Tag: Shut Up Slave

Make Way for His Majesty

Hear ye, hear ye, all subjects of the realm. His majesty, our king, Barack Obama will be here in Minnesota for two days. In recognition of his gloriousness both parks that he’s speaking at will be entirely shutdown in addition to the roads he will grace with his presence:

For starters, access to the boat launch was shut down at 10 p.m. Wednesday. And starting early Friday, no boats will be allowed on the lake. That means people who have sailboats there won’t be allowed to access them.

A playground, a beach, the rose garden and trails will be closed, as well as the restaurant next to the Band Shell.

[…]

Obama arrives in the Twin Cities early Thursday afternoon and will take part in an invitation-only town hall about 2 p.m. at Minnehaha Park, which will also be essentially shut down. Several roads near both parks also will be closed.

That was me trying to poke a little fun at the fact that one man has the power to shutdown entire parks and inconvenience the people who are forced to pay for them. It’s annoying but not the end of the world. This part, well, this part crosses the line:

People who live near the Band Shell, where Obama will speak Friday, will have to be escorted to and from their homes that morning.

[…]

On Friday, police will escort homeowners on Queen Avenue S. between 40th Street and 42nd Street to and from their homes from early morning through the end of the event.

Every reader knows how I feel about violence. I abhor it. But if some piece of shit in a cheap suit thinks they are going to escort me to and from my home they’re going to get a rude awakening when my fist makes contact with their face. There are some lines you do not cross. Making me a prisoner in my own home and requiring me to beg for permission to come and go as I please is one of them. I will not tolerate such bullshit. Fortunately for the Secret Service I don’t live there because if I did I would make it a point to walk around my neighborhood without permission or an escort.

Welcome to the freest country on Earth.

I’m Boycotting GunBroker

GunBroker has been a useful site. Without it I wouldn’t have my SPAS-12 and accompanying choke tubes. But it is time for me to say farewell to it. As it turns out GunBroker prohibits users from using one of the best tools available for protecting free speech online: Tor:

GunBroker.com is now detecting if users are connecting to them through Virtual Private Networks (VPN), proxy servers or Tor. Users who are detected using these services are being given one warning to stop using these to access the site or have their account terminated.

If your site doesn’t allow users to access it via Tor then you aren’t getting any of my money and I will do what I can to convince other people not to give you money. Protecting free speech online is just as serious as protecting the right to keep and bear arms in my book.

Another GOP Candidate Lost His Muzzle

Oh, look! The GOP stupid train is pulling into station right on time! Yes, yet another GOP candidate lost his muzzle and said something stupid. This time it’s Jody Hice, a Republican candidate from Georgia who really doesn’t like Muslims. And like most people who irrationally hate entire groups of people he has found a way to justify why the state, under its current laws, can persecute them:

Jody Hice, a Republican candidate for a U.S. House seat from Georgia, does not believe that Islam is truly a religion and doesn’t think it should be protected under the First Amendment.

In his book published in 2012, “It’s Now Or Never,” Hice made some anti-Islamic statements, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“Although Islam has a religious component, it is much more than a simple religious ideology,” he wrote. “It is a complete geo-political structure and, as such, does not deserve First Amendment protection.”

That sounds a lot like the Catholic Church back in the day. But it’s always fun to see the mental gymnastics people play to justify persecuting people. It does go to show that if somebody wants to persecute somebody bad enough they can find a way to justify it under whatever ideology they’re operating under.

War Criminal Calls Gun Rights Activists Terrorists, Irony So Thick You Can Cut It

The one thing I do enjoy about the upcoming presidential race is Hillary Clinton. She’s like a perpetual irony machine. Every time she opens her mouth to criticize somebody she dislikes she ends up saying something hypocritical. One group of people she really hates is us gun owners. So she takes every opportunity afforded to her to insult us. Most recently she called us a bunch of terrorists:

During a CNN “town hall” yesterday, Hillary Clinton said she was disappointed that Congress did not pass new gun control legislation following the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in December 2012. “I believe that we need a more thoughtful conversation,” said the former secretary of state and presumptive presidential candidate. “We cannot let a minority of people—and that’s what it is, it is a minority of people—hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people.”

