Politics – Page 31 – A Geek With Guns

Politics is a Sport

A new study has been released that confirms what everybody already knew:

A new study published at Political Research Quarterly indicates that many Americans who identify with one of the major parties make their electoral decisions more like a sports fan than an informed voter.

What motivates partisans to vote is “not high-minded, good-government, issue-based goals,” says Patrick Miller of the University of Kansas, who co-authored the research with the University of North Carolina’s Pamela Johnston Conover. Instead, “It’s, ‘I hate the other party. I’m going to go out, and we’re going to beat them.'”

I’m not exactly sure what “high-minded, good-government” is but I do understand the gist of the study. Voters closely resemble those annoying drunks at sportsball events that paint their preferred team’s colors on their body, wear some stupid hate, and scream loudly every time their preferred team does something. The only difference, and I believe this is a major downside, is that voters tend to be more restrained. I would much prefer it if voters got drunk, painted themselves, and screamed loudly at political events. At least that would be mildly entertaining and treat the subject matter with the seriousness it deserves. But I’ve been to political events and the fans are usually stuffy codgers in suits, or at the very least business casual dress, who merely clap when their preferred politician says something they like.

We should take the treating of elections to the next logical step. All political events should involve keg stands, beer pong, and drinking games. Nothing any politician says will change what team the fans vote for so they might as well turn their boring speeches into fun parities.

It’s also probably worth noting that this is why you will change nothing through voting. Most people don’t give a shit about the issues. All they care about is that their team beats the other team.

Jeb Bush Offers to Be Four More Years of Obama

If you’re paying attention to the upcoming presidential race, and may the gods have mercy on your soul if you are, you know that the selection of candidates is even worse than last year (which is saying something). Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Hillary Clinton are all terrible individuals and there is another terrible individual that everybody knows is going to run: Jeb Bush. In a press conference Jeb Bush promised that he would deliver four more years of Obama, which is kind of funny since Obama has deliver eight years of Jeb’s father:

Jeb Bush, a likely presidential contender, said Tuesday that President Obama’s greatest accomplishment was keeping in place controversial spying programs at the National Security Agency.

“I would say the best part of the Obama administration would be his continuance of the protections of the homeland using the big metadata programs,” Bush said in an interview on the Michael Medved radio show.

Bush argued the NSA programs had been “enhanced” under Obama, even if the president “never defends them or openly admits it.”

What’s that say about a man when he thinks the best part of Obama’s administration has been the continuation of an unaccountable, illegal (not that that means anything), and entirely ineffective surveillance apparatus? It says that he’s a police state fuckwit who probably read 1984 and thought the Inner Party sounded pretty good.

Unfortunately if he decides to run, and he will, the Republicans will nominate him and we’ll have a Jeb Bush versus Hillary Clinton race, which means we’ll have a neocon versus another neocon. Fortunately we have hope in Vermin Supreme.

The Democratic Party Better Hope Elizabeth Warren Enters the Presidential Race

Hillary Clinton, a person so callous that she literally laughs about murdering people, has thrown her hat into the presidential ring. Her announcement obviously fired up the Democratic base, right? Wrong. As it turns out even the most pious Democratic supporters are having a difficult time justifying their support for a Republican. One of my friends, who is as pious of a Democrat as they come, posted the following meme on Facebook:

For as long as I’ve known him my friend has been a true believer in the Democratic Party. Anything the party said became gospel; facts to the contrary were always ignored or spun as Republican propaganda. When Barack Obama ran the first time my friend was one of the biggest anti-war activist I knew. During Obama’s second presidential campaign, after he spent four years proving he was as much of a war hawk as his predecessor, my friend dropped the issue of war entirely. Even he cannot come up with a better reason to support Hillary other than she’s not a Republican.

The Democratic Party better start praying that Elizabeth Warren throws her hat into the presidential race. If Hillary can’t even get the true believers of her party enthusiastically supporting her then it’s going to be hard to sell the majority of people in this country gullible enough to vote.

Government So Small It Fits In Your Bathroom

This weekend the Minnesota Republican Party had its State Central Committee Meeting. I’ve never attended one of those nor will I ever but I have friends who were there so I got to see some of the shenanigans that went on during the event. At first I didn’t think there was going to be much to write about. The meeting just sounded like another political party circlejerk where elected party politician ‘A’ says some nice things about elected party politician ‘B’ and is reciprocated.

