You Can’t Cure Stupid – Page 17

New Levels of Incompetence

Equifax, one of the largest consumer credit report agencies, recently suffered a major database breech. Of course, you wouldn’t know it if the media wasn’t giving it heavy coverage because Equifax seems to want to keep things hush hush and I understand why. After reading this it would appear that Equifax implemented worse security than most college students in an introductory web development class:

It took almost no time for them to discover that an online portal designed to let Equifax employees in Argentina manage credit report disputes from consumers in that country was wide open, protected by perhaps the most easy-to-guess password combination ever: “admin/admin.”

[…]

Each employee record included a company username in plain text, and a corresponding password that was obfuscated by a series of dots.

However, all one needed to do in order to view said password was to right-click on the employee’s profile page and select “view source,” a function that displays the raw HTML code which makes up the Web site. Buried in that HTML code was the employee’s password in plain text.

This is an impressive level of incompetence and I mean that sincerely. Most amateur websites have better security than this. The fact that a company as large as Equifax could implement worse security practices than even the most amateur of amateur web developers is no small feat. Unfortunately, its piss poor security practices has put a lot of people’s sensitive information in the hands of unknown parties.

Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes

On Tuesday night a security officer at St. Cathrine University was shot. The initial report said that an individual had shot the officer but it turns out that the officer shot himself and lied about it. Why did he do that? Because he played a stupid game:

Investigators continued working the case all day Wednesday. While interviewing Ahlers about 9:15 p.m. Wednesday, he told officers that he was in a wooded area of the campus about 9:30 p.m. Tuesday. He had brought his personal handgun from home and was handling it when it accidentally discharged, hitting him in the shoulder.

He told police he’d lied and said he made up the story because he was afraid of losing his job because he’d brought a gun to work with him.

One of the rules of carrying a firearm is that you should leave it in the holster unless you absolutely need to use it. A holstered gun won’t hurt anybody but the second a gun leaves its holster the possibility of it being fired increases from zero.

As an additional note, if the officer wanted to carry a gun he should have sought out an armed job. Then he wouldn’t have had to worry about losing his job for being armed. Now he’ll probably lose his job and find a tough time getting a new job as a security officer since he’s proven himself to be untrustworthy.

In a Democracy Everybody Has a Say

Take a look at the current political landscape. We have national socialists and international socialists doing battle openly. College campuses are currently deciding how much free speech they should allow. The harden the fuck up crowd and the snowflake crowd aren’t terribly pleased with each other. There are a lot of rifts between Americans today and they’re only becoming wider and more numerous. What makes these rifts worse is the fact that deciding which side will win on the political battlefield won’t be done by rigorous debate to decide the pros and cons of each idea, it will be decided by a popularity contest:

“Democracy,” H. L. Mencken once said, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” He also famously defined an election as “an advance auction sale of stolen goods.”

Mencken was not opposed to democracy. He simply possessed a more sobering view of its limitations than today’s conventional wisdom.

Indeed, democracy may be the world’s single most oversold concept of political governance. Commonly yet erroneously romanticized, it is assumed in most circles to ensure far more than it possibly can. The Norman Rockwell portrait of engaged, informed citizens contending freely on behalf of the common good is the utopian ideal that obscures the messy details of reality.

I’m sure you’ve all heard George Carlin’s quote, never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups. Democracy is a mechanism that empowers people in large groups to do stupid things. One of the biggest flaws in democracy is the fact that it gives everybody an equal say in matters. Considering almost everybody on this planet, including myself, is incompetent when it comes to a vast majority of things, giving everybody an equal say in every matter is a recipe for disaster. The United States’ economic policies are probably the best illustration of this. Most people are incompetent when it comes to economics, which is why they’re willing to support a lot of really bad economic policies.

I think the best example of the power of stupid people in large groups is the fact that a majority of people still claim that democracy is a great system. Hell, a majority of the people who claim that the current state of the United States, which was created through democracy, is deplorable still claim that democracy is a great system. These people are simply parroting what they’ve been told. They’ve put almost no critical thought into the idea of democracy. Yet their voice on the matter is treated equally to everybody else’s, even the people who have done a great deal of research on democracy.