I wonder what minority holds more terroristic viewpoints. Gun owners who tend to be very peaceful or officials in the United States government who bomb foreign countries seemingly at random and then laugh about it (seriously, Hillary, that quote is the gift that keeps on giving)? Considering that I’ve never threatened anybody with violence nor wielded violence against another it’s pretty hard to say I’m terrorizing anybody. Hillary, on the other hand, was the head of the State Department for the government that, under the current administration, dropped bombs on civilians in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia (and probably a few other countries that I’ve forgotten about).

I’d say if any minority holds terroristic viewpoints it’s her and her cronies.

The Presidential Business Hit List

Regulatory agencies have for a long time been the tool of choice for the executive branch when it wanted to target things it didn’t like but didn’t want to wait for approval by the legislative branch. The current head of the executive branch has made no attempt to conceal his distain for guns so it’s not surprising to see that he sicced his dogs on firearm sellers:

The administration is using an anti-credit card fraud effort dubbed Operation Choke Point to go after legitimate businesses it deems “high-risk,” says a staff report by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Internal Justice Department documents show that Attorney General Eric Holder was informed that small businesses were being hurt by the operation as banks dropped them and exited entire lines of business deemed “high-risk” by the government, yet his department has continued to pursue the operation, the report says.

[…]

The Washington Times has reported that several gun retailers have been dropped by their banks as a result of the operation — the most recent being Powderhorn Outfitters, a sporting goods shop in Hyannis, Massachusetts, which was dropped last week by TD Bank after a 36-year business relationship.

And gun stores aren’t the only organizations being targeted by Operation Choke Point. The Washington Times included a convenient picture that covers other so-called high-risk businesses that have cause the Department of Justice’s ire:

operation-choke-point

It’s pretty ironic that surveillance equipment made it onto a government list of high-risk merchants but I digress. While many people are focusing on the gun store angle specifically I think the take away from this story is that giving the state regulatory power is dangerous. Whenever something bad happens the government always steps in and offers to regulate that bad thing. If the Democrats are in power then self-proclaimed Democrats take the government up on its offer. If the Republicans are in power then self-proclaimed Republicans take the government up on its offer (even though they claim to want a smaller government). Neither side stops to consider the fact that their party won’t be in power forever and when the party in power changes those new regulatory powers will be used in a different manner.

The Pointless Finger Pointing Continues

In addition to California’s “weak” gun laws, mental illness, misogyny, and white privilege the shooting in California is now also the fault of America’s gun culture! But that’s not all! As an added bonus the shooting was also the product of toxic masculinity! As I said everybody is running as fast as they can towards this shooting to exploit it for their personal gain. I’ve not seen a flock of vulture this ravenous since Sandy Hook.

I’m still waiting for the article that blames this incident on Republican created “anarchy”. If anybody reading this comes across such an article please send it my way posthaste.

Dipshit, Dipshits Everywhere

Minneapolis is home of two extremely annoying groups: dumbass hipsters and control freaks. The former want to be special snowflakes and by doing so because conformists in the hipster culture while the latter want you to seek their personal approval for everything little thing you do.

Control freaks are interesting folk. They will go to pretty absurd lengths in their vain attempt to make the world how they believe it should be. Last night I had an unpleasant encounter with a control freak while riding the mean bike trails of Minneapolis. This person believed that everybody should ride bikes and he saw the barrier between reality and utopia being bicycle helmets. I know this because he bitched at me for my sin of wearing a helmet. In his twisted little world the act of wearing a bicycle helmet creates the appearance that bicycling is dangerous. By not wearing a helmet he believes bicycling would appear safer to non-bicyclists, which would convince them to become bicyclists.

This is one of the many reasons why I hate control freaks. No amount of dumbassery (you control freaks whining about how dumbassery isn’t a real world cannot see the middle finger that I’m holding up in your direction but know that it’s there) is beyond them if their crusade against those who dare do differently than them. Are not enough people riding bicycles? No problem, just have everybody put their lives at risk by not wearing a helmet so the activity appears to be safer! Because that will totally work.

