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Prison Notebooks of Phoenix Quinn, part 1


Hello friends and lovers!

I am excited to report that in my recent excursions through the SFP archives in their Great Undersea Library, deep beneath the Great Barrier Reef, neatly stacked up behind a huge statue of Fallback Pants, the legendary First Commander of the Bear Cavalry, I discovered the heretofore unseen and only partly soiled private journals of that wacky avatar-cum-guru-cum-nutbag known fondly to millions simply as "PQ".

The notebooks are voluminous. Some of it is nearly unreadable gibberish. It will take me some time to get thru all of it. What follows is a selection from the very earliest pages...












23-June, 2009 by the Old Calendar. Here they call it "Day 581", for reasons I have not yet enitrely discerened.

I have been imprisoned in a strange land. My decision is keep writing until I can escape. I will try to remember what I have read in that real world, record it here, if I can, in some form. But my memory is fuzzy. Remember. Remember.

But my mind is slipping. Where to begin? Damn.


Joyce, of course. But. I seem to be under the impression that I am ostrich. Can that be right?
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was an emu coming down along the path and... wait... that's not right. Is it?

What is my name? Have I been reborn? As an ostrich? No. Wait. Yes. A phoenix...





I remember!

Captain Silas Soule was friend of both John Brown and Walt Whitman. An abolitionist anti-slavery militant from Maine who served in Company D of the Union Army, Soule wrote a letter to his mother Sophia in December of 1864 stating that, "I was present at a Massacre of three hundred Indians mostly women and children. It was a horrible scene and I would not let my Company fire. Some of the Indians fought when they saw no chance of escape..."

Then in the new year, January 1865, he wrote to her again, noting, "I would not fire on the Indians with my Company and the Colonel said he would have me cashiered".

Later that year, in the spring of 1865 Captain Soule testified against the Colonel who ordered the massacre, the one who'd threatened to cashier him. 80 days later Soule was shot down dead in the streets of Denver. To this day, representatives from the Northern Cheyenne, Northern Arapaho, Southern Cheyenne and Arapho, and members of the National Park Service decorate his grave annually at the Riverside Cemetery in Denver.




Hmm. Think I'll start my public writing here in the e-prison with a nod to the Hopi Elders. With maybe a little Harvard Business School thrown in just for fun..




Joined the "United States Workers Party". Haha! As if.






30-June, 2009 by the Real World (RW) Calendar.

Got an invite from a couple of cats putting together something called the "Socialist Freedom Party". It's just a little bunch of freaks, not even in the "Top Ten". But what the heck.

The "Workers Party" is run by a bunch of elitist hacks. The "US Army" is even worse.


Well, as long as I'm imprisoned, might as well hang out with the "real" commies. Maybe one of these days I'll tell them how I was founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade back in the RW.


Or not. God forbid anyone should think I'm still an Avakianist.





5-July, 2009.

This Osmany Ramon character is a hoot. We had a long talk about all sorts of interesting stuff.

He's kind of an old-school Marxist in real life, sort of Eugene Debs-leaning-towards-Lenin-but-not-sure-there-is-really-any-real-need-for-a-Party. He works professionally with mentally challenged adults. Reminds me of other kids I've known who'd rather take care of the "crazy" ones than have to work with the "sane" ones.


I told him I was little concerned about dealing with homophobia / anti-gay bullshit and whatnot in the game-prison-world. He was very reassuring. Said he has two Dads and wouldn't tolerate any of that as long as he was President of the SFP. Nice to hear.


He's interested in the Italian Autonomist Marxists. I told him about Harry Cleaver's "Reading Capital Politically" and he said he'd check it out. Cool to meet somebody who has actually at least tried to read Marx's Capital.








12-July, 2009.

There's all kinds of fun people in this crowd. This game is kind of dumb. I was hoping for something more like a really creative implementation of Bucky Fuller's "World Game" concept, but it's more like a kind of moronic and banal retro-Clausewitzian celebration of World War One era thinking about nations.

But what the fuck, right? Stuck here. Might as well play along. If only I could remember straight...


Maybe I'll run for Congress, learn the mechanics, fart around a bit, try to get involved and see how we might trip things up a bit. At least this little crew will be up for trying out some new things.



Had a long chat with Josh Mahurin about the history of so-called socialism in RW Slovakia. There's a group trying to start a "socialist" e-country there and he was a little taken aback by the fierce "anti-communism" and racism of the Slovak players.


Reminded him of the interchange between Yoda and Luke Skywalker:


“Luke: What's in there?
Yoda: Only what you take with you.”
-- Star Wars


Then I went on to try to bore him to death by summarizing Popper's theory of knowledge that all observation is selective and theory-laden, there are no pure or theory-free observations, that we must take Hume's rejection of induction one step further, recognizing that _only_ falsifiability makes a theory scientific. And so, the quest for knowledge can only be the practise of problem-solving and an independent creative imagination is, as Einstein clearly recognized, at the heart of "good" science.

