Month: August 2012

Instead of a Post, By a Man too Busy to Write One

Instead of being a responsible blogger this weekend I decided to attend a three-gun competition in Holmen, Wisconsin. By the time I returned to my home base in the Twin Cities I wanted a shower and some sleep more than I wanted to write blog posts. Needless to say, unless I end up writing something for later today, you’ll have to check back tomorrow for your daily dose of zany agorist gun blog posts.

You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

Collectivists like to throw around words such as bourgeois, proletariat, exploitation, etc. One of the most interesting words they seem to enjoy haphazardly tossing here and there is nationalize. In the eyes of collectivists nationalizing businesses will make them more “socially responsible” by transferring ownership away from a single or handful of wealthy individuals to the public. What actually happens is that the ownership is transferred from a single or handful of individuals to a single or handful of individuals. Nationalization transfers ownership from private individuals to the state, which is why this article in Slate is so incredibly stupid:

Over the last several years, Facebook has become a public good and an important social resource. But as a company, it is behaving badly, and long term, that may cost it: A spring survey found that almost half of Americans believe that Facebook will eventually fade away. Even the business side has been a bit of a disaster lately, with earnings lower than expected and the news that a significant portion of Facebook profiles are fake. If neither users nor investors can be confident in the company, it’s time we start discussing an idea that might seem crazy: nationalizing Facebook.

Let me see if I follow the author’s idea. Facebook has been performing poorly compared to expectations and, in general, behaving badly. The solutions to this problem is to prop Facebook up by nationalizing it. Interesting. Here I thought the best way to deal with a problematic company was to let it go broke and fade into the irrelevance of market failures. If the author’s accusations are true then Facebook is misallocating resources that could be put to more productive uses, shouldn’t we allow those misallocated resources to be freed so that they could be used to provide services that people actually want? Wouldn’t it be wrong to force everybody to continue giving Facebook resources as since shown a propensity to use those resources poorly?

Let’s see what the author has to say:

By “nationalizing Facebook,” I mean public ownership and at least a majority share at first. When nationalizing the company restores the public trust, that controlling interest could be reduced. There are three very good reasons for this drastic step: It could fix the company’s woeful privacy practices, allow the social network to fulfill its true potential for providing social good, and force it to put its valuable data to work on significant social problems.

What? Excuse me, I need to get some Aspirin to continue with this post.

In Odin’s name, where does the author come up with the idea that nationalizing Facebook would fix the company’s woeful privacy practices? The the fuck is “social good” and how does nationalizing help Facebook provide it? What significant social problems can Facebook work on after being nationalized that it couldn’t work on before?

I want to focus on the claim that nationalizing Facebook will improve its privacy practices. As I explained earlier, when a company is nationalized ownership is transferred from private individuals to the state. The state that would gain ownership of Facebook in this case is the United States, the same state that said it was legal to wiretap your phone and track your cellular phone without a warrant. Does that sound like an entity that has the protection of your privacy in mind? I want to emphasize the stupidity the author is advocating:

It would be better to have a national privacy commissioner with real authority, some stringent privacy standards set at the federal level, and programs for making good use of some of the socially valuable data mining that firms like Facebook do. But in the United States, such sweeping innovations are probably too difficult to actually pull off, and nationalization would almost get us there. Facebook would have to rise to First Amendment standards rather than their own terms of service.

Since there are concerns about privacy on Facebook the author wants to put the federal government in charge of enforcing Facebook’s privacy policies. Yes, the same federal government that ruled wiretapping and tracking cellular phones doesn’t even require a warrant. I wonder if the author, fearing babysitters may molest his child, uses the sex offenders registry in the find babysitters.

I’m completely baffled by the author’s claim that putting the federal government in charge of Facebook would require it to rise to Fist Amendment standards when that very same federal government doesn’t itself rise to such standards.

With 80 percent of market share, Facebook is already a monopoly, and being publicly traded hasn’t made it more socially responsible.

No, it’s not a monopoly. Monopolies aren’t defined by arbitrary market shares, monopolies are defined by whether or not competition can freely enter a market. The fact that the state hasn’t made any laws protecting Facebook’s market share, demonstrated by Twitter and Google entering the social networking market unhindered, proves that no monopoly exists. Once again the author makes an accusation that Facebook isn’t “socially responsible” without actually stating what does or doesn’t make a company “socially responsible.”

