Tag: Not So Crazy Libertarian Ideals

Bill Gates Knows What’s Best for You

Just because Bill Gates is really good at making money he believes that he knows how to run your life better than you do. Recently his charitable foundation made a $1 million donation to a campaign in Washington state trying to prohibit private sales of firearms:

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, have donated $1 million to a Washington state campaign seeking to expand background checks on gun sales, bringing the total amount the campaign has brought in up to nearly $6 million.

The donation to the Initiative 594 campaign was given Friday, but it was not made public until Monday, when it posted on the state’s Public Disclosure Commission website.

I-594 would require background checks for all gun sales and transfers in Washington state, including at gun shows and for private sales. Under the measure, exemptions would exist, including gifts within a family and antiques.

Gun control advocates try to criticize anybody who opposes mandatory background checks with variations of “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.” They imply anybody who opposes background checks has a criminal history. But they are also dishonest about what they want. While they claim that they want to prevent criminals from purchasing firearms what they really want is to prohibit you from selling your property without government permission. I cannot read minds but I will go so far as to imply most gun control advocates want this prohibition in place because it makes the burden of gun ownership higher and therefore would further discourage it. Additionally mandatory background checks would allow the state to more easily restrict firearm ownership by creating more criteria for what defines a prohibited person and having those additional criteria enforced by federally licensed dealers.

In the end laws restricting individuals are always about trying to control the lives of others. Those who advocate them, such as Bill Gates, are control freaks and deserve to be ignored by the rest of us.

AgoraFest 2014 Summary

This weekend I was at the second annual AgoraFest. As the event’s namesake is taken from agorism it’s no surprise to know that it was total anarchy. That is to say the event was absent of coercive force, devoid of hierarchy, and much mutually beneficial trade occurred. Unlike political events, AgoraFest’s speakers didn’t spout of violent hate speech. There were no psychopaths urging the bombing of a foreign country, arrest of nonviolent people, or further militarization of the police. We were fortunate to be joined by Jack Shimek, a agorist who was good friends with agorism’s founder, Samuel Edward Konkin III. He’s working on some interesting things that I’ll discuss more when they’re announced to the public.

In addition to giving an introductory course on firearms (which was requested by an individual who didn’t even show up) and lock picking I also spent my time being the event’s network ninja. We setup a mesh network using Ubiquity NanoStation and PicoStation access points running Commotion Wireless firmware. The event was hosted at the Villa Maria in Frontenac, Minnesota so cell coverage was sparse. Likewise the Villa Maria only has Internet access in the main building. Using our access points we were able to span the distance between the main Villa Maria building and the cabins where the event took place. Overall we covered a distance of roughly 1,200 feet, which was made difficult by sparse availability of power outlets (we had one 500 foot span because there were no power outlets that allowed us to shorten the distance). While the Villa Maria’s Internet connection isn’t stellar the setup allowed us decent coverage of slow Internet access instead of no coverage at all. It was a fun experiment and I look forward to improving the network next year.

I had a great time but it was also a lot of work so I’m taking today off of blogging (at least anything other than the Monday Metal entry and this post) to recuperate. Between Defcon and AgoraFest I’m pretty burned out this month but it was well worth the hassle.

Victim Blaming

With all of the shit hitting the fan in Ferguson I think it’s a good idea to figure out what one needs to do in order to not get their ass kicked or shot by the police. Fortunately Sunil Dutta, a man who was an officer for the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) for 17 years, was kind enough to pen an article explaining exactly that:

Sometimes, though, no amount of persuasion or warnings work on a belligerent person; that’s when cops have to use force, and the results can be tragic. We are still learning what transpired between Officer Darren Wilson and Brown, but in most cases it’s less ambiguous — and officers are rarely at fault. When they use force, they are defending their, or the public’s, safety.

Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me. Most field stops are complete in minutes. How difficult is it to cooperate for that long?

Emphasis mine. Did you get that? If an officer uses force, in a majority of cases, it’s the victim’s fault. You see the victim refused to roll over and be an obedient serf so the officer had no other choice but to beat his ass or shoot him! After all police officers truly love us and sometimes we make them do violent things by failing to properly respond to their love. Admittedly there are a few bad apples out there but for the most part cops only beat you because they love you.

