Month: October 2018

Unleash the Zuckerberg Inquisition

Yesterday Zuckerberg unleashed his inquisitors and they found a lot of heretics:

Facebook said it was removing the publishers and accounts not because of the type of content they posted, but because of the behaviors they engaged in, including spamming Facebook groups with identical pieces of content and using fake profiles.

“Today, we’re removing 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior,” the company said in a blog post. “People will only share on Facebook if they feel safe and trust the connections they make here.”

So what kind of pages were removed? As of this writing, Cop Block’s main Facebook page has been unpublished along with a number of its state affiliate pages. Gun Laws Don’t Work, V for Voluntary, Punk Rock Libertarians, and many other anti-state pages were also found guilty of heresy.

This is where most libertarians flip their shit about Facebook’s censorship… on Facebook. I won’t debase myself in such a manner. Instead I will point out that it was foolish for so many anti-statists to centralized their content on a site owned and operated by a statist. While I recognize how easy Facebook makes it to reach a large audience, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. In exchange for accessing Facebook’s audience you have to submit to Facebook’s policies and those policies are (probably purposefully) vague and in a constant state of flux. One minute Facebook takes a hands off approach to content, the next it erases dissenting voices like the black plague erasing Europeans.

Of course this entire mess could have been avoided by simply doing the pre-Facebook status quo. Had all of these organizations kept their audience focused on their own websites and forums, there would have been nothing for Zuckerberg’s inquisitors to censor. Instead they opted for the ease of relying on Facebook. They pushed their audience to Facebook and thus put themselves under the rule of Zuckerberg. Now they’re paying the price. Some of these organizations are fortunate enough to still have their own websites and forums so they haven’t been completely erased but most weren’t so smart.

Once again I find myself beating this bloated corpse of a horse that is advocating for individuals and organizations to stop relying on centralized technologies and instead rely on their own infrastructure. Sadly, I know that the innards of this corpse are going to burst forth and spill all over the place before anybody follows my advice.

Fight! Fight! Fight!

Politics is the art of inflicting violence by proxy. Instead of going to their neighbor’s home and stealing their shit, a political activist begs a politician to do it in their place. Much of humanity has called this violence by proxy civilized. However, the “civilized” nature of politics seldom lasts forever. Eventually people begin to recognize that they’re being victimized. When they begin recognizing this, politics become more divisive and eventually reach a point where people begin performing violence directly:

A Republican candidate for the Minnesota House said Monday that he is recovering after suffering a concussion from an attack at a restaurant in St. George Township a few days earlier.

Shane Mekeland is running for the House in District 15B, an open seat that includes parts of Benton and Sherburne County. He said that last Friday night, he was “blindsided” by an assailant as he spoke to patrons at a bar and restaurant he wouldn’t identify.

Granted, this is a minor incident. But minor slap fights and brawls like this appear to be increasing and will likely escalate to more severe violence in the near future, which is the inevitable progression of politics.

When a Plan Backfires

Elizabeth Warren was the butt of a few jokes when she claimed to have Native American ancestry. In an apparent attempt to silence her critics she had her DNA tested and it showed that there is evidence that she had Native American ancestry between six and 10 generations back. But releasing the results of her DNA test has backfired pretty severely:

“A DNA test is useless to determine tribal citizenship. Current DNA tests do not even distinguish whether a person’s ancestors were indigenous to North or South America,” Cherokee Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin Jr. said. “Sovereign tribal nations set their own legal requirements for citizenship, and while DNA tests can be used to determine lineage, such as paternity to an individual, it is not evidence for tribal affiliation. Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong. It makes a mockery out of DNA tests and its legitimate uses while also dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven. Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.”

One of the defining characteristics of politicians is an inability to qualify statements. It seems like every statement made by a politician is an absolute. Instead of claiming that she had Native American ancestry, Warren could have said that her family folklore claims that her family had Native American ancestry. If she would have qualified her statement by saying that her ancestry was family folklore, the results of her DNA test wouldn’t have mattered. She could have taken these results and said that there is evidence supporting her family folklore and left it at that.

Hey Siri, I’m Getting Pulled Over

Do you carry an iPhone? If so, is it updated to iOS 12? If you answered yes to both, there’s a very useful tool you can download:

There’s a big new feature for iPhone experts this year: It’s an app called Shortcuts, and with a little bit of logic and know-how, you can stitch together several apps and create a script that can be activated by pressing a button or using Siri.

[…]

But Robert Petersen of Arizona has developed a more serious shortcut: It’s called Police, and it monitors police interactions so you have a record of what happened.

Once the shortcut is installed and configured, you just have to say, for example, “Hey Siri, I’m getting pulled over.” Then the program pauses music you may be playing, turns down the brightness on the iPhone, and turns on “do not disturb” mode.

You can download the shotcut here.

I’ve downloaded it and tested it. Sure enough it works as advertised. Grab it and install it on your phone so it’s ready if you get pulled over.

The First Candidate with a Convincing Argument

John McAfee is the first presidential candidate for this election cycle with a valid argument for electing him:

.@VerminSupreme and myself at the 2016 Libertarian National Convention. If that one chance in a trillion that I could be elected president actually happens, I will stand down and be replaced by him. Vermin would be the best president ever.