Here’s the thing, I don’t care if you wear a helmet or not. I don’t even care if you ride a bike or not. Do whatever makes you happy in whatever manner makes you happy. But if asking people to put themselves in danger makes you happy I’m going to call you a dumbass.

As an unrelated side note I feel it is worth pointing out that the dumbass didn’t seem to notice the gun I was openly carrying. Unlike the boys over at Open Carry Texas I can open carry a gun without being an attention whore about it.

No Honor Amongst Thieves

With the number of laws on the books the state has to fast track as many cases as it can. Fast track, in this instance, refers to the practice of offering lesser sentences in exchanges for a guilty plea. This is commonly referred to as a plea bargain and is often chosen by those facing prosecution because the guarantee of 18 months in a cage beats the possibility of 50 years. But there’s no honor amongst thieves so even if you take the plea bargain you may not get the lesser sentence:

A 16-year-old Utah boy was sentenced earlier this month to up to 15 years in a maximum security prison after a judge changed the terms of a plea agreement.

Cooper Van Huizen pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree felony robbery for his role in a home invasion late last year.

The teen, who had no prior criminal history, and his parents believed the plea deal would result in 180 days in jail.

But District Judge Ernie Jones told Van Huizen at the May 7 sentencing hearing he believed the terms recommended by prosecutors and the probation board were “too soft” and instead sent the boy to Utah State Prison for one to 15 years.

Never make a deal with the devil state because it, like all disreputable individuals, cannot be trusted to honor its side of the bargain. The darker part of my kind of hopes that this type of behavior becomes more common amongst judges. I feel that the plea bargaining system has put a lot of innocent people in prison and enabled the state to prosecute more people than it could if it had to bring each suspect to trail. If more judges changed the terms of plea bargains it would encourage people to take their case to trail, which would increase the state’s costs for prosecuting. On the other hand I would like to see this judge be disbarred for failing to honor his team’s side of the bargain.

Trigger Warning: The Author of This Blog is an A-Hole

There are so many feel good movements on the Internet that I can’t keep track of them all. Some of the most prevalent ones (that I’m aware of) are the push for people to use gender neutral terms (which is really fucking difficult when the language you’re using is English), stop using the word retarded, and include trigger warnings on any material that may trigger a traumatic memory of people you haven’t met. The last one has been gaining some traction as of late and it appears to be spreading outside of the Internet:

It’s a phrase that’s been requested this semester by a number of college students to be applied to classic books — The Great Gatsby (for misogyny and violence), Huck Finn (for racism), Things Fall Apart (for colonialism and religious persecution), Mrs. Dalloway (for suicide), Shakespeare (for … you name it). These students are asking for what essentially constitute red-flag alerts to be placed, in some cases, upon the literature itself, or, at least, in class syllabuses, and invoked prior to lectures.

These feel good movements, in addition to being an attempt to protect everybody’s sensitive feelings, generally have an (sometimes) unintended side effect: censorship. As the article goes on to state:

Of course, life doesn’t come with a trigger warning, even if it should. And while a classroom conversation about emotionally fraught subjects would seem not only advisable but also just part of any decent teaching method, slapping a trigger warning on classic works of literature seems a short step away from book banning, a kind of censorship based on offenses to individual feelings.

Whenever I run across a comment that says some permutation of “Dude, add a trigger warning!” (Dude? Way to jump to assumptions that all offense things on the Internet are posted by men you misandrist asshole!) it triggers my trigger, which is triggered whenever I run across somebody bitching because there isn’t an included trigger warning. How is the author of an article or a comment supposed to know that the content of his work is going to set off some random stranger’s traumatic memories?

Of course the opinion that trigger warning are bullshit isn’t generally accepted within the halls of the social justice warriors so they will often demand that you be censored for expressing it. And if you do include a trigger warning they will demand that you be censored because you posted something online that you expected to trigger somebody’s traumatic memories.

