Month: December 2012

All “Undesirables” Report to the Ghetto

When discussing my opposition to the state advocates of the state are quick to bring up countries like Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands as examples of states that do good for their people. What these state advocates fail to comprehend is the fact the state uses coercion to achieve its ends. Social programs are paid for with taxes that are paid because the alternative is suffering state violence. When an individual resorts to the use of coercive means to attain one end they generally become more comfortable with using coercive means to attain other ends. If the state finds coercive means acceptable to achieve its ends of providing education or healthcare it will also tend to find coercive means acceptable to deal with “undesirables.” A method that has been favored by states to deal with “undesirables” is to collect the “undesirables” and force them to live in inhuman conditions. Traditionally these communities of “undesirables” have been referred to as ghettos although Amsterdam is planning to refer to them as scum villages:

Amsterdam is to create “Scum villages” where nuisance neighbours and anti-social tenants will be exiled from the city and rehoused in caravans or containers with “minimal services” under constant police supervision.

[…]

Holland’s capital already has a special hit squad of municipal officials to identify the worst offenders for a compulsory six month course in how to behave.

Social housing problem families or tenants who do not show an improvement or refuse to go to the special units face eviction and homelessness.

Eberhard van der Laan, Amsterdam’s Labour mayor, has tabled the £810,000 plan to tackle 13,000 complaints of anti-social behaviour every year. He complained that long-term harassment often leads to law abiding tenants, rather than their nuisance neighbours, being driven out.

[…]

The new punishment housing camps have been dubbed “scum villages” because the plan echoes a proposal from Geert Wilders, the leader of a populist Dutch Right-wing party, for special units to deal with persistent troublemakers.

“Repeat offenders should be forcibly removed from their neighbourhood and sent to a village for scum,” he suggested last year. “Put all the trash together.”

One of the countries often cited by statists attempting to demonstrate the great rewards bestowed upon people by democracy/socialism/progressivism is establishing ghettos and forcing “undesirables” to live there. The country in question isn’t just any country though, it’s a country that has traditionally been known for extreme tolerance of behavior that is generally looked down upon such as prostitution and drug use.

Something that should be noted about these ghettos is that individuals displaying “anti-social tendencies” are being relegated to them. This is noteworthy because “anti-social tendencies” is such a vague term that is can be applied to anybody. As a general rule states tend to expand their power. While individuals that are generally considered bad neighbors will be the first cast into these new ghettos the program will likely expand to include other “undesirable” groups. Individuals failing to show proper support for the ruling royal family or other state entities could easily be labeled “anti-social” and cast into one of these ghettos. This is generally where a self-proclaimed progressive attempts to stop me and claim such a scenarior could never happen. Such a claim has already been rendered irrelevant by the fact ghettos are being established at all. Incrementalism is the name of the game and the state is already incrementally increasing its power so it’s not illogical to believe it will continue to incrementally increase its power.

I think the lesson to be learned here is that accepting coercive means to achieve ends you find desirable will lead to widespread acceptance of coercive means. That acceptance will make it far more difficult to oppose coercive means when they’re being used to achieve ends you find undesirable. In other words slippery slopes are dangerous and you should avoid them as much as possible.

Comparing Apples to Orangutans

The spillover of politics into circuses continues to approach the level of full retard:

Whitlock spoke out against the NFL’s handling of the aftermath of Jovan Belcher’s suicide and gun issues in his Sunday FoxSports.com column. During Martin’s podcast, he likened the NRA to the Ku Klux Klan and tied the group to the dangerous street culture that unfortunately dominates “so many black youths.”

I’m not the biggest fan of the National Rifle Association (NRA) myself but comparing them to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is, at most, a blatant attempt to use shock and awe in place of actual argumentation. Granted shock and awe is an effective strategy when one attempts to win hearts and minds but it’s a strategy that requires some subtlety and believability. When you attempt to make a connection between a group you dislike and a group that is almost universally disliked you need to find some common ground. In the case of Whitlock’s comparison he attempted to connect the NRA with the KKK by claiming the NRA is responsible for the culture that, as he says, dominates black youths. This comparison, to put it very nicely, is a stretch.

