Category: News You Need to Know

Presenting What You Want People to See

Once again we have a shooter whose family and friends say they are shocked by his actions, which has lead them to believe he just “snapped.” This is very common after a shooting and it’s not unusual for people on the sidelines to sneer and claim that the friends and family are either idiots who missed something obvious or lying. However, I believe his family and friends need to be cut a significant amount of slack. After all, an individual who is intelligent enough to plan an attack of this magnitude is also intelligent enough to act in an expected manner around friends and family.

There is a book that I believe is relevant here. It’s titled Without Conscience and is an overview on psychopathy. I’m not trying to imply that the Las Vegas shooter was a psychopath as it is defined medically but psychopaths are an example of individuals who are capable of acting in an expected manner to achieve desired ends.

It’s quite feasible that the Las Vegas shooter consciously acted in a way he knew would be least alarming to people because acting in that manner served his ends of perpetrating his attack. There very well may have been no warning signs for friends and family to notice, which is why they’re shocked by his actions.

As humans we tend to want things to fit into simple boxes. If somebody appeared to be “normal” to us, then the tidiest explanation for them acting violently is that they “snapped.” We also tend to want simple solutions. Access to mental healthcare is often brought up as a solution to shootings like this. However, providing access to mental healthcare only works if the subject wants to pursue it. If they want to perpetuated an attack instead, they aren’t going to utilize mental healthcare. Banning firearms is another proposal brought forth after these shootings. However, somebody who is willing to kill is seldom dissuaded by laws preventing them from acquiring a weapon legally. If that were the case, felons and gang members wouldn’t have access to firearms.

Unfortunately, the universe doesn’t care about our desire for simplicity. It throws complicated shit at us. If we refuse to acknowledge that fact, we’re doomed to continue trying to shove things into our simple boxes and are therefore doomed to propose simple solutions that will inevitably fail.

Attack in Las Vegas

I’m sure most of you have heard that there was an attack in Las Vegas. It’s still too early to do much more than speculate. What is known is that as of this writing at least 50 people have been killed and at least another 200 have been injured. The attacker has been named as Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old resident of Las Vegas.

Over the next few days I’m sure a great deal of speculation will take place. Keep in mind that with these kinds of events it usually takes weeks for forensic teams to put all of the pieces together.

None of Your Business

California may be the second state to allow denizens to list “X” as their gender on government documents. I first heard about this when a self-described libertarian posted it in outrage. This particular libertarian is socially conservative so I can’t say that I was surprised that he was upset about this. However, I appreciate this change and believe many other libertarians should:

Libertarians—even those just fine with the gender binary and their place in it—should celebrate the change. It allows people more choice about how to define themselves in a way that is noncoercive and decreases government control.

Should D.C. ever give residents the option to essentially delist their sex/gender from their driver’s license, I would do it. (At least, you know, the next time my license is up for renewal or if there was some sort of online option; I’m not crazy enough to subject myself to the Department of Motor Vehicles any more than necessary.) And I would hope anarchist, libertarian, and limited-government-supporting types of any sex or gender might do the same.

There is no good reason the state, its representatives, and the countless people tasked with checking IDs for one reason or another need to know every individual’s gender or sex.

Even socially conservative libertarians should be able to appreciate the ability to opt out of having information printed on government documentation. There’s no reason why government documents should list a gender. Ideally there wouldn’t be any government documents but if there are going to be such documents then they should contain, at most, a unique identifier and maybe a picture (only because so many services want to see a picture ID). When you’re pulled over, for example, for driving faster than the arbitrarily selected limit, the officer doesn’t need to know anything about you. They only need a unique identifier to give the person in charge of mailing the extortion fee so they can look up where to send the ticket.

Communication Breakdown

When you’re filming on location it’s wise to contact the local law enforcers to let them know. It’s also a smart idea to request an officer onsite during the filming. Why would I suggest voluntarily interacting with the police? Because, in the case of on location filming, it could avoid a situation like this:

Police in Indiana fired a gunshot at a man who they thought was a thief on Tuesday, but was actually just an actor playing one.

The incident occurred after Indiana State Police responded to the scene of a possible robbery at Backstep Brewing Co. in Crawfordsville, Indiana, according to Fox 8 Cleveland.

When actor Jim Duff exited the building, wearing a ski mask and holding a gun, police reportedly thought he was the suspect they were looking for.