Luckily Victor (my son) wasn't around to hear me. He thinks Popper is a neo-liberal quack since he wrote those "Open Society" books criticizing Marxist tendencies towards authoritarianism. But then Victor is from Mexico, so he probably knows a thing or two about what it takes to confront Gringo Imperialism successfully.

Whatever. Anyway, I also told Josh about Nassim Nicholas Taleb's idea on "the ludic fallacy" from his "Black Swan" book, which he describes as "the misuse of games to model real-life situations", which is basically a critique of "playing games" with probability in predictive models, right? Apply over-simplified modelds to a complex phenomenon (like, say, credit default swaps on asset-backed derivatives) and you will likely end up ignoring both the butterfly effect and probably creating a model that seems "smart", but lacks the ability to be falsified.

Then boom. World-wide financial meltdown. Oops.




15-July, 2009.

Decided to run for Congress despite the hostility shown to Robert Bayer. Considering he is pretty much just a mild-mannered democratic socialist who hates Ajay Bruno, maybe I just won't let on right away that I'm a fire-breathing anarcho-communist, yuck-yuck. LOL.


In a little private ode to the Jayhawker freedom fighters who took up John Brown's revolt during the Bleeding Kansas era of the RW Civil War, I chose to run from Kansas and adopted its state motto as my own: "Ad astra per aspera" -- roughtly, "To the stars, through difficulties".

My campaign will be pragmatic -- build more hospitals and defense systems -- and anti-imperialist -- let's help those nations occupied by the imperialist "PEACE" coalition. Support just wars. Don't become imperialists ourselves.

I will support openness -- plan to call for a Congressional Newspaper that publishes all votes of every member, the budget, and so forth -- and oppose movement towards Big Brotherism like a so-called "national primary" that would effectively take the wee bit of democratic practice we have out of the game and squirrel it away on some off-game forum. Blech.


And in a wee tweak to those revisionists in the USWP, I will note that I'm "an active member of the Socialist Freedom Party, e-America's real workers party. Heh!




26-July, 2009.

Holy crap. I got elected.






29-July, 2009.

I am going to do my best to understand the game mechanics.

Meanwhile, it looks like Commander Ramon is going to step down so that he can help to start a Communist Internationale. That should be fun. He's interested in doing an actual marxist economic analysis of the ludic model. So far his theory is that while there is no real exploitation or national oppression in the game in a materialist sense (though it does get sort of simulated in a stupid way), you probably could argue that there is "real" alienation. In other words, "workers" (players) really are alienated from the fruit of their labor in various ways.

He and some others are thinking about how to create a "commune" style of manufacturing where we as a collective would pool our labor and profits for some common good, like say, forming our own self-directed fighting unit. He's also interested in which e-countries might be large enough to support something like a larger-scale play-experiment in cooperative or socialized or "nationalized" economy. He's dubious about small-scale experiments where a little group of so-called "commies" just move somewhere and take over the electoral process.


So if this "Congress" gig is a bust, maybe I can help with that.




3-August, 2009.

Holy crap. These Congress-critters are batshit crazy and useless as 3-day-old dog poo. This is worse than 4chan. Bunch of ego-sick napoleans waving their jeejahs around. Yikes. Thank goodness for Rainy Sunday and one or two others who aren't completely insane. That PigInZen guy seems OK too.





4-August, 2009.

Wrote like 20 pages of critiques on the draft Constitution for the Communist Internationale and passed them along to Commander Ramon. Hopefully something useful or interestig in all of that.



As I head into my third month of captivity, trying to walk this tightrope between engagement and revolutionism, I am reminded of US Marine Corps Brigadier General Evans Carlson.

Remember? Remember... Do I?


I remember!

He was the guy who introduced the phrase "gung ho" to the Marine Corps and hence to popular US culture. A lifelong military man, he found himself in China as a military observer in 1937, aligned with the Nationalist forces who were fighting the Japanese.

There he met a fellow named Edgar Snow and developed a strong interest in the red guerilla fighting units. He made his way behind their lines, met Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, and travelled with them on foot and on horseback for some time. He also befriend the Kiwi commie Rewi Alley, who'd developed a system of industrial cooperatives aimed at supporting the fight against Imperial Japan. Gōng hé was the slogan of those co-ops.

Upon his return Stateside, Carlson was a frequent critic of Japan and he enventually joined the Marines. He was put in command of the Second Marine Raider Battalion, a commando unit whose second-in-command was Captain James Roosevelt, FDR's son.

They were modeled after Chinese guerilla units, where each 10-man squad had one squad leader and 3 fire teams. Even more annoying to his traditionalist collegues was Carlson's insistence that the entire notion of "officers" was ridiculous religious-style elitism. He emphasized the role of NCO's and encouraged all the men to seek out mentors and to think of their positions as ones of responsibility, not of power.