First Whitlock’s implication requires the assumption that gun rights causes the violent culture that, according to Whitlock, dominates black youths. An easy way to test this theory is to see if there are any places where gun rights are severely restricted or nonexistent that also have a high rate of youth violence. Chicago is such a place. Even though Chicago has very strict gun control laws they also have a very high rate of youth violence. Considering this it’s difficult to connect gun rights to youth violence.

Second Whitlock’s implication requires ignoring the starkly different methodologies used by the NRA and KKK to advance their causes. In the name of advancing gun rights the NRA promotes hunting, self-defense, and firearm safety education. The NRA also spends a great deal of time and money lobbying politicians and working to get proponents of gun rights elected into political offices. In other words the NRA uses mostly nonviolent (using the state is almost violent in some regard) strategies in order to advance its cause. On the other hand the KKK has a history of using violent tactics such as lynching African Americans and destroying property to promote its cause of white supremacy.

Third Whitlock’s implication requires ignoring the vastly different causes each organization is attempting to advance. The NRA’s primary goal is to advance gun rights for the entire American population while the KKK’s primary goal is to make other racial and religious groups subservient to white christians. While the NRA is working to expand liberties that KKK is working to retract liberties.

Whitlock’s implication is asinine and fails to even establish a believable connection that would assist him in his desire to use shock and awe. In his zeal to demonize guns and gun owners Whitlock lost focus of his initial cause, opposing violence, and became obsessed with an object that he associates with violence. This is a common trap individuals fall into when they become too obsessed with an object or action they associate with their initial cause. Opponents of violence become obsessed with weapons instead of acts of violence, opponents of human trafficking become obsessed with prostitution instead of sex slavery, and opponents of racism become obsessed with speech instead of the idea that one race is somehow superior to another. Losing focus of your initial cause will lead you down the path to ruin and open you up to scathing criticism from amateurs that operate blogs.

Charges Against Sung-Ho Hwang Dismissed

Earlier this year police arrested Sung-Ho Hwang for legally carrying a firearm. What made the case even more interesting was Mr. Hwang’s status as a lawyer. Not surprisingly, considering Mr. Hwang was a lawyer and partaking in an entirely legal activity, all charges against him have been dismissed:

Sung-Ho Hwang, president of the New Haven County Bar Association, was charged with breach of peace and interfering with police after officers said they found a loaded handgun in his waistband. Police say he had a permit to carry the weapon but didn’t comply with their commands.

Hugh Keefe, Hwang’s attorney, said prosecutor David Strollo agreed to drop the misdemeanor charges Monday. Strollo cited his clean record and that although police were yelling to put his hands up, Hwang didn’t know they were police because of the flash lights in his eyes, Keefe said.

[…]

Hwang said he brought the gun to protect himself late at night. Hwang, 46, said he was cooperative.

“When baseless breach of peace and interfering charges are brought against people that have a right to carry, it really threatens our constitutional right to bear arms,” Hwang said in August.

I think Mr. Hwang’s situation demonstrated two things. First it demonstrates how reactionary police officers are. Although Mr. Hwang wasn’t doing anything illegal or even showing signs of aggression the police decided to overreact, storm the theater, and hold him at gunpoint because of the situation in the Aurora, Colorado theater that happened slightly earlier in the year.

Second it demonstrated that the police will find something to charge you with if you’ve caught their eye. Since Mr. Hwang was carrying a firearm lawfully the police couldn’t charge him with illegally carrying a firearm so they did the next best thing. They charged him with breaching the peace because he didn’t cooperate with unwarranted police aggression. Even though there were no grounds to hold Mr. Hwang at gunpoint the police did so and then charged him for not submitting to their unwarranted, and I would say unlawful, aggression.