The FCC’s Free File Hosting Service

Who says government agencies can’t innovate? The ~~Fascist Communications Club~~ Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has an online commenting systems that allows individuals to give their input on proposed rule changes. In addition to being a commenting system, the system also served as a file hosting service:

The application programming interface for the FCC’s Electronic Comment Filing System that enables public comment on proposed rule changes—such as the dropping of net neutrality regulations currently being pushed by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai—has been the source of some controversy already. It exposed the e-mail addresses of public commenters on network neutrality—intentionally, according to the FCC, to ensure the process’ openness—and was the target of what the FCC claimed was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. But as a security researcher has found, the API could be used to push just about any document to the FCC’s website, where it would be instantly published without screening. That was demonstrated by a PDF published with Microsoft Word that was uploaded to the site, now publicly accessible.

I guess the FCC decided that since you’re already paying taxes to find it, it didn’t need to charge you for file hosting services.

The level of incompetency displayed by the government never ceases to amaze me. Commenting systems aren’t exactly rocket science, they have been available on websites for ages now. Most of those commenting systems managed to implement basic protections against uploading arbitrary files. Why didn’t the FCC just go with one of those services or at least hire a developer with some basic understanding of how to develop a commenting system that isn’t vulnerable to such a trivial exploit?

From what I’ve read, it doesn’t appear that the FCC has fixed this hole yet. While uploading arbitrary files to the FCC’s commenting service might cause you to run afoul with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, you still have access to a government provided free file hosting service.

They Came for Violence

If you listen to self-identified national socialists, you would be lead to believe that they had no violent intentions in Charlottesville and that they only resorted to violence to defend themselves against the international socialists. However, material posted in chats for organizing the event indicate that those claims of self-defense are spurious at best:

Unicorn Riot has so far published roughly 1,000 screenshots of chats, and the recording, conducted through the app Discord, from a source. A march organizer says the documents he has seen appear to be authentic. Transcripts show participants openly planning violence while organizers instruct them to obey the law. Participants on one call debated when it would be permissible to use riot shields as weapons. “Some screaming little Latina bitch comes at you and knocks your teeth on your riot shield, that means you hit her, and you’re going to get in trouble for the weapons,” one participant says.

Timothy Litzenburg represents two women injured in the melee who last week sued 28 groups and individuals, including the alleged organizers of the Unite the Right march. He says the documents could be “the crux of the case,” because they show “a little flavor of how [organizers] totally intended on violence and mayhem.”

While Unicorn Riot cannot be called an impartial source (it’s a hardcore leftist media collective), it did provide screenshots from the organizer’s Discord server that have so far been undisputed. Moreover, it’s no surprise that a bunch of national socialists planned to perpetrate violence since national and international socialists have been killing each other for a long time now. But this information does lend itself to a more interesting topic: self-defense.

In Minnesota, one of the requirements for legally using deadly force in self-defense is that you must be a reluctant participant. That is to say, you must not have willfully entered yourself into the violent situation. I personally think that it’s a good principle.

So the question here is, can the national socialists claim self-defense in this situation? Obviously that question can only be answered on an individual by individual basis. However, the material released by Unicorn Riot shows that at least some of the individuals who went to Charlottesville did so seeking violence. They knowingly put themselves into a situation that was all but guaranteed to turn violent (violating the “Don’t go stupid places,” principle of self-defense) and specifically expressed a purpose to perform violence.

I know there will be some debate about whether or not one can claim self-defense if they knowingly went somewhere that they reasonably believed would turn violence, however, one thing is certain: prosecutors eat up material like this. And that is another important point. While situations that qualify as self-defense can be debated, what you post online can and will be used against you if you are ever in a situation where you claim self-defense. Protecting yourself doesn’t stop after the situation itself, it starts before that situation and ends after that situation. Before you get into a self-defense situation, you should take care of how you portray yourself because a prosecutor will use your character against you after the situation.

All Hail Hurricane Harvey, Savior of Our Economy

A lot of people like to write off the Austrian school of economics as lunacy. Those same people usually cite mainstream economics as the right and true school of thought. However, I have a difficult time taking their opinions seriously when they believe shit like this:

Devastating Hurricane Harvey, unprecedented in its rainfall, could be a slight negative for U.S. growth in the third quarter, but economists say it may ultimately provide a tiny boost to the national economy because of the rebuilding in the Houston area.

Goldman Sachs economists estimate a very preliminary impact of the storm to be $30 billion in property damages, making it the ninth largest since World War II in terms of domestic property damage. Goldman economists say, in a note, the storm could take 0.2 points off of growth in third quarter because of the impact to the energy sector.

The problem with mainstream economics is its reliance on activity. So long as money is changing hands mainstream economists see a strong economy. If $30 billion of property is destroyed, they see $30 billion of activity and therefore a stronger activity. What totally flies over their head is the fact that that $30 billion isn’t producing new wealth, it’s merely replacing lost wealth. The Austrian school of economics is at least intelligent enough to address this fact.