Carlson's Patrol in the long bloody campaign on Guadacancal killed 500 enemy troops in 29 days, suffering only 16 casualties of their own. After the war, his style of firing squads was adopted throughout the Corps, but they ignored his ideas regarding hierarchy. He passed away of a heart condition in 1947, lucky to miss out on having his outstanding contributions tarnished by the McCarthyite scum.




8-August, 2009.

Mark Valshaannar is the new party president while Ramon is off trying to foment e-world-wide autonomo-marxist revolution or something. He's a hoot too. Not a big intellectual like Osmany, but lots of enthusiasm and a raw edge that is kind of refreshing.

The Party is starting to work on a formal Platform. Good idea. Helps to pull people together and, if nothing else, it is something to do.

Quite a mixed group, really. I tried to enumerate the various "tendencies" I could detect:

* social-democracy
* socialism in the Debs tradition
* marxism
* leninism
* trotskyism
* maoism
* guevarism
* gramscian cultural work
* anarcho-syndicalism
* anarhco-primativism
* radical democracy
* anti-imperialism
* labor-union activism
* leftist existentialism
* pro-revolutionary "communist nihilism"
* adherance to the thought of Zeno of Citium, not to be confused with Zeno of Elea
* adherance to the thought of Zeno of Elea
* buddhism
* the advice of the Hopi elders

And no doubt there are some others that I have missed.

The growing consensus as far as revolutionary theory goes seems to be around the idea of "economic class war" based on the development and growth of communes in the most resource-endowed e-countries, as an alternative to capitalist modes of production. Not clear how that will translate to a world-wide effort.

I am also intrigued by the "Workers Militia" type of groups that have grown up around the emerging Internationale, who seek to fight imperialism and for the liberation of occupied countries. Not sure where that "end up" either (if anywhere), but it sounds like more fun than "Rah-rah! U-S-A! U-S-A! I have a tiny dick!" or whatever. (LOL)



15-August, 2009.

As my captivity drags on, my mind wanders into making up aphorisms to e-live by...

In e-life, all it takes for boredom to triump is for clever people to do nothing.


e-Life is unpredictable. Small differences to start with can lead to extraordinarily different outcomes. Risks and probabilities are purely guesswork. So fuck it and just have fun.



I ponder a New Land I will call Nomosia. In the Land of Nomosia...

* Sharing food is a national obsession. It is very rare to ever see a Nomoisan eating alone.

* The mixing up of gender roles, appearances and identities has reached such massive proportions that gendered pro-nouns are beginning to disappear from all of the Nomosian languages, of which there are several dozen.


* In the widely spoken Nomosian-English creole, a common conversation goes like this:

Y'et-yet? (Have you eaten?)
Bandam-boyo! (Let's talk about eating together.)
What way? (Where shall we go to eat?)
Good-good? (A question, like "How are you?" In this context meaning, "How hungry are you really?)
Tok! (Hungry enough. Basically, "I could eat a meal, not just a snack.")
Eat-eat! (Please come with me and I'll feed you.)
Ya, tanks. (Yes, thank you)

Then after the meal...

Yugo? (Was it OK? Or, literally, something like "Could you take a nice big dump now?")
Yugo! ("You betcha!")


* Nomosians love to debate. Bantering contests are a national sport. Nomosians do very little work, so they spend alot of time talking, thinking, singing and so on.

* Taboo topics. The Old Southern Lolo Nomosian language has a word "battelkkenonz", which can be roughly translated as "mean and stupid bullshit". Saying things that are simply mean, nasty, cruel-spirited, clearly-untrue and not funny will get you ignored in Nomosia. If you persist in it, side-eye will ensue, and then even a gentle smack upside the head. The most humiliating reponse of all to "battelkkenonz" is when somebody goes to get a grannie to listen to what you just said, and then they smack you.

* Nomosian head of government is selected every Sunday afternoon by lottery. If the chosen citizen is busy, or they just don't feel like ruling that week, they are free to turn down the honor. It is also considered to be bad form to be asleep, drunk or stoned if you get choen for supreme ruler, so people in such a state are quietly and subtly passed over. Citizens must be at least 13 years old to be ruler. The supreme ruler has no real responsibilities; it is mainly a ceremonial post. The actual everyday business of running the country is done by people who don't mind doing such things, so old folks pretty much quietly run the country day-to-day and don't go around bothering people too much.


* Every day in Nomosia is a National Holiday, sometimes multiple ones. Most income is taxed at about 100%, with a few exceptions. The general approach is to work just enough for a "plesant survival", as the common phrase goes. Given that Nomosians are constantly talking about everything and sharing all their food, there tend to be few serious social problems. Some of the more popular Holidays recently include: Ostrich Day, Grandparents Day (that's a big one), Ocean Day, Kite-Flying Day, Huge Freaking Choir Day (devoted to mass sing-a-longs) and Pie Day (which involves throwing, as well as eating, pies).