But Facebook can also make mistakes with political consequences. The company has come under fire for missteps like prohibiting photos of women breast-feeding and suddenly banning “Palestinian” pages at one point. Facebook communications are an important tool for democracy advocates, including those who helped organize the Arab Spring. Yet the user policy of requiring that democratic activists in authoritarian regimes maintain “real” profiles puts activist leaders at risk. And dictators have figured out how they can use Facebook to monitor activist networks and entrap democracy advocates.

But since the security services in Syria, Iran, and China now use Facebook to monitor and entrap activists, public trust in Facebook may be misplaced. Rather than allow Facebook to serve authoritarian interests, if nationalized in the United States, we could make Facebook change its identity policy to allow democracy activists living in dictatorships to use pseudonyms.

Just a second, I need more Aspirin.

How does transferring ownership of Facebook to the federal government stop it from serving authoritarian interests? The United States government is an authoritarian regime.

Nationalizing Facebook would allow more resources to go into data mining for public health and social research.

We must nationalize Facebook to protect user’s privacy by violating their privacy! War is peace! Freedom is slavery! Ignorance is strength! It’s kind of impressive to see an author invalidate almost nine paragraphs of argumentation in one 17 word sentence.

Many academics are finding that big social network data sets can generate surprising and valuable information for addressing social problems—for instance, public health and national security.

National security? I think it’s a well-known fact at this point that the words “national security” are mutually exclusive with “protecting privacy.”

Nationalization could allow us to review the ethical implications of their management decisions.

We’re going to put an entity that assassinates American citizens without a trail in charge of determining whether or not management decisions are ethical? Can anybody explain how that would work out?

I know the author was thinking, “Gosh, nationalizing ownership of Facebook would take ownership away from those evil bourgeois pricks and transfer it to The PeopleTM!” The author must have read a great deal of socialist propaganda and decided the writings about the evils of private ownership were great while the writings about the evils of the United States government could be ignored. Even the most ardent socialist wouldn’t dream of nationalizing Facebook under the current United States regime. Nationalizing Facebook wouldn’t suddenly turn the service into a guardian of privacy, it would merely grant a gross violator of privacy absolute ownership over the service’s data. Facebook wouldn’t be wrenched from the hands of evil bourgeois and put into the hands of The PeopleTM, it would be wrenched from the hands of investors and put into the hands of a state that ceased representing The PeopleTM long ago (if it ever did in the first place).

GM is Heading Towards Bankruptcy Yet Again

The state spent billions of tax victim dollars to keep General Motors (GM) from filing bankruptcy and it appears, unsurprisingly, that GM is heading for bankruptcy yet again:

Right now, the federal government owns 500,000,000 shares of GM, or about 26% of the company. It would need to get about $53.00/share for these to break even on the bailout, but the stock closed at only $20.21/share on Tuesday. This left the government holding $10.1 billion worth of stock, and sitting on an unrealized loss of $16.4 billion.

Right now, the government’s GM stock is worth about 39% less than it was on November 17, 2010, when the company went public at $33.00/share. However, during the intervening time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen by almost 20%, so GM shares have lost 49% of their value relative to the Dow.

This is why bailouts are such a joke, they reward companies that misallocate resources. When a company allocates resources towards fulfilling the desires of consumers that business is rewarded with more resource, which are voluntarily given to them by consumers. When a company misallocates resources by putting them towards producing goods and services consumers don’t want that company doesn’t receive further resources and eventually fails. When you insert government into the mix you destroy the market feedback mechanism as companies are given additional resources even though they’ve failed to provide for consumer wants. If GM gets another bailout there will be even less motivation for them to fulfill consumer desires as they would be rewarded twice for failing to do so, and the government seems more than happy to deliver GM another bailout less it be embarrassed by the dismal failure that the bailout programs have been.

President Obama’s Legacy

What will Obama be remembered for? His supporters will claim that people will remember the president for passing the healthcare bill. The rest of us know what his legacy will be, it’ll be a legacy of dead bodies:

Sure, we as a nation have always killed people. A lot of people. But no president has ever waged war by killing enemies one by one, targeting them individually for execution, wherever they are. The Obama administration has taken pains to tell us, over and over again, that they are careful, scrupulous of our laws, and determined to avoid the loss of collateral, innocent lives. They’re careful because when it comes to waging war on individuals, the distinction between war and murder becomes a fine one. Especially when, on occasion, the individuals we target are Americans and when, in one instance, the collateral damage was an American boy.