But you can always count on somebody showing up to a political event and ruining it for everybody. In the case of this meeting, being a Republican Party function, that prize went to the Child Protection League (CPL). After looking them up I discovered that the CPL seems to be primarily focused on shaming members of the kink community and getting transgender individuals to commit suicide.

Via Rob Doar’s Twitter feed I was able to see the fly handed out at the meeting by the CPL:

There’s nothing like take a male model; dressing him in a wig, mascara, and unbutton pants; and using him to scare ignorant people into associating him with transgender individuals to get the old bigotry juices flowing. The CPL is trying to confuse people into thinking that transgender individuals are crossdressers and exploiting that confusion to insinuate that transgender individuals, specifically male to female individuals, are trying to gain access to the women’s bathroom for sexual gratification.

Under the guise of protecting the children, a guise favored by every politician, the CPL is showing it has no interest in protecting transgender children. If it did it wouldn’t be pushing state legislation that would further oppress transgender individuals because that oppression comes with an extremely high suicide rate.

In addition to showing the complete ignorance of transgender individuals the CPL holds this flyer also demonstrates the problem with political solutions. What the CPL is advocating is a state law. The estimated population of Minnesota is 5,457,173. That means the CPL wants a law passed that would mandate over 5 million people behave in a certain way. Specifically it would mandate that every public school in the state force transgender students to use the bathroom of the gender they don’t identify as. This would undo local decisions such as the policy enacted in Minneapolis.

Although I was raised Catholic nobody would accuse me of being a good Catholic. But there is one Catholic teaching I do greatly cherish and that is subsidiarity. Subsidiarity teaches that decisions should be handled at the most local level possible. Issues facing individuals should be decided by the individuals, issues facing families should be decided by the families, and so on. As much as I would prefer each school to allow transgender students to use the bathroom of the gender they identify as I would far prefer a piecemeal system where each school can decide its own policy than a blanket statewide mandate. Why? Because that would at least give transgender students an option to change schools instead of having to suffer the same persecution wherever they went. One may then ask why I wouldn’t prefer a state law mandating schools to allow transgender students to use the bathroom of the gender they identify as. My reason for not advocating such a law is because once the power to make such a decision rests at the state level it rest there forever. Since laws are arbitrary a good statewide policy could be replaced by a bad statewide policy after a single election. The more local a decision is the less people it impacts.

Ironically what I’ve just described is what small government advocates always pretend to want. Republicans usually claim to be small government advocates but many of them get excited every time somebody presents them with a state or federal law that would mandate discrimination against a group they dislike. Fortunately my friends at the meeting scoffed at this flyer but I know there are a lot of Republicans that agree with what it says. Widespread support within the party is the reason the CPL came to the meeting to hand out flyers. Until the vast majority of the Republican Party speak out against laws such as HF 1546 nobody is going to take it seriously when its members call themselves the party of small government.

The Best We’re Going to Get

The biggest downside to Rand Paul running for president is that Rand Paul is running for president. Normally I wouldn’t care but I’m a libertarian and that has caused a lot of people to ask me what my opinion of Rand is. To make matters worse they expect my response to be positive and get upset when it’s not. Usually they say some variation of “He’s the best we’re going to get!”

That’s like marrying an abusive significant other because you think that they’re the best you’re going to get. You shouldn’t settle for shit just because your other suitors are slightly shittier. Spend some time being single, or in this case not involved in politics, and enjoy your life until something genuinely good comes around.

I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.

Whatever the state controls can be arbitrarily changed at a moment’s notice with nothing more than a stroke of a pen and enough men in suits saying “Aye!” A counterargument to anarchism is that the state is necessary to help those in need. The argument is bullshit. Under a state assistance of those in need, as with everything else, is entirely controlled by the state. Over time this usually results in the state claiming a monopoly, or near monopoly, on providing welfare. At that point welfare becomes unpredictable because the rules can change at any moment. Missouri is experiencing one of these attempted arbitrary rule changes now as several politicians try to restrict what type of foodstuff food stamp recipients can buy:

That story fit a longtime conservative suspicion that poor people use food stamps to purchase luxury items. Now, a Republican state lawmaker in Missouri is pushing for legislation that would stop people like Greenslate and severely limit what food stamp recipients can buy. The bill being proposed would ban the purchase with food stamps of “cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood or steak.”

“The intention of the bill is to get the food stamp program back to its original intent, which is nutrition assistance,” said Rick Brattin, the representative who is sponsoring the proposed legislation.

