Slavery Didn’t End

Yesterday was Juneteenth, a holiday to celebrate the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation. Unfortunately, based on news articles and social media posts, many if not most people are under the mistaken belief that Juneteenth celebrates the end of slavery in the United States.

The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t end slavery in the United States (and the anti-slavery laws and Thirteenth Amendment that followed), it changed the rules of slavery. Prior to the Emancipation Proclamation people of African descent could be owned by private individuals in specific states. While the Emancipation Proclamation prohibited that practice, it didn’t prevent all forms of slavery.

In the post Emancipation Proclamation United States whether one can be a slave is no longer determined by skin color and whether one can own slaves is no longer determined by the state in which they reside. Instead whether one can be a slave is determined by criminality and the only legal slave owners are the federal and state governments and their contractors.

Yes, this post is yet another one of my rants about the existence of Federal Prison Industries, also known as UNICOR, state level versions of UNICOR such as MINNCOR, and government contracted private prisons. All of these organizations utilize slave labor, but many people seem to be willing to ignore this fact because the slaves are criminals. But I will again remind you that the legal system in the United States is so convoluted that the label criminal is effectively arbitrary. Back in 2011 the book Three Felonies a Day was published. The book pointed out that working professionals in the United States unknowingly commit an average of three felonies per day. The only reason they aren’t all criminals is because the state either hasn’t caught them or hasn’t enforced its laws against them. But if the state doesn’t like somebody it can chose to investigate them and enforce any of its numerous laws against them and thus make them a criminal.

So when you see news anchors, politicians, and celebrities celebrating an end to slavery, remember that slavery is still alive and well in the United States. The rules may have changed, but the practice never ended.

It Always Comes Back to Fascism

Champions of democracy whether they be republicans (not the party), socialists, communists, or social democrats always claim that their idealized form of government is the opposite of fascism. When things are going well for democratic governments, they can appear quite different from fascism. However, when things go bad, democracies always revert to fascism.

A few weeks ago a bunch of Canadian truckers decided that they had had enough of their government’s COVID mandates. As a form of protest they drove to Ottawa and setup camp. What makes this protest different from recent popular occupational protests like the Occupy movement is that the protesters are working class instead of petty bourgeois. Because of that they’ve been labeled insurrectionists, racists, and worse instead of protesters (it turns out self-proclaimed champions of the working class tend to hate the actual working class). In spite of the labels foisted on the protesters, they have successfully embarrassed the Canadian government. The Canadian government’s reaction was predictable. It resorted to good old-fashioned fascism:

Under the extraordinary measures invoked by Mr. Trudeau, the police across the country will now be able to seize trucks and other vehicles being used in blockades. The measure will formally ban demonstrations that “go beyond lawful protest,” and the government can formally ban blockades in designated areas like border crossings, airports and the city of Ottawa.

Tow-truck operators, who have been reluctant to cooperate with the police, will also now be compelled to work with law enforcement agencies to clear Ottawa’s streets and the border crossings at Coutts, Alberta. If they don’t cooperate, they could face arrest.

The second paragraph is the most interesting. Most tow-truck operators who possess the equipment necessary to move semis rely on the good grace of truckers for their income. As a result they have refused the government’s request for towing services. In response the Canadian government is now putting a gun to their head and demanding obedience. This practice is commonly referred to as forced labor or slavery.

The Canadian government’s behavior isn’t unique amongst democracies. All democracies will toss aside their facade of respecting individuals when their power is challenged.

In Case It Was Unclear, This Is Fascism

Fascism has a number of defining characteristics including dictatorial powers, oppression of opposition, strict governmental control over the populace, and strong governmental control of the economy. All four characteristics were present in the executive ordered issued by Joe Biden this afternoon:

In an address made from the White House on Thursday, Mr Biden directed the Department of Labor to require all private businesses with 100 or more workers to mandate the jab or require proof of a negative Covid test from employees at least once a week. The order will affect around 80m workers.