[…]

You are not the first president with the power to kill individuals. You are, however, the first president to exercise it on a mass scale. You inherited the power from George W. Bush as one of several responses to terrorism. You will pass it on to your successor as the only response, as well as an exemplar of principle. Your administration has devoted far more time and energy to telling the story of targeted killing than it has to telling the story of any of your domestic policies, including health care. It is as though you realize that more than any of your policies, the Lethal Presidency will be your legacy.

Previous presidents, while holding the power to order assassinations, at least wrapped their orders in a thin veil of moral unease. Obama doesn’t even go that far. In fact it seems to cause him no unease to order assassinations as he keeps doing it.

That Didn’t Last Long

At the risk of being called a communist I expressed my support for the actions of activists in Oakland reopening a library that was abandoned and sealed by the city. Since tax victims were forced to pay for the building why shouldn’t they reopen it and get some kind of use from it? Only a violent entity more obsessed with authority and power than people would stand in the way of such an action. Needless to say the City of Oakland is more concerned with authority and power than people:

Books were still available for checkout Tuesday but from the sidewalk outside the vacant city building that briefly had been occupied as a “people’s library” before police shut it down.

Ten to 15 people left the property at 1449 Miller Ave., near International Boulevard, shortly after officers entered the building about 11 p.m. Monday and told activists they were trespassing, said Officer Johnna Watson, a police department spokeswoman.

Members of the makeshift library project, which drew many veteran activists, including some who had been part of Occupy Oakland, had been in the building since 7 a.m. Monday. The activists said the vacant building in the San Antonio neighborhood had been left unlocked.

After word spread on Facebook, about a dozen volunteers arrived and started stocking it with donated books and clearing out grime, old mattresses, graffiti and other markings. They put up a bilingual banner proclaiming the “Victor Martinez People’s Library,” named for the late Latino author.

That’s what the state does. It takes money from you at gunpoint to build a library, it then abandons the library and seals the building, and then it uses force to protect the abandoned building that was paid for by the community through the force of its gun.

Assange Granted Asylum

I don’t believe I’ve spent much time discussing WikiLeaks. In general it appears that WikiLeaks enjoys popular support on the Internet although there are a few statists who disagree with what the organization has done. WikiLeak’s critics usually cite the potential dangers that could be caused by the information they leak. It is my belief that any country willing to murder its own citizens without so much as a trail has forfeit any right to keep secrets. It’s obvious that the United States government cannot be trusted with secrets and thus I entirely support any attempt to leak confidential state information.

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julius Assange, has obviously pissed off the wrong people (or the right people, depending on how you look at it). To avoid being extradited Assange sought asylum in Ecuador’s embassy in London, which was granted. The United Kingdom, apparently hellbent on arresting Assange, threatened to invade the Ecuadorian embassy:

“Today we received from the United Kingdom an express threat, in writing, that they might storm our embassy in London if we don’t hand over Julian Assange,” he said.

“Ecuador rejects in the most emphatic terms the explicit threat of the British official communication.”

He said such a threat was “improper of a democratic, civilised and rule-abiding country”.

He added: “If the measure announced in the British official communication is enacted, it will be interpreted by Ecuador as an unacceptable, unfriendly and hostile act and as an attempt against our sovereignty. It would force us to respond.

“We are not a British colony.”

Embassies are considered sovereign soil and an invasion of an embassy can be treated as an invasion of the embassy’s country. In essence the United Kingdom are willing to threaten war against Ecuador in order to arrest Assange. I think Nigel Farage’s tweet summed up the situation concisely:

The EU arrest warrant has made us so subservient to the EU we’re now storming the territory of another country in their name.

It’ll be interesting to see this story play out. Assange is currently holed up in the Ecuador embassy but the United Kingdom government has stated they won’t guarantee safe passage for Assange to leave the country:

Though the UK government says it wants to continue talks, it says flatly that it will not guarantee Mr Assange safe passage out of the country and will not compromise over its obligation to extradite him to Sweden.

This guy has obviously pissed off some higher ups, something that should be commended. I hope he survives but if things are this bad I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up with an assassin’s bullet in his head. The state doesn’t tolerate those who stand against it and will happily employ violence to silence them.

When All You Have is a Hammer

When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. That’s what a few doctors are proving in their advocacy to treat gun control as a public health issue:

Is a gun like a virus, a car, tobacco or alcohol? Yes say public health experts, who in the wake of recent mass shootings are calling for a fresh look at gun violence as a social disease.

What we need, they say, is a public health approach to the problem, like the highway safety measures, product changes and driving laws that slashed deaths from car crashes decades ago, even as the number of vehicles on the road rose.