Talk about unapologetic victim blaming. Mr. Dutta’s argument can basically be summed up as “Shut up, slave!” It doesn’t surprise me that a 17 year veteran of the LAPD holds this attitude. Although no statistics exist, as far as I know, documenting the reason for police interactions I believe, based on the way laws are enforced, that a vast majority of encounters involve the officer initiating force. A majority of police activity involves extorting money from the populace. We see this in the form of speeding tickets, parking citations, civil forfeitures, fines for drinking alcohol in public parks, littering, and other nonviolent acts. In each of those instances a police officer is approaching a nonviolent individual and threatening them with force (because all laws are ultimately enforced at the point of a gun). In those cases the person approached by police is the victim and the officer is the aggressor.

There is no reason, other than the threat of violence made by an officer, for anybody to be polite to a another person who approaches solely to make a threat. In fact anybody making threats should expect to get an impolite response. Police officers are fortunate that most Americans are polite to a fault. Even when an officer threatens a person that person will usually say a few harsh words, passively resist being kidnapped, or spit in an officer’s face. While police officers often talk about how dangerous their job is in reality they have it pretty easy in this country. Only once in a great while do they have to make good on their threats. Otherwise people blow off a little steam and pay the demanded extortion money.

But, as Mr. Dutta points out, even if your show the slightest amount of displeasure towards a badge-wearing aggressor you risk being pummeled or murdered. And this is somehow the victim’s fault.

Another Good Reason to Not Vote

Besides statistical reasons there is now another good reason to not vote. As the number of people who show up to polling places goes down the need to entice voters will go up. After all a democratic state’s “legitimacy” depends entirely on people voting. If the number of voters gets low enough the state will become desperate to maintain its legitimacy and attempt to buy voters’ participation:

Alarmed that fewer than one-fourth of voters are showing up for municipal elections, the Los Angeles Ethics Commission voted Thursday to recommend that the City Council look at using cash prizes to lure a greater number of people to the polls.

On a 3-0 vote, the panel said it wanted City Council President Herb Wesson’s Rules, Elections and Intergovernmental Relations Committee to seriously consider the use of financial incentives and a random drawing during its elections, possibly as soon as next year.

Los Angeles may be a preview of things to come. The number of people participating in this sham called democracy has been steadily decreasing. In Los Angeles there are so few participants that the City Council is entertaining the idea of bribing people to show up to the polling places. Imagine if the rest of the country follow suit. It could lead to voting becoming a productive activity as state agents, in their desperation to appear legitimate, begin to offer us money just to show up to polling places from time to time.

All we need to do is hold out and the state may give us some of the money it stole from us back.

What Happens When a Blind Def Man Uses the Internet

I’m lead to believe Paul Waldman is both blind and def. Why is this? Because he doesn’t believe libertarians are speaking up about what’s going down in Ferguson, Missouri:

The shooting death by police of Ferguson, MO teenager Michael Brown, and what has happened in the aftermath, has been blanketing the news for the past few days. It’s a story about race, but it’s also become a story about the power of the state and how it’s wielded, and against whom.

So my question is this: Where are the libertarians?

[…]

You would also have thought that libertarians would be using the police reaction to the protests over Brown’s killing as a case study in the needless and dangerous militarization of the police.

Can Mr. Waldman really be this naive? After all, he works for the same damned publication as Radley Balko who has been covering this story on the Washington Post. Prominent libertarian magazine Reason has also been covering this story. The front page of the Libertarian subreddit (which I wouldn’t call overly libertarian but it’s libertarian enough for Mr. Waldman) is filled mostly with articles about this story. So what the Hell is Mr. Waldman prattling on about? Well, as you will soon see, he isn’t actually asking about the libertarians. He’s asking about Rand Paul:

But there has been a near-total silence from prominent libertarians on this issue. Senator Rand Paul, right now America’s most prominent libertarian (yes, I know, some don’t consider him a real libertarian), hasn’t said anything about the case — no public comments, no news releases, nothing on Twitter, nothing on Facebook.

Mr. Waldman is correct in that some don’t consider Rand Paul a real libertarian. For example, Rand Paul doesn’t consider Rand Paul to be a real libertarian. So it’s dishonest to say he is America’s most prominent libertarian when the man doesn’t consider himself a libertarian. This just goes to show that if you narrow the field enough you can make up whatever claim your heart desires.

If Mr. Waldman can’t find the libertarians discussion this story he needs to overcome his own laziness, pick up his phone, and call his coworker Mr. Balko up.