What’s especially bad about the viewpoint that destruction is good for the economy is that it was refuted by Frédéric Bastiat way back in 1850:

Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son has happened to break a pane of glass? If you have been present at such a scene, you will most assuredly bear witness to the fact that every one of the spectators, were there even thirty of them, by common consent apparently, offered the unfortunate owner this invariable consolation – “It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Everybody must live, and what would become of the glaziers if panes of glass were never broken?”

Now, this form of condolence contains an entire theory, which it will be well to show up in this simple case, seeing that it is precisely the same as that which, unhappily, regulates the greater part of our economical institutions.

Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier’s trade – that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs – I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen.

But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, “Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.”

It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.

Resources spent on rebuilding lost wealth cannot be used on creating new wealth. The rate of creation of new wealth is a far better indicator of the strength of an economy that simple economic activity.

Prosecutorial Jackpot

Christopher Cantwell, after talking a tough game, ended up crying like a bitch after Charlottesville because he was afraid of what was going to happen to him after macing a couple of people in the face. Not surprisingly, a warrant was issued for his arrest and now he’s sitting in a cage:

Police report a white nationalist who says he pepper-sprayed a demonstrator in self-defense on the campus of the University of Virginia has turned himself in.

Campus police issued a statement late Wednesday saying Christopher Cantwell of Keene, New Hampshire, was taken into custody at the police department in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Cantwell was wanted on three felony charges: two counts of the illegal use of tear gas or other gases and one count of malicious bodily injury with a “caustic substance,” explosive or fire.

Cantwell claimed that his act of macing two individuals was self-defense. I’m not intimately familiar with the self-defense laws in Virginia but if they’re anything like Minnesota’s, he’s probably going to have a difficult time selling the self-defense angle. If he doesn’t take a plea bargain, his entire social media presence, his appearance in Vice’s documentary on white nationalists, and his podcast are all going to come back to bite him in the ass. He stated numerous times that he was expecting violence and, to add icing to the cake, after the fiasco in Charlottesville was over he bragged about the amount of violence him and his fellow white nationalists used against the anti-fascists.

The prosecution team probably feels like it hit the jackpot with this guy. This case will probably serve as a warning to others that what they say, whether it be in the past or present, can be used against them.

Witch Hunts

I’m back. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any time between Monday evening and last night to put together material for this blog. However, I did find one story that I felt was worth mentioning.

Much like the Bloods and the Crips, the neo-fascists and anti-fascists have an ongoing gang rivalry. While I couldn’t care less about two violent gangs wiping each other out, these rivalries always end up catching innocent bystanders in the middle. Earlier this week a man was stabbed by a supposed anti-fascists because of his “Nazi” haircut:

A “confused anti-fascist” swung a knife towards the face of a man with a haircut similar to the one popular with white nationalists.

Joshua Witt, 26, was getting out of his car at Steak ’n Shake in Sheridan, Colorado when a man ran over to him yelling, “Are you one of them neo-Nazis?”

The man aimed for his head over his car door, but Witt blocked the blow with his hand, which needed three stitches.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of the fascists are exploiting this attack to gain sympathy from the general public. Many of the anti-fascists, likewise, are claiming that this attack was a false flag performed by a fascist to make the anti-fascists look back. Was this attack perpetrated by an anti-fascist who decided a haircut is enough justification to stab somebody, was it a false flag, or are the facts being reported incorrectly and the real answer doesn’t involve either warring faction? It’s hard to tell.

Gang rivalries have a nasty habit of going from a disagreement over an actual transgression to mindless “us” versus “them” fighting rather quickly. Once a fight stops being about actual wrongs suffered and begin being about group identity, the tactics tend to change to the means justifying the ends. After that point it becomes difficult to tell who did what. When the means justify the ends, false flags becomes acceptable as well so you have a hard time knowing what side actually perpetrated an atrocity. Zealotry becomes common and that brings with it individuals identifying with either side trying to prove their piety by performing a seemingly random act of violence. These seemingly random acts of violence are often indistinguishable from acts of violence performed by unaffiliated individuals.

Update: 2017-08-29: Now that an investigation has been performed it appears that Mr. Witt stabbed himself and then claimed an anti-fascist did it. However, I believe the point I made in this post, that ongoing gang rivalries tend to catch innocent people in the crossfire, still holds true.