This looks like a winning team to me:

Just Vote Harder

If somebody is a member of the Libertarian Party, I generally assume that they have at least a basic understanding of the evil of government. If somebody has been a member of the Libertarian Party for a few election cycles, I generally assume that they have firsthand experience of how the two ruling parties prevent third parties from gaining a foothold in the political system. If somebody has been a member of the Libertarian Party for a few election cycles and still believes in the political process, I generally assume that they’re an idiot.

If you’ve recently joined the Libertarian Party, or any third party for that matter, and believe that you’re going to make a difference by helping a candidate break into the two party political system, let me give you an idea of what you’re in for:

Third party candidates are used to getting snubbed when it comes to political debates, but Dale Kerns says he was promised a spot in an October 20 senatorial debate in the Philadelphia media market—only to have the invitation rescinded as the debate neared, apparently at the request of the station hosting it.

[…]

Emails obtained by Reason show that Kerns’ campaign was twice assured of a spot in a televised debate by executives at the state’s chapter of the League of Women Voters, which typically plays a role in organizing debates. In March, Suzanne Almeida, the then-executive director of the group, told Kerns’ campaign manager that Kerns would “certainly” be invited to “participate in candidate forums after the primary.”

In late August, the campaign again contacted the League of Women Voters seeking information about planned debates. Jill Greene, who had taken over as executive director in July, responded on August 29 to say that she was currently trying to plan a Senate debate with the League’s media partners and that she would “be sure to include Mr. Kerns and Mr. Gale.”

Six weeks later, after the debate had been scheduled for October 20 on Philadelphia’s ABC affiliate, WPVI-TV, Greene emailed Kerns’ campaign manager John Odermatt to deliver the bad news. The League had asked to include Kerns and Gale in the debate, she said, but “other organizers” did not “feel as if current polling warranted an invitation.”

This is nothing new. In fact, this is the status quo. This is also why voting doesn’t matter.

Apologists for democracy claim that voting is how the people let themselves be heard but one only needs to take a look at a ballot to recognize the facade. A ballot consists of a list of officer with approved candidates for each office. The first indicator that voting isn’t what the apologists claim it to be is the fact that the names that appear on the ballot must be approved. The second indicator is the fact that the only choice is what candidate to put into the office. What if you want to abolish the office entirely (which is what every self-proclaimed libertarian should want to do to every office)? You can’t voice that opinion on a ballot.

If you’re involved in a third party, you’re playing a game where the rules are set by your opponent. Not surprisingly, your opponent is setting the rules in such a way that you’re guaranteed to lose.

The Fake Facebook Profiles of Law Enforcement

Do you remember that really hot chick who tried to friend you on Facebook? The one who claimed to be single and horny? There’s a good chance that “she” was a cop:

Police officers around the country, in departments large and small, working for federal, state and local agencies, use undercover Facebook accounts to watch protesters, track gang members, lure child predators and snare thieves, according to court records, police trainers and officers themselves. Some maintain several of these accounts at a time. The tactic violates Facebook’s terms of use, and the company says it disables fake accounts whenever it discovers them. But that is about all it can do: Fake accounts are not against the law, and the information gleaned by the police can be used as evidence in criminal and civil cases.

Investigators know this, which is why the accounts continue to flourish.

This should come as a surprise to approximately nobody. Law enforcers have been busy turning this country into a surveillance state. Meanwhile, Facebook has been busy collecting every shred of personal information about as many people as it can. They’re a match made in Heaven, or more aptly Hell.

The best defense against this, other than not using Facebook, is to only add people whose identity you have personally verified. That doesn’t necessarily mean that a person you know in real life isn’t an undercover cop, but verifying identities will at least cut down on the low level efforts to surveil you.

The World’s Largest Text Editor

One of my Macs was screaming that it was running out of disk space so I pulled up a report of the largest files on the system. Since the system contains several virtual machines, those files were at the top as expected. However, as I scrolled through the list of files something jumped out at me. At some point I had installed the Atom text editor on the system. I don’t remember why I did that but it was probably because I wanted to test it for something. Regardless according to the report the Atom text editor was over 800MB in size. Just for fun I decided to download a copy of the latest version of Atom on another system. The downloaded file decompressed to 822.7MB.

I get that disk space is more or less plentiful and cheap but 822.7MB for a text editor is a bit excessive. I’m actually kind of impressed that a development team managed to bloat a text editor to such an enormous size (but not the good kind of impressed).

The Plebs are Becoming Unruly

All isn’t well in the People’s Republic of Minneapolis. The patricians are having a tough time conducting their very important government business due to the fact that the plebeians are becoming unruly:

Maintaining order in meetings has become a struggle for the new City Council. It has created a dilemma for a council majority brought to power on a progressive wave, putting former activists in the difficult position of having to hush their constituents just to get through the agenda.

It appears that a bunch of plebs have realized that members of their ranks being elevated to the patrician class hasn’t resulted in a better life for the plebeians. I doubt this lesson will stick though. These activists will probably still scream about the importance of voting, which will perpetuate this cycle of former and current activists eating each other. At least it gives those of us watching from a distance an entertaining show.