As the article points out the lawmakers may have a claim if they stopped at cookies, chips, energy drinks, and soft drinks. But seafood and steak are broad categories that encompass many nutritional foods. There are a lot of cheap seafood and steak options, especially when they’re on sale. Of course none of these politicians have an educational background in nutrition so whatever rules they make are, as always, arbitrary.

I know a lot of people are cheering this as a good idea. Most of those people would probably be happy if government food assistance only allowed enrollees to buy Soylent. They see people on government assistance as moochers who are stealing valuable tax dollars. It’s a misguided viewpoint. Their anger should be directed at the state as it is the entity that, through approximately a century of regulatory bullshit, transferred welfare from voluntary mutual aid groups to itself. Were welfare still in the hands of mutual aid groups those who didn’t want to participate wouldn’t have to and welfare would again be of a far higher quality.

In addition to that I also believe their anger is misguided because it assumes that those tax dollars would be put to better uses. Every dollar that gets put into welfare is a dollar that isn’t being put into buying more bombs, building better surveillance systems, or providing the police with even heavier armaments. As far as I’m concerned food assistance recipients should be allowed to buy caviar if they want it. Anything that pulls resources away from the state’s enforcement arms is good in my book.

Feinstein Doesn’t Understand How the Internet Works

Dianne Feinstein has made herself famous amongst gun owners by spouting entirely false claims. But she’s not satisfied with simply being ignorant about firearms. She also wants to prove to the world that she’s ignorant about how the Internet works. Her latest crusade is to remove the Anarchist Cookbook from the Internet:

“The arrests of two women in New York accused of plotting to carry out bombings remind us that the threat of terrorism inside the United States endures. We must remain vigilant against these types of attacks and place a high priority on tracking and interdicting such plots.

“I am particularly struck that the alleged bombers made use of online bombmaking guides like the Anarchist Cookbook and Inspire Magazine. These documents are not, in my view, protected by the First Amendment and should be removed from the Internet.

How does she propose to do that? The Internet is a decentralized system where no single government’s rule dictates jack shit. Even if she could declare the Anarchist Cookbook illegal in the United States, which would carry some serious free speech ramifications, it wouldn’t prevent servers in other countries from hosting the book. There is literally no way for the book to be remove from the Internet. The fact that Feinstein doesn’t understand this should be more proof that she has no business writing or voting for any legislation affecting the Internet (just as she has no business writing or voting for legislation affecting firearms).

As an interesting side note the book, despite the title, has nothing to do with the philosophy of anarchism. It was written by William Powell as a response to the fact that the government was trying to send him off to fight a war without his consent (also known as a draft). The book wasn’t about anarchism but about retaliating against a government that would make him act against his will. Unfortunately the title selection has been used as evidence that us anarchists are a bunch of violent psychopaths since its publication.

People are Wising Up

Your masters want you to vote because that gives them legitimacy. The few people who vote the less legitimate their rules appears to be. This is why wonderful bastions of democracy like Australia and North Korea make voting mandatory. So when the number of voters drops dramatically the rulers get worried. Here in Minnesota the rulers noticed that, in particular, St. Cloud experienced a dramatic drop in the number of voters between the last presidential election and 2014’s election and the Minnesota Secretary of State wants answers:

In St. Cloud’s Ward 1 Precinct 1, which includes a large portion of St. Cloud State University, 1,100 voters showed up to cast a vote in the 2012 presidential election.

Two years later, in the 2014 election, that number fell by more than half, to just 343 votes.

A decline in voter turnout during midterm elections isn’t new, but that plunge was even steeper than usual, and Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon wants to know why. Is it a mechanical problem of voter access to the polls? Or disillusionment about the political process itself?

I can tell you that the drop in voter participation isn’t due to mechanical problems or access to polling places. People are just wising up. More of them are realizing that they are going to get fucked no matter who gets elected. Going to the polls takes time. Why would you waste valuable drinking time traveling across town, standing in line, and filling in ovals on a piece of paper? That time could be more productively used by sleeping in, clipping your fingernails, or drinking beer.

Voter participation is only going to continue to drop as people wake up to the fact that being under the boot of another person isn’t ideal. As voter participation goes down the rulers will try to develop schemes to encourage people to go to the polls. These schemes may include raffles for prices, coupons for local businesses, or laws fining people for not going to the polls. Our politicians are jealous of the fact that Kim Jong-un was elected by 100% of his population and want the same claim of legitimacy.