You Keep Using that Word

Do you find something amiss in this excerpt:

More than 200 women’s rights groups are calling for laws to make paying for sex a crime across the European Union.

More than 200 women’s rights groups openly acknowledge that women have many rights but having sex for money isn’t one of them. This stance seems contradictory to the advancement of women’s rights. Women’s rights groups generally fight against the idea that men own women, which is still prevalent throughout the world. One would think that a rights group fighting the idea that one person can own another would fight that idea that any entity can own a person. By demanding the state use its monopoly on violence to prohibit women from having sex for money these groups are stating that they believe the state owns women. If the state owns women then the state has the right to do with women as it pleases including transferring its ownership to another entity either temporarily or permanently. Supporting the idea that the state can own women also supports the idea that men can own women so long as the state gives its blessing.

Claiming to be a rights group while campaigning to restrict voluntary behavior through coercive force is hypocritical.

Who Will Haul the Trash

When discussing anarchism with statists you must expect to have a wall of tired arguments hurled at you. The most common criticisms of anarchism come in the form of questions such as “Who will build the roads?” and “Who will haul the trash?” These criticisms rely on the idea that people are unwilling to perform actions in self-interest if those actions may benefit more than just themselves. Fortunately such criticisms are easily addressed by looking at the actions of individuals who have found alternatives to the state for basic infrastructure maintenance and trash disposal:

When the lamps illuminating Ralph Kelly’s street were switched off, he and his neighbours together paid the city about $100 to “adopt” a streetlight and reignite a shared bulb. There was also an “adopt a trash can” program, where the city supplied the bin but residents hauled the garbage to privately run participating dumpsters.

[…]

So when the government shut off the landmark fountain in America the Beautiful Park three years ago, non-profits and residents banded together to raise $25,000 to keep it flowing. When the city considered closing the innercity’s Westside Community Center, the Woodland Valley Chapel offered to manage it with only limited municipal support. That partnership, and others like it, continues to this day.

When the police force was slashed and Chief Pete Carey “needed to get innovative,” as he put it in an interview, volunteers became community service officers. They cost 60% less than police officers and can respond to non-injury traffic accidents or even burglaries so long as the thief has left the scene.

[…]

“What happens is that neighbourhoods with money started providing these services, while poorer neighbourhoods didn’t,” said Bob Loevy, a retired Colorado College politics professor who paid $80 to turn on his streetlight.

And when the city slashed park services, people noticed.

“I live near a park,” one Grade 8 student told the mayor during the recent townhall meeting. “The bathrooms there are ruined. There are no stalls or doors or anything. So when I go to the park in the summer and I want to go to the bathroom, there are no doors. It’s really awkward. Is there any chance you could maybe clean up the bathrooms in the parks? Make them a little nicer and maybe even supply some toilet paper?”

Statists will point to the streetlights in poorer neighborhoods not being lit and park restrooms not being clean or stocked with toilet paper as support for their claim that the state is necessary. Such a claim entirely ignores the fact that streetlights in poorer neighborhoods and well-maintained restrooms in parks are not actually desired. Consumers have to make numerous economic decisions every day. They have access to a scarce amount of means that can be employed to achieve their ends. As they don’t have enough means to achieve all of their desired ends they must prioritize. Consumers will essentially make a list of their wants and order them from most wanted to least wanted. There are many things I want including a Glock 21 Gen4, a Surly fat bike, and a functioning laptop. Since I don’t have enough means to achieve all of my desired ends, at least not all at once, I have prioritized my wants. The first ends I want to fulfill is getting a new laptop because I use my laptop to perform work. Second on my list is a Glock 21 Gen4 because it’s more attainable (i.e. cheaper) than the bike. Streetlights and park restrooms are ends and people must decide whether or not those ends are of sufficient value to delay or forego other ends.