Dictatorial powers? Biden issued this order by himself through an executive order. Oppression of opposition? This order is a direct attack on individuals who haven’t received one of the available COVID vaccines. Strict governmental control over the populace? If order every person who works for an arbitrarily large company isn’t strict government control over the populace, I don’t know what is. And finally strong governmental control of the economy? Biden just ordered every business with more than 100 employees to either force their employees to get a COVID vaccination or subject them to weekly testing.

Proponents of democracy should be appalled by this. Congress didn’t propose this. It didn’t debate this. It didn’t pass this. It didn’t get to say a goddamn word about this. It was a single man using a tool that I and every sane person has been warning about for ages: executive orders. An executive order is the antithesis of democracy. It creates dictatorships.

Those who claim to fight for the poor and downtrodden should be appalled by this. As Glenn Greenwald noted, this order is going to hurt the poor and downtrodden much more than the well off. And before somebody brings up the fact that COVID vaccines are free (and by free I mean paid for by the federal government with tax money and printed dollars), everybody knows that. The individuals in lower income brackets who haven’t received a COVID vaccine know that. They haven’t chosen to forego the vaccine because they’re ignorant of the cost. But they have chosen to forego it and that makes this order a direct attack against their autonomy.

Advocates of body autonomy should be especially appalled by this for obvious reasons.

In fact anybody who isn’t appalled by this is a fascist. They might not realize they’re a fascist, but they are one.

That ends my rant.

In case my feelings on the matter are unclear, I will close by giving my opinion on the COVID vaccines. If you want one, get one. If you don’t want one, don’t get one. It’s your body. You should be the only person who decides what to put in it.

Collective Punishment of Automobile Owners

Congress slipped a provision into the infrastructure bill that will requires vehicles developed after 2027 to detect if the driver is drunk:

The U.S. Congress is debating about a massive bill titled “Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act,” and it includes a provision that makes it mandatory for cars in the future to have an advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology. What makes it interesting is that the bill actually stipulates 2027 as the year for its implementation, which is not very far. As Vice points out, these are not retro-fitted devices but actually standard fitments that go in during the manufacturing process.

I can’t wait until even entry level vehicles cost $100,000 (in today’s dollars, not in future dollars severely devalued from today’s money printing efforts) on account of all of the sensors needed to ensure that drivers aren’t drunk, high, tired, infected with a respiratory illness, dizzy, overweight (it takes more fuel to move around more weight and that makes Mother Gaia cry) or otherwise deemed unfit for the road. It’s always nice when politicians in Washington DC decide to punish everybody (in this case by increasing the cost of vehicles) for the actions of a handful of people.

The Collusion of Corporations and Government

The First Amendment is supposed to citizens from government censorship… unless those citizens are inciting a riot… or making a false statement of fact or saying obscene things or expressing themselves in any of the other prohibited manners. It turns out free speech in the United States is a fairy tale, but I digress.

Even though the First Amendment is a joke the idea it is supposed to enshrine, the freedom of expression, is one that seemed to enjoy majority support in the United States until Trump’s 2016 presidential victory. Those who didn’t believe Trump was able to win started looking for scapegoats as soon as his victory was announced. One of the most common scapegoats became social media. Trump’s opponents decided that misinformation spread by Russian bots on Facebook and Twitter was responsible for Clinton’s loss. It came as no surprise when they started demanding social media sites start censoring anything they deemed to be misinformation. It also came as no surprise when those social media sites, predominantly owned and operated by individuals who expressed a great deal of (deserved in my opinion) hatred towards Trump, complied. When sites like Facebook and Twitter started censoring pretty much any content expressing political beliefs slightly right of Mao, those who were being censored started screaming about free speech.

The response from those in support of social media censorship (those not being censored), like every other expressed political opinion following Trump’s election, was predictable. They purposely misconstrued the concept of free speech for the First Amendment and haughtily pointed out that the First Amendment only protects against government censorship.