Everything I Want is a Human Right and Should be Free

Economic ignorance has lead to widespread belief in many silly things. For example, people believe that war is good for the economy because it creates manufacturing jobs. Frédéric Bastiat explained why this belief was bullshit in 1850 with the parable of the broken window. Another silly belief many people seem to have is that there is such a thing as free. This belief has become especially commonplace now that everybody equates anything they want as a human right and therefore should be provided for free.

The latest case of this belief being proliferated is tampons. I’m not kidding. This article, which argues that tampons should be free, has been making the rounds on the Internet and many people have deemed it to be a good idea:

We need to move beyond the stigma of “that time of the month” – women’s feminine hygiene products should be free for all, all the time.

Sanitary products are vital for the health, well-being and full participation of women and girls across the globe. The United Nations and Human Rights Watch, for example, have both linked menstrual hygiene to human rights. Earlier this year, Jyoti Sanghera, chief of the UN Human Rights Office on Economic and Social Issues, called the stigma around menstrual hygiene “a violation of several human rights, most importantly the right to human dignity”.

[…]

But this is less an issue of costliness than it is of principle: menstrual care is health care, and should be treated as such.

We’ve come full circle. Since so many people believe that healthcare is a human right and therefore must be provided to all for free anything that can be somehow tied to healthcare should likewise be provided to all for free. But nothing is free. Everything good requires resources. First raw resources must be collected, which in of itself requires energy. Then those raw resources must be refined into something useful for the manufacturing of capital goods, which also requires energy. After that those capital goods must be further refined into something consumers can us, which requires more energy. Energy itself is a resource as is time and basically everything else that touches the manufacturing process.

The bottom line is somebody has to invest the resources necessary to produce a good. When somebody says they believe something should be free what they really mean is that everybody in the world should be forced to set aside a portion of their resources to manufacture that “free” product. To further simplify the matter when somebody says they believe something should be free what they really mean is that everybody else should pay for it.

Now the people who want free shit usually use very utilitarian arguments. This article, for example, points out that approximately half of the population of this planet can utilize tampons. I’m going to one up that. What is an activity that every human being does that can negatively impact sanitation? Shit! Therefore I propose something different. Instead of “free” tampons I propose “free” toilet paper for all! Obviously I’m joking since I’m not economically illiterate and I’m not such an asshole that I want government violence brought against you so I can get something for “free”. But I believe my point has been made.

Armslist.com not Responsible for Murder Committed with Weapon Obtained via Site

There has been a lawsuit open against Armslist.com because an individual obtained a weapon from a person who advertised it on the site and used it to commit murder. Much to the dismay of gun control advocates Armslist.com has been declared not responsible for what happened:

The case decided Tuesday by the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals concerns a woman murdered in 2011 with a .40-caliber handgun that a Seattle man advertised on Armslist for $400. A Canadian man bought the weapon.

Demetry Smirnov, the gun purchaser, murdered Jitka Vesel in Chicago with that weapon after an online romance soured. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. The man who sold him the gun, Benedict Ladera, was handed a year in jail for illegally selling the firearm, as federal regulations prohibit the transfer of weapons to people in another state or country, the appeals court said.

There is no other way this case could have been ruled in a logical universe. It isn’t possible for one individual to know the intent of another individual just like it is impossible for a third-party to know the intent of two individuals who happen to use its services. Claiming that Armslist.com was responsible for what happened would be no different than claiming Google was responsible for a murder because the weapon used was traded between two individuals via Gmail.

Of course there are a lot of gun control advocates who believe otherwise. Their belief stems solely from the fact that they want to see fire and brimstone brought down upon anybody who is in any way involved with a firearm (except for their armed guards, of course). There is no logical argument for such a position though, it’s merely the product of a desire for petty hatred. Fortunately the 7th Us Circuit Court of Appeals understood this and save another business from unnecessary legal burden.

Speed Limits

This month the men and women of Minnesota’s various police departments have been holding one hell of a fundraiser in the form of speed traps. They’ve been using the tagline “There’s not excuse for speeding.” And they’ve been covering billboards, newspaper pages, and other advertising space (with our tax dollars no less) with propaganda about the dangers of speeding (the ads are kind of like reefer madness but less entertaining).