Obviously people in Colorado Springs’s poorer neighborhoods haven’t given streetlights a high priority nor has anybody living in the town given a high priority to park restrooms. This demonstrates how the state distorts markets. Under the state’s rule streetlights were lit on every street and park restrooms were clean and had toilet paper stocked even though there wasn’t sufficient demand from the affect communities for either. On the other hand the people had enough desire for hauling away trash and security to implement systems to provide both.

When statists ask “Who will light the streetlights in poor neighborhoods?” or “Who will clean park restrooms and stock them with toilet paper?” the answer is nobody because there isn’t enough demand from the affected communities. On the other hand when statists ask “Who will haul away the trash?” or “Who will protect the community?” (I would like to know who protects communities now, but I digress) the answer is those who desire the services. Individuals will cooperate to achieve their desired ends. Few people enjoy living in squalor and will invest means to achieve the ends of a clean living space. Sometimes this involves hauling the trash to a dump yourself, sometimes it involves you hauling your neighbor’s trash away to avoid it affecting you, and sometimes it involves individuals volunteering to haul away trash for the entire community. Regardless of the means chosen the ends will be accomplished without coercive force.

How the State Buys Support for Its Expropriation

Advocates of higher taxes love to point to wealthy individuals and large corporations that also advocate higher taxes as proof that higher taxes are a good thing. What those advocates don’t bring up or remain entirely ignorant about is the motivation wealthy individuals and large corporations have for raising taxes. Take the case of AT&T, a company that recent came up in support of raising taxes. Why would AT&T want to raise taxes? The answer is simplicity itself:

[A bunch of nonsense implying that the Republican Party lowers taxes while the Democratic Party raises taxes.]

[…]

A skeptic might point out, however, that AT&T does a lot of business with the U.S. government. AT&T Government Solutions boasts that it employs “more than 4,000 scientists, engineers and analysts—many with security clearances” who “focus exclusively on the IT requirements of government.” One federal contract AT&T won last year had a potential value of $5 billion, which is real money even to a company as large as AT&T. The company, like other wireless phone providers, also earns revenue from the “Lifeline” program that provides subsidized cellphones—so-called Obama phones—to low-income customers. And AT&T has already seen what negative effects hostile government agencies can have on its business—when a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit and FCC opposition blocked AT&T’s takeover of T-Mobile, AT&T wound up paying T-Mobile a $4.2 billion “break-up fee.”

[…]

The sad reality, though, is that the thousands of dollars that my business would mean to AT&T, or the millions of dollars that the business of other like-minded Americans would mean, are dwarfed by the value of a $5 billion government contract or winning the favor of a regulator with the power to approve or deny a multi-billion-dollar deal.

When a business is in bed with the state they will often tend to support higher taxes because that means more potential revenue for the business as well. You always want to ensure your cash cow is flush with cash.

Politics and Sports Don’t Mix

Politics doesn’t mix well with entertainment venues such as sports. Sports are the circuses of our era that help to distract the people from the reality in which they live. Once in a while somebody in the world of sports opens their mouth on a political issue and raises all kinds of havoc. Bob Costas decided to be one of those people and gave a speech advocating gun control during a halftime show during a football game:

You want some actual perspective on this? Well, a bit of it comes from the Kansas City-based writer Jason Whitlock with whom I do not always agree, but who today said it so well that we may as well just quote or paraphrase from the end of his article …

Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it. In the coming days, Jovan Belcher’s actions, and their possible connection to football, will be analyzed. Who knows?

But here, wrote Jason Whitlock, is what I believe. If Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.

Obviously Bob Costas doesn’t know his job is to distract the serfs from politics, not remind them of it. The Romans knew that the secret to keeping the people docile was to give them bread and circuses. So long as the people were fed and entertained they were very willing to roll over and let the Roman government do as it pleased. The average American isn’t much different, which is why politics is such an incredibly caustic thing to mix with sports.

