Month: June 2018

Murder by Proxy

One of the easiest ways to gain 15 minutes of fame this day and age is to say something outlandish. A 22-year-old preacher decided to grab his 15 minutes of fame by stating that he believes homosexuals should be put to death:

Powell wasn’t shy about sharing his views on how gay people should be dealt with.

“As far as homosexuality goes, I believe the Bible puts the death penalty on it,” Powell said. “I believe it’s disgusting. And incidentally, every scientific test has come back and said that homosexuals are 50 more times likely to get AIDS… we got this AIDS thing spreading… it’s a fact that this is the case.”

But that wasn’t the real icing on the cake. Like a vast majority of people who talk a tough game, this guy is actually a little bitch:

“I believe the Bible puts the death penalty on it,” Powell replied. “Obviously, not by me or anybody in a regular society, obviously. I believe it’s the government’s job to execute criminals. I believe that the Bible says clearly that homosexuality is a criminal crime. It’s a crime. It’s one of the worst crimes ever.”

He believes that homosexuals should be put to death but he’s too much of a bitch to do the dirty work himself. In this way he has a great deal in common with almost every single individual who cries that there ought to be a law.

Laws are threats of violence. If a law is passed that prohibits driving over an arbitrarily selected speed, the ultimate punishment for driving over that speed is death. Sure, violating such laws generally doesn’t result in death because most people pull over as soon as they see a law enforcement car with its attention whore lights on behind them. The reason they pull over is because they know that failing to pull over will result in a chase that has a high chance of resulting in injury or death.

If you ask most people if they’re willing to personally execute somebody for driving over an arbitrarily selected speed, they will say no. However, if you put a proxy between them and violence, they’re suddenly all for it.

Most people who claim to oppose violence are actually in favor of it so long as somebody else does it in their stead. So while a lot of people are flipping out about the fact that there is a preacher who wants homosexuals executed by the government, they’re often themselves advocating for the government to execute people for partaking in behavior that doesn’t harm bystanders (such as selling heroine to people who want to buy it voluntarily).

When a Court Wants to Add Insult to Injury

In 2014 two officers were responding to a noise complaint. When they arrived at the address, they saw a black man with a gun and decided to open fire through the man’s garage door. One bullet fatally struck the man. Considering the rather murky circumstances (firing blindly through a garage door at somebody who hadn’t posed a direct threat yet) an excessive force lawsuit was brought against the officer. Not only did the jury find the officer innocent of any wrongdoing (normal in these cases) but it decided to add a bit of insult to the injury:

FORT PIERCE, Fla. — A federal jury has cleared a deputy of using excessive force in the 2014 shooting death of Gregory Hill Jr. and awarded $4 to Hill’s family, a family lawyer said. The jury, which was weighing a lawsuit filed by Hill’s family, ruled last week that St. Lucie County Deputy Christopher Newman did not violate Hill’s civil rights, reports CBS affiliate WPEC-TV of West Palm Beach, Floirda.

Awarding $4 over a fatal excessive force complaint is nothing more than a giant fuck you.

With Friends Like the United States, Who Needs Enemies

A lot of people refer to Trump as a fascist. While he (along with almost every other politician) certainly displays a lot of fascist tendencies, I think it would be more accurate, at least economically, to refer to him as a mercantilist. His policies have been aimed at discouraging importing goods in favor of internal trade. While many people still believe that mercantilism is a sound economic policy, it wrecks havoc on international relations:

The US is to impose tariffs on steel and aluminium imports from key allies in Europe and North America.

The US said a 25% tax on steel and 10% tax on aluminium from the EU, Mexico and Canada will start at midnight.

The move immediately triggered vows of retaliation from Mexico, Canada and the EU, which called the tariffs “protectionism, pure and simple”.

With friends like the United States, who needs enemies?

Mercantilism falls apart because it discourages international trade. First one nation implements a policy that harms another nation. Then that nation implements its own policy in retaliation to harm the first nation. This cycle can continue until trade between the two nations halts entirely.

I know a lot of people believe that this will bring prosperity to the United States. However, if you believe that policies like this will bring back the good old days of the 1950s where a single factory worker could buy a house, truck, and boat, you’re sorely mistaken. Manufacturing is highly automated, which reduces the number of available factory jobs. Moreover, the regulatory red tape makes many economic activities such as resource extraction, resource refinement, and manufacturing cost prohibitive. In addition to all of that, the United States has been out of the game for so long that it lacks the experience and knowledge necessary to mass produce many desired consumer goods. Overcoming all of those issues will take a significant amount of time and even if they are overcome, the available market will be tiny because foreign nations will have already implemented retaliatory policies prohibiting trade with the United States (not having the biggest market in the world, China, available would itself strongly discourage manufacturing goods in the United States).