Do you know what fucks up traffic flow? People who don’t drive with the flow of traffic, which is always above the posted speed limit because those posted speed limits are bullshit and the state knows it. This shouldn’t surprise anybody though. Who knows the maximum safe operating speed of a stretch of road better than the people who drive it twice a day, five days a week as they go to and from work? Posted speed limits are the product of arbitrary decisions made by people sitting in marble buildings who have no idea what the maximum safe speed on a random stretch of road they’ve never driven on is. Flow of traffic is the result of people who have a great deal of experience driving on a stretch of road doing so at the maximum speed they know to be safe.

Minneapolis Police Department Created More Aggregate Demand for Dog Breeders

From my understanding there is a bit of a rivalry between the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments. Not wanting his department to be outdone by the St. Paul department in creating aggregate demand for dog breeders a brave soldier of the Minneapolis department stepped up to the plate and executed a family pet:

In the alley, Tito — a nearly two-year-old, 120-pound Cane Corso — approached an officer who was still hunting for the car theft suspect. The officer ended up opening fire and killing Trott and Lyczkowski’s beloved dog.

“I ran out the door and was hollering for him,” Trott tells us. “I didn’t get halfway to the gate when you could hear the officer yell, ‘Stop!’ He just yelled ‘Stop!’ and shot him and that was it.”

St. Paul is still in the lead but I’m sure another fine soldier of the Minneapolis Police Department will find a litter of puppies to execute, which would put his department ahead of St. Paul’s.

Not surprisingly the officer was quick to jump on the “You weren’t here, man. You don’t know what went down!” justification:

“The only thing [cops] kept saying is, ‘You weren’t here, you don’t know what’s going on, you don’t have time to discern pet from animal and in our mind they’re just animals,'” Trott says. “It was, shoot first, think later. You know, I understand where they’re at — I worked four years for the Illinois Department of Corrections as a correctional officer. But [Tito] had a collar, tags, and he’s clearly not a stray.”

This has become the police officers’ equivalent to the Obama supporters’ race card. And like that race card this “You weren’t there, man!” card has worn thin. The officer apparently said that he didn’t have time to discern pet from animal but if you’re using a firearm you better be 100 percent sure of your fucking target. Shooting a dog or person because you didn’t have time to discern the situation is not an acceptable excuse. If needing to identify targets before deploying lethal force is too rigorous for you then you shouldn’t be a police officer.

Whenever I mention these strange views I hold somebody invariably falls back to the polices’ other favorite excuse, officer safety. They claim that officers have to be given considerably leeway in these matters because “They’re putting their life on the line to save ours!” I’m sorry but that’s a bullshit excuse as well. Most of an officer’s time is spent extorting the citizenry by issuing speeding tickets and parking violations, arresting people participating an mutually agreed to transactions that the state has declared prohibited, and kidnapping people who have failed to give the state a cut of the action. The lives saved by police officers seems to more and more be a happy accident than purposeful action, which makes sense since saving lives seldom results in more funding for a department. Maybe if today’s police spent most of their time saving lives I’d be willing to cut them a bit of slack but they don’t so I’m not.

Hopefully our society will eventually stop shielding police officers from the consequences of bad actions. Until then aggregate demand for dog breeders will continue to increase.

You Need the State to Protect Your Rights; You Need to Fight the State to Protect Your Rights

As an anarchist that hangs out with statist libertarians I am often involved in political and philosophical debates. When I mention my belief that we humans don’t need to be ruled my more statist cohorts have to quickly jump in to tell me how wrong I am. According to them government is absolutely critical for a free society (because nothing says free like being ruled). When I ask why they almost always claim that a government is necessary to protect the rights of the citizenry.

This reason has always amused me. Governments have it easy. They get to make all of the rules, including what is considered a right under their legal system. You would think that they would write a set of rules that they intend to follow. But governments are the biggest violators of the very rights they declare. When I point this out my statist friends reply by saying that we need to stand up to the government whenever it violates our rights.

So the theory of statism goes like this. We need a government to protect our rights and we must protect our rights against the government. If we’re worried about our rights why would we want to charge the biggest violator of those rights with protecting them? That makes as much sense as charging the fox with guarding your chickens.

Being forced to choose between defending my rights against smaller groups of vicious people or one large, centralized organization with a monopoly on violence and perceived legitimacy by a sizable portion of the population I’d choose the former. It’s much easier to defend yourself against small mostly disorganized groups who nobody considered a legitimate authority. When you have to defend yourself against a government, which is nothing more than a very large gang, you end up not only having to fight the government but all of the people who believe it to be a legitimate entity (because, after all, it’s their gang so it must be the right one).