Not only did Costas perform the sin of mixing politics and sports but he did a lousy job of it. His speech made the typical gun control argument that firearms increase the rate of violence. That claims is false. The fact is gun control does the opposite of what its proponents claim. By reducing the number of individuals that have ready access to firearms gun control decreases the cost of performing violence and therefore makes violence a more acceptable risk than it otherwise would be.

Keep the politicians out of the circuses less the people be reminded about how bad they’re getting screwed.

Piers Morgan Gets Owned on Gun Rights

Browsing Reddit I came across a picture of Piers Morgan having his ass handed to him on the topic of gun rights:

Even though I don’t derive my right to own firearms from the Second Amendment any student of history would be absolutely floored by the claim that the amendment was written with muskets in mind. During the writing of the Constitution the memory of the Revolutionary War was still ripe in the minds of the people. They still remembered the British attempt to sieze weapons from Concord that started the war and how necessary firearms were to win America’s independence. It seems odd to believe the authors of the Second Amendment would desire to handicap future generations by limiting them to the arms available at the time of the Revolutionary War. You would think such a restriction would have been written down somewhere.

The Divine Conspiracy

This will likely be the last update for today since I spend last night (I usually write my blog posts the night before and schedule them to automatically post the next day) fighting with my laptop again (which is the system I keep material I’m planning to post). As far as I can tell I managed to anger some deity somewhere because the headaches I’ve been experiencing with my laptop can only be describe as a divine conspiracy.

A few weeks ago I started experiencing problems waking my laptop from sleep. Due to the amount of time it takes me to get my system booted and setup the way I want it I usually put the laptop to sleep instead of shutting it down. This hasn’t been a problem until recently. Instead of waking from sleep my laptop has begun to randomly go into a state that I can only call undead. While the fans come on, indicating the system has powered up, the screen says off and the keyboard and mouse appear to be unresponsive. The only way to bring my laptop out of this state is to hold the power button for a few seconds to turn it completely off. Upon restarting the keyboard and mouse will usually remain unresponsive until I power cycle the laptop again. If I manage to power cycle the laptop before the decryption prompt appears I can restore the system from the sleepimage file (it’s the file that stores the contents of random access memory (RAM) when OS X goes into sleep mode).

During these last few weeks my procedure for bringing my laptop out of sleep has been to cross my fingers open the lid, and breathe a sigh of relief if it comes on or curse all that is holy if the laptop enters the state I mentioned above. If the laptop awakens to it’s undead state I power it off and hit the power button a few times before letting the decryption prompt appear.

After numerous hours of debugging I eventually determined that the problem is most likely hardware related. Due to the rather odd nature of the problem I believed the issue had to do with either the RAM, logic board (the term Apple uses for the motherboard), or the hard drive. I ruled the hard drive out because the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) stated that the drive was fine. That lead me to test the RAM.

The reason I believed the RAM could be the culprit is due to one of the times I booted the system up only to have it report 4GB instead of the usual 8GB available. Doing some searching online I found a couple other people who experienced the same issue and ended up having to either replace a RAM module or the logic board (which is how the logic board became a potential culprit). I ran memory tests on my RAM overnight only to have the testing software report no issues. Thinking the problem may be missed by the testing software I removed my 8GB or RAM and replaced it with the 4GB that the system originally came with. I ran the system is this almost crippled state for six days without any issue. Believing the RAM to be bad I ordered new modules. The day the new modules arrived my laptop experienced it’s undead state again (obviously some deity was having a spot of fun at my expense). At this point I lost all hope as it appeared my logic board was going out.

It appears that the logic board may not be the issue since the hard drive appears to have died last night. Out of the blue the system almost entirely froze up for several minutes whenever the disk was being accessed. After I powered the laptop off I was unable to power it on again (granted the hard drive continued to run and wasn’t giving me the click of death, it just wasn’t accessing data). Fortunately I keep a spare drive around and have relatively effective backups so this problem is more of an annoyance that a major problem. Unfortunately swapping drives and restoring the new drive from my backups is time consuming and ensures my laptop remains in an unusable state for many hours.