My guess is that either the film crew didn’t alert the local law enforcers that they would be filming there or they did inform the local law enforcers but that information didn’t communicated down the chain. Having a local law enforcer present could have prevented this since when the other officers arrived at the scene a known individual could have informed them that the “robbery” was being shot for a movie.

There are no absolute rules in the universe. While I normally recommend against voluntarily interacting with law enforcers, there are circumstances where doing so may be the less bad option.

I Disagree

It’s no secret that the people living in the United States of America are becoming more polarized. People increasingly refuse to even entertain the possibility that their ideas may not be the only correct ideas. What makes this matter especially bad is that there appears to be an inverse correlation between polarization and disagreement. As a population becomes more polarized, it seems to become less willing to entertain disagreement:

To listen and understand; to question and disagree; to treat no proposition as sacred and no objection as impious; to be willing to entertain unpopular ideas and cultivate the habits of an open mind — this is what I was encouraged to do by my teachers at the University of Chicago.

It’s what used to be called a liberal education.

[…]

That habit was no longer being exercised much 30 years ago. And if you’ve followed the news from American campuses in recent years, things have become a lot worse.

According to a new survey from the Brookings Institution, a plurality of college students today — fully 44 percent — do not believe the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects so-called “hate speech,” when of course it absolutely does. More shockingly, a narrow majority of students — 51 percent — think it is “acceptable” for a student group to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree. An astonishing 20 percent also agree that it’s acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking.

These attitudes are being made plain nearly every week on one college campus or another.

Rhetoric and debate are being replaced by religious zeal. An increasing number of Americans appear to be holding their beliefs as infallible scripture. If you disagree with their beliefs, you are seen as a heretic and may find yourself excommunicated or even attacked.

Discussion and debate were once considered a cornerstone of education. You were expected to hold your beliefs because evidence had lead you to them and you were therefore also expected to be able to defend your beliefs from critics using the art of debate. In modern times you are expected to have faith in the beliefs dictated to you by your “betters.” Since people who hold beliefs because they were told to do so have not actually researched their beliefs thoroughly, many people today are unable to debate and thus resort to other tactics, which are sometimes violent.

Admittedly, part of me looks forward to the televised death matches that are the logical conclusion of this polarization. However, I’m already weary of every minor disagreement resulting in screaming matches or physical fights.

War is Good for Business

War is good for business. At least if you’re on the waging side. It’s probably not so good for those on the invaded side. But who can bring themselves to care about them when we’re talking about numbers like this:

BOSTON, Sept. 26, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Force modernization will be one of the primary factors underpinning growth in global defense spending, driven by unprecedented developments in autonomous systems, missile, space and cyber-electronic warfare, and other technologies. Strategy Analytics: The Strategy Analytics Advanced Defense Systems (ADS) service report, “Global Defense Spending Outlook 2016-2026,” forecasts the global defense budget will grow to $2.41 trillion in 2026, with the opportunities available to industry growing at a CAGR of 3.5% to reach $771 billion.

Force modernization, if it follows in the footsteps of the F-35, will involve a great deal of money. However, there will be little to show for that money. The F-35, for example, still has problems reliably delivering oxygen to pilots even though it has cost over $1 trillion. Imagine the same thing happening with other military equipment. If we look at the raw numbers alone, it’ll be amazing economic growth!

Unfortunately, all of the resources invested in “force modernization” cannot be allocated to productive uses like new manufacturing plants, office buildings, and research and development for new consumer products.

Selective Collectivism

One of the most fascinating characteristics of collectivists is how they tended to individualize bad ingroup behavior and good outgroup behavior but collectivize good ingroup behavior and bad outgroup behavior.

Let’s use a supporter of the Democratic Party (party chosen at the flip of a coin) for an example.

If another member of the Democratic Party commits murder, our hypothetical supporter will likely be quick to point out that that murderer is a bad apple and not typical of democrats in general. If another member of the Democratic Party gives money to a homeless man, our hypothetical supporter will likely point out that that charitable individual is proof of the good acts of the Democratic Party.

If a member of the Republican Party commits murder, our hypothetical supporter will likely be quick to accuse the Republican Party of not doing enough to distance itself from the murderer and therefore everybody in that party is tacitly supporting the murderer. If a member of the Republican Party gives money to a homeless man, our hypothetical supporter will likely point out that that charitable individual is an exception and that the Republican Party in general hates the poor.