Short of a revolution, which in the absolute best case is only temporary, nothing can stop the erosion of a freedom. Free expression is no exception. The concept of free expression has been eroding in the United States since the country’s founding, but accelerated significantly after Trump’s election. Now we have reached the inevitable point where the government is directly involving itself in censorship:

In terms of actions, Alex, that we have taken — or we’re working to take, I should say — from the federal government: We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s office. We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.

Private companies are no longer the only ones involved in censorship. The federal government is admitting, openly no less, that it is flagging content it deems problematic for Facebook (with the implication that Facebook will remove the flagged content). There is a term for a political system where corporations and the government collude. Consider looking up that term your homework assignment.

As with any government grab for power this one comes with justification:

Asked what his message was to platforms like Facebook regarding Covid disinformation, Biden said “They’re killing people.”

“I mean they really, look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and that’s — they’re killing people,” Biden said on the South Lawn of the White House.

Biden was echoing earlier comments from White House press secretary Jen Psaki.

The justification is always safety (and always nonsensical). Air travelers must submit to sexual assault, either in being molested or virtually stripped naked by government agents, under the auspices of keeping air travelers safe from terrorists. Gun owners must fill out government forms and ask for government permission in order to buy a gun under the auspices of protecting the populace from gun violence. Every year representatives in Washington DC argue that effective encryption must be made illegal under the auspices of protecting children from rapists and human traffickers. Now the government has decided it needs to choose what is and isn’t appropriate to post on Facebook under the auspices of keeping the populace safe from a virus.

A Glimmer of Hope for a Decentralized Internet

If you don’t own your online services, you’re at the mercy of whoever does. This rule has always been true, but hasn’t been obvious until recently. Service providers have become increasingly tyrannical and arbitrary with the exercise of their control. More and more people are finding themselves banned from services like Facebook and YouTube. Compounding the issue is that the reasons given for the bans are often absurd and that’s assuming any any reasons is given at all.

This type of abusive relationship isn’t good for anybody, but is especially dangerous to individuals with money on the table. Imagine investing years of your life in building up a profitable business on a service like YouTube only to have Google take it away without providing so much as a reason. Some content creators on YouTube are beginning to acknowledge that risk and are taking actions to gain control over their fate:

Whether he’s showing off astronomically expensive computer gaming hardware or dumpster-diving for the cheapest PC builds possible, Linus Sebastian’s videos always strike a chord, and have made him one of the most popular tech personalities on YouTube.

But Google-owned YouTube gets most episodes of Linus Tech Tips a week late.

Now, they debut on his own site called Floatplane, which attracts a much smaller crowd.

A handful of content creators are mentioned in the article. Most of them are too nice or perhaps timid to state the real reasons they’re seeking alternatives to YouTube: YouTube has become a liability. Google; like Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and other large online service providers; has been hard at work destroying all of the goodwill it built up over its lifetime. There’s no way to know whether a video you upload to YouTube today will be available tomorrow. There isn’t even a guarantee that your account will be around tomorrow. If you post something that irritates the wrong person, or more accurately the wrong machine learning algorithm, it will be removed and your account may be suspended for a few days if you’re lucky or deleted altogether if you’re unlucky. And when your content and account are removed, you have little recourse. There’s nobody you can call. The most you can do is send an e-mail and hope that either a person or machine learning algorithm sees it and have a bit of pity on you.

I’m ecstatic that this recent uptick in censorship is happening. In my opinion centralization of the Internet is dangerous. Large service providers like Google are proving my point. They are also forcing people to decentralize, which advances my goals. So less anybody think I’m ungrateful I want to close this post by giving a sincere thank you to companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon for being such complete bastards. Their actions are doing wonders for my cause of decentralizing the Internet.

It’s Crises All the Way Down

I assume that the people who watch and believe what passes for news today feel hopeless. Why? Because all news is bad news and crises never end, they merely turn into new crises.