Imagine a class of 30 students. Each student has lived a separate life full of different experiences from every other member of the class. More than likely more than one of the students has suffered a traumatic experience and it’s also likely the the type of trauma suffered by each sufferer is different from the other sufferers. What happens when the instructor of a literature class chooses to assign Huck Finn and one of the students who suffered racial trauma objects? That instructor will be faced with deciding to assign a different book or being labeled an asshole for making a student who is triggered by the assigned material read it. Since the former is less likely to end in a week long bitchfest on Twitter as social justice warriors create a clever hashtag to use to derogatorily refer to the instructor he or she will probably choose to assign a different book. So let’s say that the instructor decides to assign Mrs. Dalloway instead only to find out one of his students was traumatized by a past attempt to commit suicide. Again we return to one of two options. Eventually the only titles that become acceptable to assign are sanitized tomes devoid of almost everything that makes for a great work (namely addressing or exploring a controversial topic).

In addition to being based entirely on random people’s feelings, trigger warning are also time period dependent. Consider many of the works of Samuel Clemens. Many of his titles contain what we now consider to be very racist language. But when they were written the terms used were part of the vernacular. When the books were written nobody would have demanded a trigger warning be added to the book. So in addition to having to predict the feels of every potential reader authors and publishers must either predict what will offend individuals in the future or periodically update the included trigger warnings.

Trying to manage such a subjective time sensitive clusterfuck as trigger warnings on novels is retarded (I’m just going to tick off all of the easily offendeds’ boxes). Because of the difficult of managing such a mess colleges and instructors will choose the much easier path of assigning completely sterile works to the detriment of students everywhere.

How the Abolition of Net Neutrality is Being Bought

The battle for net neutrality is a difficult one to sort out because it’s effective oligarchs arguing with other oligarchs. Oligarchs that hold actual monopoly in many areas to distribute Internet content want the ability to suck more money out of both customers and service providers. These oligarchs own much of the infrastructure and claim that they have a right to use it as they please since it is their property. What they don’t mention is that they have legal protections from other oligarchs that prevent any meaningful competition from arising in the Internet content distribution market.

The other set of oligarchs are the ones that compose the legislature and regulatory bodies. It’s an election year for many in the legislature so they want to convince the serfs that their rulers are very benevolent and should be vote in for another term. Since the serfs are quite fond of the current model used to distribute Internet content the oligarchs in the legislature are demanding the model stay in place. The regulatory body most involved in this fight, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is stuck between both sides. Its current chairman, Tom Wheeler, is a form lobbyist for the infrastructure oligarchs but he also wants to continue his position as chairman of the FCC, which means he must also make the oligarchs in the legislature happy.

Fortunately when competing sects of the oligarchy go to war they don’t use bombs. Instead they negotiate with one another to determine how much which sect will pay to get its way:

These lawmakers, including the top House leadership, warned the FCC that regulating broadband like a public utility “harms” providers, would be “fatal to the Internet,” and could “limit economic freedom.”​

According to research provided Friday by Maplight, the 28 House members received, on average, $26,832 from the “cable & satellite TV production & distribution” sector over a two-year period ending in December. According to the data, that’s 2.3 times more than the House average of $11,651.

What’s more, one of the lawmakers who told the FCC that he had “grave concern” (PDF) about the proposed regulation took more money from that sector than any other member of the House. Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR) was the top sector recipient, netting more than $109,000 over the two-year period, the Maplight data shows.

The infrastructure oligarchs obviously feel very strongly about being able to change their current distribution model because they are paying a good chunk of change to key oligarchs in the legislature. I predict an end to what we call net neutrality in the near future (probably not until the next election cycle or two have concluded though). It will be a slow death consisting of apparently minor changes over the coming years.

If we want to continue enjoying a distribution model that is neutral towards service providers then we will likely have to cut out the infrastructure oligarchs entirely. That will involve building our own infrastructure, which will almost certainly be declared an illegal act at some point. I’ve mentioned several times that I’m working with a handful of other people in the Twin Cities to develop a local mesh network with the hopes of expanding it over time. I think mesh networks, being decentralized (and therefore hard to stop through the judicial and law enforcement systems), are a promising strategy for bypassing the Internet service providers that are trying to double dip by charging both content consumers and content providers more money to access one another. The Chaos Computer Club’s idea to launch small satellites into orbit to bypass state censorship also appeals to me. Between all of us who dwell online would should be able to develop a practical solution to the oligarchy problem.