One example: Guardrails are now curved to the ground instead of having sharp metal ends that stick out and pose a hazard in a crash.

“People used to spear themselves, and we blamed the drivers for that,” said Dr. Garen Wintemute, an emergency medicine professor who directs the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California-Davis.

It wasn’t enough back then to curb deaths just by trying to make people better drivers, and it isn’t enough now to tackle gun violence by focusing solely on the people doing the shooting, he and other doctors say.

The analogy is flawed from the beginning. Take the given example of guardrails, they mention how people used to get impaled on them so the guardrails were redesigned. What do such incidents have in common with acts of violence? Little. We make changes in guardrails, automobiles, chainsaws, etc. safer to prevent injuries in accidents. Violence isn’t accidental, a person who initiates violence against another is making a conscious purposeful action. The shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin weren’t the result of a person failing to pay attention to trigger discipline and accidentally shooting people, it was the result of two individuals who decided they wanted to bring violence against their fellow human beings.

Between 1990 and 2009 the number of annual automobile accidents ranged from a high of 39,386 in 1990 to a low of 30,797 in 2009 [PDF]. Part of the reason the number of accidents resulting in fatalities has been diminishing isn’t due to stricter automobile control laws but increases in safety features. Such actions work when the result of fatalities are accidental in nature. When the actions are purposeful increasing safety features doesn’t work because individuals wanting to cause harm will bypass said safety features. Gun control is an attempt to create safety features around firearms in the form of background checks, mandatory mental evaluations, etc. and people willing to harm others will also bypass these “safety” features.

When the threat is purposeful action the only real way of protecting yourself is purposeful action. You can’t stop an enraged ex from killing you by simply passing a couple of laws. Killing people is already illegal so somebody willing to kill has already demonstrated a willingness to ignore the law. In such cases you must have a means of defending yourself, of taking purposeful action. When measures are put into place to control access to firearms they merely prevent those willing to obey the law from obtaining said firearms. In other words gun control puts the lawful at a disadvantage while advantaging the lawless. To compare gun control to redesigning guardrails, it would akin to welding six foot spikes onto guardrails once it was shown people were being impaled on the current design. The redesign would put those involved in collisions with guardrails at a disadvantage while not affecting those don’t collide with guardrails.

I understand doctors deal with health issues and therefore they are biased towards seeing everything as a health issue. In this case they need to take a step back and analyze the issue. Violence doesn’t stem from accidents or making poor health decisions, it stems from some people wanting to hurt other people. The failure isn’t on the patient’s end, there is seldom anything the patient can do to prevent it.

The State Wants to Take Everybody’s Stuff

The state exists for one reason and one reason only, to grant the ability of a few to take wealth from the many. It doesn’t matter if you’re a wealthy businessman or a seven year-old girl:

A 7-year-old Connecticut girl will lose her 20-pound pet rabbit if North Haven officials get their way.

Zoning Enforcement Officer Arthur Hausman issued a cease-and-desist order to the Lidsky family two weeks ago, informing them that they were violating town zoning regulations because their property was smaller than the 2 acres required to keep rabbits and other types of livestock.

Whether it’s your money, guns, or giant rabbits the state wants to take it all.

Warrantless Cell Phone Tracking Ruled Legal

Last week the state ruled it could perform warrantless wiretaps, today it has ruled that it can track your location through your cellular phone without a warrant:

On Tuesday, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that law enforcement officials don’t need a warrant to track suspects via cellphones. Attorneys argued to overturn Skinner’s many convictions, citing that the GPS location information that led to the defendant’s arrest was obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment, which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures. This didn’t wash with the majority of judges over the case, who voted in a 2-1 ruling.

“When criminals use modern technological devices to carry out criminal acts and to reduce the possibility of detection, they can hardly complain when the police take advantage of the inherent characteristics of those very devices to catch them,” wrote Judge John Rogers in the majority opinion that will affect future cases in a huge chunk of the country.

So much for the Fourth Amendment. Unfortunately if one tries to argue this case on constitutional grounds they’re faced also accepting another constitutional idea, that the courts maintain a monopoly on interpreting the Constitution. Therefore when one says warrantless tracking of cell phones is unconstitutional they much also accept that they don’t actually have a say in whether or not such acts are unconstitutional as the Constitution grants such authority to the state’s courts. I think Lysander Spooner was correct when he said the following:

But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain — that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.