I said I might, a little surprised, and asked how it was around here building tiny homes. He said he didn’t know, but that he knew many people were interested, including one name he gave me from the forums. Liam had a ………… to run, so he headed out. He seemed like a curious figure to me. Calm in the face of calamity to the point it made me wonder if he was suspiciously immune or just realistic and determined. I have heard he didn’t do a good job of listening to the other side. I saw no evidence of that in this conversation, but I would have to listen …….... He later messaged me on the forum letting me know of local manufacturing companies that are hiring. His quick response made me think he would welcome my involvement. After he and a few others left I sat next to Dave, who was conversing with a computer geek named Don. Don is the most classically geek person you could meet. He clammed up when I came over, perhaps shy around girls? I asked encouraging questions on his recommendations of android operating systems and good privacy apps. [The business man] seemed reluctant to help me when I asked him. He mocked Dave when he didn’t know that IRC stood for internet relay chat. They didn’t know anything about Ethercoin, but Dave did, and explained their strategies for dealing with scalability. Don explained to me something I didn’t know, that the cell card intertwined with the CPU meant it could be tracked even without the SIM card. I asked about theoretical ways that could be changed. [The business man] told me about some possibilities, to which Dave goaded him, speculating he had something like that in the works. This seemed to bother [the business man] and he took a much more defensive stance. [Dave acted like he was sadistically toying with him, and [the business man] looked shocked and nauseous, crossed his arms, and didn't want to talk so much after. Don looked at him very sympathetically. After the first time I spoke with Dave, he had seemed to imply he was not welcomed here -2/13/20] The geeks were not extremely forthcoming with me. “There is nothing to do here.” Dave bemoaned to me as I searched out their activities. Dave watched me interact with interest. As we headed out he told me that I was a good conversationalist. “Really?” He noted how I asked questions and followed up. He said he wished there was something for the coming activists to do. “I will have to think about it and come up with some ideas.” He gave me his email in case I wanted to catch up with him later. I asked if he was going to stay in [town]. He said his days in [town] were numbered. He told me he was ready for a new chapter in his life. I told him to make it a good one and perhaps I would see him again, and then I walked off to my car. I did not go to the meetings the next week. I was too busy preparing to move.