We see this everyday. How many Christians point out that the misdeeds of a handful of Christians aren’t representative of Christianity but then imply or outright claims that Islam is a religion of violence because a handful of Muslims commit violent acts? How many Americans continue to excuse the terrible acts of the country’s politicians as the acts of a few bad apples who aren’t representative of America as a whole but then collectivize all North Koreans because of the acts of the country’s leader?

Collectivists tend to be selective. They want all of the good credit for their side and all of the bad credit to the other side, which leads to a significant amount of philosophical inconsistency.

But Wait, There’s More

Equifax already displayed a staggering level of incompetence but like a Billy Mays commercial there’s more:

The official Equifax Twitter account encouraged people to visit a knock-off website that mocks the company’s security practices instead of the site the company created to warn of a massive data breach. That recent breach exposed personal details for as many as 143 million US consumers.

In a tweet on Tuesday afternoon, an Equifax representative using the name Tim wrote: “Hi! For more information about the product and enrollment, please visit: securityequifax2017.com.” The message came in response to a question about free credit monitoring Equifax is offering victims. The site is a knock-off of the official Equifax breach notification site, equifaxsecurity2017.com. A security researcher created the imposter site to demonstrate how easy it is to confuse a legitimate name with a bogus one. The Equifax tweet suggests that even company representatives can be easily fooled. The tweet was deleted late Wednesday morning, more than 18 hours after it went live.

It’s almost as if large credit agencies like Equifax aren’t held accountable for screwing up and therefore aren’t motivated to do an effective job. Weird.

Statists continue to claim that government is necessary to deliver justice when large corporations like this screw up. However, I’m still waiting to see the government do anything more than give a corporation like this a minor slap on the wrist for fuck ups of this magnitude. Hell, I’m still waiting to see the government give Equifax a stern talking to over this series of amateur mistakes. As far as I can tell, government seems exists primarily to protect large corporations like this from competitors that would currently be tearing it apart if there was a free market.

NSA Told to Sod Off

After the National Security Agency (NSA) was caught cryptographic algorithms to enhance its surveillance abilities, trust for the agency fell to an all time low. This distrust lead the International Standards Organization (ISO) to reject two encryption algorithms recently submitted by the NSA:

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – An international group of cryptography experts has forced the U.S. National Security Agency to back down over two data encryption techniques it wanted set as global industry standards, reflecting deep mistrust among close U.S. allies.

In interviews and emails seen by Reuters, academic and industry experts from countries including Germany, Japan and Israel worried that the U.S. electronic spy agency was pushing the new techniques not because they were good encryption tools, but because it knew how to break them.

The NSA has now agreed to drop all but the most powerful versions of the techniques – those least likely to be vulnerable to hacks – to address the concerns.

The dispute, which has played out in a series of closed-door meetings around the world over the past three years and has not been previously reported, turns on whether the International Organization of Standards should approve two NSA data encryption techniques, known as Simon and Speck.

This is an appropriate response. The NSA has a track record of manipulating standards organizations in order to make its surveillance apparatus more effective. In security trust is everything. Since the NSA has proven itself to be untrustworthy, it only makes sense to reject any proposals from the agency.

Collectivizing Individual Action

The War on Some Drugs is justified by collectivizing individual action. According to its proponents, drug usage is a societal problem. They try to justify this claim by using other forms of collectivism. For example, proponents of the drug war will claim that drug usage costs “us” fantastic amounts of money in healthcare-related expenses. However, they can only make that claim because the government has collectivized a significant portion of the healthcare market. If the healthcare market were a free market, drug users would be left footing the expenses for their habit.

The drug war’s current hot topic is illegal opioid usage. In an attempt to make illegal opioid usage look like a societal problem, proponents of the drug war are now claiming that opioid usage has lowered the average life expectancy in the United States:

The problem is so bad, in fact, that the epidemic is dragging down the entire country’s life expectancy—by 2.5 months. That’s according to a new analysis by CDC researchers who published Tuesday in JAMA.

The problem with this statistic is that it’s completely meaningless.

Drug usage isn’t a communicable disease like plague or the flu. A drug user can’t transmit the effects of the drugs they’re using to you. Like them, you have to make a conscious decision to use drugs. If my neighbor down the street decides to use heroine, my life expectancy isn’t impacts in any way whatsoever. But if enough people actually realized that, the government would have a difficult time drumming up popular support for its very profitable war.