Take the overpopulation crisis as an example. For most of my life I have been hearing about it. Even when I was in elementary school, teachers were warning us kids that too many people were consuming too many resources and we faced a bleak future because of it. The narrative continued throughout my high school and college careers. Today the news is reporting about the worldwide drop in fertility rates. This must mean that the population crisis has been averted and the future is looking brighter than it was, right? Wrong! The overpopulation crisis has turned into the baby bust crisis:

The U.S. is already below the so-called “replacement level” by some measures, meaning fewer young people to support the country’s otherwise aging population.

Myers said of the decline, “That’s a crisis.”

“We need to have enough working-age people to carry the load of these seniors, who deserve their retirement, they deserve all their entitlements, and they’re gonna live out another 30 years,” he said. “Nobody in the history of the globe has had so many older people to deal with.”

What the fuck? How did we snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? We did exactly what the experts told us to do! We had fewer babies! How did we end up facing yet another crisis? To answer that I will turn to George Orwell:

The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.

The crises you hear about in the news are not meant to be solved. They’re meant to be continuous. They exist to keep the masses in a constant state of fear because so long as the masses are afraid, they will seek a savior. When they find somebody who promises to be their savior, they will give him anything he demands. If he demands soldiers to fight a war against the enemy, they will gladly surrender their sons to him. If he demands broader surveillance powers, they will gladly surrender their privacy. If he demands wealth so he can fund the fight against the enemy, they will gladly surrender their income and assets. And his demands won’t stop even when the crisis abates. Instead he’ll come to them with new demands to fight a new crisis.

Ignorance of the Law Should Be an Excuse

“Ignorance of the law is no excuse” and “I’m a law abiding citizen” rank towards the top on my list of hated phrases. Law enforcers and prosecutors like to claim that ignorance of the law is no excuse when they’re arresting and taking you to court respectively. Judges are even in on the game. They tell jurors, while wearing a straight face no less, that their verdict must be based on the letter of the law. Then there’s the defendant. Up until he found himself in court he very well may have said that he was a law abiding citizen. He might even compound his ignorance by saying he looked forward to his day in court so he could prove his innocence. The lawyers, prosecutors, and judges are demanding that people be held to an impossible standard. The person who calls himself a law abiding citizen is a fool.

I’m sure there’s at least one person who considers themselves a law abiding citizen scoffing at my previous sentence. If that person is you, there’s an exercise that you can perform to prove me wrong. The only thing you need for this exercise is a pen and paper. Without looking any up write down every law for the municipality, county, and state in which you live. Then write down every federal law. When you’ve finished writing down all of the laws you know, look up all of the laws you missed.

You’ll find that you missed most of them. I know this for certain because if you did start writing down every law under which you live, you would die of old age before you finished. Maybe you think you could do so if you had enough time. If you believe that, begin reading through the laws under which you live and only write down the ones you didn’t know. Since legal professionals like lawmakers, judges, and lawyers don’t know the entirely of the law, I have my doubts that you do.

The bottom line is the everybody is ignorant of the law. Since everybody is ignorant of the law, it’s impossible for anybody to know that they’re a law abiding citizen.

This situation is even more dire when you stop to consider that the body of law is in a constant state of change. City council members, senators, congressmen, and other lawmakers are constantly tweaking existing laws and creating new ones. Even if you did manage to learn every law under which you live, your knowledge would quickly be outdated. Then you have to take into account the rulings made by various judges. Their rulings ultimately decide what the letter of the law actually means. And they frequently invalidate each others’ rulings so their rulings too are in a constant state of flux.

I’m left with a question that should seem obvious at this point. Why isn’t ignorance of the law an excuse? If legal professionals who attend specialized schooling can’t comprehend the entirety of the law, why are laymen expected to do so? Why is a system built on a practically uncountable number of laws that are frequently conflicting and always changing considered just?