Focus Your Wrath on the Politicians of Indiana Not the People

A lot of dust has been kicked up after Indiana passed a bill that would allow businesses to discriminate based on the owner’s religious beliefs. As the bill was written by Republicans it’s no surprise the bill was aimed at enabling business to discriminate against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals (LGBT).

In response to this news Salesfore has cancelled all events in Indiana, Gen Con has threatened to pull out of the state, and more people than I care to count have said they will no longer do any business in Indiana. I feel that it’s necessary for me to point out something that seems to be getting missed. The bill in question was passed by a handful of suit-clad individuals in a marble building. Most of the state had no say in the matter. All they could do is sit idly by while their overlords passed the legislation. Some may claim that the people of Indiana should be held accountable because they voted in these overlords but I will point you to the state’s 2014 election turnout that notes only 30% of registered votes were stupid enough to show up to the polls [PDF]. So 70% of registered votes didn’t have anything to do with the current rulers getting elected.

The bottom line is that punishing everybody in a state for the actions of a handful of fuckwits is not an appropriate response. A far better response would be to create a database of businesses that choose to discriminate against LGBT individuals and boycott them specifically. It would also be appropriate to boycott the politicians themselves but that’s always appropriate because they’re a bunch of sick fuckers who rule us at the point of a gun.

For my libertarian friends that claim this legislation better allows business to freely choose who they will and will not do business with I will point you to the text of the bill. It has some wonderful weasel language:

(b) A governmental entity may substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion only if the governmental entity demonstrates that application of the burden to the person:
(1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and
(2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.

It seems to me that this bill gives the state the option of not prosecuting a business for discriminating based on the owner’s religious beliefs but keeps the door open if the state choose to prosecute. Namely if the state can claim prosecuting a business is in its interest and no other means of forwarding its interests would be less restrictive then it can prosecute. This would open the door for a lot of abuse. For example, the state could decide to prosecute a business owned by a Muslim under the guise of forwarding the state’s interest and having no less restrictive way of proceeding.

Opening the door for the state to pick and choose who it prosecutes is not the same as allowing a business to pick and choose who it does business with. One gives the state the power to decide how businesses can discriminate and the other doesn’t. This bill, based on my layman’s reading (shocker, for those who don’t know, I’m not a lawyer), is a case of the former and not the latter.

Why Nobody But Republicans Like Republicans

Although the many Republican political victories in the off year election made many social conservatives feel absolutely chart-topping levels of euphoria the truth is most of the country hate the Republican Party. And there’s a reason for this. The party’s constant pursuit of social issues rubs most people who aren’t social conservatives (and many who are) the wrong way. It also rubs many small government advocates the wrong way because nothing says small government like paying bounties to people who identify transgender individuals:

State Senator CB Embry’s bill would have banned students across Kentucky from using facilities that did not correspond with their “biological sex”, offering rewards of $2,500 (£1,650) to anyone who reported people violating the law. Sen Embry believed trans students using the toilets of their gender would cause “embarrassment, shame, and psychological injury to students”.

The bill passed the Republican-controlled Senate, but was stalled by the majority Democrat House of Representatives. Sen Embry then tried to force through his proposals by adding them to a separate, unrelated educational bill, intended to give students greater representation on certain decisions.

Fortunately the bill stalled out but this ended up being bad press for Republicans and great press for Democrats. This is just another bill on the massive pile of bills that Republicans have written and passed since winning seats in the last election. And it’s going to bite them in the ass come next election.

There were a lot of fiscal conservatives who gave the Republicans a chance by voting them in only to see no appreciable results. Government hasn’t shrunk and budgets are still creating massive amounts of debt. If they’re smart the fiscal conservatives will migrate elsewhere since voting Republican obviously hasn’t advanced their goals. Advocates of equality are also unhappy with the Republicans’ pursuit of social conservative issues and will be motivated to turn out to the polls during the election year that actually matters. Hell, many social conservatives are unhappy with these bills because even though they don’t particularly like many groups being attacked by Republican politicians they still believe interactions should be entirely voluntary.

In other words nobody besides diehard Republicans like Republicans. They’re insufferable jackasses when they get into power and don’t even deliver on their promises of balancing budgets and shrinking government. At least the other team is somewhat honest about its intentions to interfering in our personal lives, stealing our money, expand government, and piss away money like a drunken sailor on shore leave.