Nietzsche Opposed Nationalism and Racism

I’m going to be pretty busy for the next couple of days so content here will probably be a bit light. However, I will still find time to point out how fucking stupid national socialists and their international brethren are.

Today’s post deals with reading comprehension. The Nazis periodically cited the works of Nietzsche when arguing their philosophy. Their offspring; neo-Nazis, the alt-right, and other flavors of national socialists; have followed in their footsteps. However, unless you read Nietzsche particularly badly and are entirely ignorant of the personal views he expressed throughout his lifetime, there are no grounds on which to cite Nietzsche when making an argument in favor of nationalism:

But if you read Nietzsche like a college freshman cramming for a midterm, you’re bound to misinterpret him — or at least to project your own prejudices into his work. When that happens, we get “bad Nietzsche,” as the Week’s Scott Galupo recently put it.

And it would appear that “bad Nietzsche” is back, and he looks a lot like he did in the early 20th century when his ideas were unjustly appropriated by the (original) Nazis. So now’s a good time to reengage with Nietzsche’s ideas and explain what the alt-right gets right and wrong about their favorite philosopher.

[…]

“Nietzsche’s argument was that you had to move forward, not fall back onto ethnocentrism,” Hugo Drochon, author of Nietzsche’s Great Politics, told me. “So in many ways Spencer is stuck in the ‘Shadows of God’ — claiming Christianity is over but trying to find something that will replace it so that we can go on living as if it still existed, rather than trying something new.”

[…]

Nietzsche was interested in ideas, in freedom of thought. To the extent that he knocked down the taboos of his day, it was to free up the creative powers of the individual. He feared the death of God would result in an era of mass politics in which people sought new “isms” that would give them a group identity.

“The time is coming when the struggle for dominion over the earth will be carried on in the name of fundamental philosophical doctrines,” he wrote. By doctrines, he meant political ideologies like communism or socialism. But he was equally contemptuous of nationalism, which he considered petty and provincial.

Only a lack of reading comprehension could lead somebody to believe that Nietzsche supported the idea of national socialism. Come to think of it, only a lack of reading comprehension could lead somebody to believe that national socialism is a good idea so I think I’ve found a significant underlying problem.

If the leaders of the new national socialist movement can’t read a handful of books and actually comprehend what they say, why should anybody think that the ideas they espouse are any less stupid than they are?

The Importance of Proving Guilt

People are trying to identify of the national socialists who attended the Charlottesville fiasco. The people leading this operation want to identify those individuals so they can be publicly shamed and fired from their jobs. I nominally have nothing against such a tactic. After all, it was a public rally so anybody there should have been aware that they had no expectation of privacy. However, if you’re going to ruin somebody’s life you damn well better be sure that you have the right target. Unfortunately, as is common with these Internet lynch mobs, people have been less concerned about evidence than about nailing somebody to the wall:

After a day of work at the Engineering Research Center at the University of Arkansas, Kyle Quinn had a pleasant Friday night in Bentonville with his wife and a colleague. They explored an art exhibition at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and dined at an upscale restaurant.

Then on Saturday, he discovered that social media sleuths had incorrectly identified him as a participant in a white nationalist rally some 1,100 miles away in Charlottesville, Va. Overnight, thousands of strangers across the country had been working together to share photographs of the men bearing Tiki torches on the University of Virginia campus. They wanted to name and shame them to their employers, friends and neighbors. In a few cases, they succeeded.

But Mr. Quinn’s experience showed the risks.

A man at the rally had been photographed wearing an “Arkansas Engineering” shirt, and the amateur investigators found a photo of Mr. Quinn that looked somewhat similar. They were both bearded and had similar builds.

By internet frenzy standards, that was proof enough.

Following Blackstone’s formulation, which states that, “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer,” doesn’t make me the most popular person in the world but I’d rather have clean hands than be popular.

Justice cannot exist when there is no concern for evidence and proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt before inflicting punishment. The only result of a lack of a substantial burden of proof is a system of chance. Maybe some guilty people will be punished, maybe some innocent people will be punished. If you’re accused of a crime, you will be facing a flip of a coin.

If you want to name and shame national socialists, that’s fine. However, you should actually have enough evidence at hand to prove that they’re national socialists. Likewise, people on the Internet shouldn’t take any accusations at face value. If somebody claims that an individual is a national socialist, you should demand to see the evidence and decide if the evidence proves that the individual is a national socialist beyond a reasonable doubt. If both of those conditions are missing, everybody will effectively be holding a gun to each other’s head and the only rule will be to shoot somebody before they have a chance to shoot you.