I call bullshit on the entire concept. Ignorance of the laws should be an excuse.

Google Suspends Element from Its Play Store

The developers of Element; a decentralized, federated, and secure messaging client; were just informed that their application has been suspended from the Google Play Store, which means Android users cannot currently install Element unless they do it through F-Droid or side loading. Why did Google suspend the app? At first Element’s developers weren’t given a reason but they were eventually informed the suspension was because of abusive content. Both the lack of transparency and citing abusive content have become staples of application store suspensions, which are two of many things that make centralized application stores like the Apple App Store and Google Play Store so frustrating for both users and developers.

The abusive content justification is bullshit because Element is no different than any other messaging application in that all content is user created. If Element is removed due to showing abusive content then by that very same justification Signal, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Google’s own Gmail should be removed. Furthermore, Element actually has a pretty complete set of moderation tools so Google can’t even argue that the lack of moderation is the culprit. But this doesn’t matter because there are no consequences for Google if it suspends an application for incorrect reasons. Agreements between developers and Google (and Apple for that matter) are one-sided. The only option for developers when their applications are suspended is to beg for clemency.

The suspension of Element is yet another example on the already extensive list that shows why centralized application stores and closed platforms are bad ideas. Without prior notice or (initially) any reason Google made it so Android users can no longer install Element unless they jump through some hoops (fortunately, unlike with iOS, Android generally gives you some options for installing applications that aren’t in the Play Store). Google might decide to be magnanimous and change its mind. Or it might not. In any case there’s very little that Element’s developers or Android users can do about it.

One-Sided Contracts

Yesterday I once again reiterated the fact that if you don’t own your infrastructure, you’re at the mercy of whoever does. Today I want to discuss why third-party providers can so easily pull the rug out from underneath you.

Businesses all over the world rely on third-party providers for any number of goods and services. They do so without too much concern that those third-parties are going to suddenly kneecap them. How do they accomplish such a feat? The answer is contracts. Large business deals aren’t made by one business clicking the accept button on a provider’s terms of service of end user license agreement. They’re made by lawyers on both sides negotiating terms. If one party only offers a deal where they can do whatever they want and the other party simply has to accept it, the other party will likely walk away. But such one-sided deals are common with online service providers.

If you sign up for an account on Amazon Web Services, Digital Ocean, GoDaddy, or any other hosting provider, you are presented with terms of service that you have to accept in order to use the service. There is no opportunity for you to negotiate. If you bother to read the terms of services, you’ll realize that they tend to put a lot of obligations on you as the paying customer but almost none of them as the provider. The terms of service usually allow the provider to cut you off for any reason without notice. But do you get any guarantees in return? Do they guarantee you uptime, reliability, or anything along those lines? If they do, do they agree to pay a financial penalty if they fail to provide what they guarantee? Do they offer a concise list of specific terms that are the only terms under which they are allowed to terminate the agreement without paying a financial penalty to you? They don’t.

I’ve been fortunate enough to observe contract negotiations between businesses. It’s both an interesting and painstaking process. They can take weeks, months, and even years. During that time both parties will strive to ensure every detail that could impact them is hammered out. Neither party wants to be in a position where the other can screw them.

Every end user license agreement and terms of service you’ve accepted over the years was likely entirely one-sided. The company you’re paying probably reserved all of the power for themselves. It’s likely that they dictated who will arbitrate any disagreement between them and you (if any disagreement is even allowed to you under the terms). This is one reason, perhaps the biggest reason, you can’t rely on a third-party service provider. If you decide to host your site on Amazon Web Services, Digital Ocean, GoDaddy, etc., they can remove your site for any reason without any advanced warning. In return you get to take it and ask for more.

No competent business would knowingly enter a one-sided contract. Take a page from their book. If you’re looking to purchase a good or service and the only offer is a one-sided agreement where the provider gets all of the power, walk away.