Tag: Your Government Doesn’t Love You

Why Nobody But Republicans Like Republicans

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congress Totally Cool With Being Spied On

I’m seldom surprised by Congress but this one made me take a step back. Congress has been entirely complicit in the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance of the American people. I always imagined they would freak out if the same happened to them but it turns out they’re OK with being spied on. At least if Israel is doing the spying:

Israel is spying on the U.S.-Iranian nuclear talks? No problem, key Democrats and Republicans in Congress say. It’s just part of the game.

“I don’t look at Israel or any nation directly affected by the Iranian program wanting deeply to know what’s going on in the negotiations—I just don’t look at that as spying,” Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, said. “Their deep existential interest in such a deal, that they would try to figure out anything that they could, that they would have an opinion on it… I don’t find any of that that controversial.”

I wonder if it’s possible of us lowly serfs to setup a deal with the Israeli government to have them spy on our government and give us nice itemized reports. It would certainly save a lot of potential whistle blowers from being caged like Manning or exiled like Snowden.

Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes They Are Five.

Between pervasive surveillance and never ending warfare this police state we live in more accurately resembles 1984 every day. But now we have doctors reenacting the scene where O’Brien tortures Winston until he finally sees five fingers instead of the four being held up. A woman was kidnapped by police, taken to a psychiatric ward, forcibly sedated, and held prisoner for eight days because she claimed that Obama followed her on Twitter:

The NYPD disagreed — they handcuffed her and sent her to the hospital.

According to the lawsuit Brock is filing, the “next thing you know, the police held onto me, the doctor stuck me with a needle and I was knocked out. I woke up to them taking off my underwear and then went out again. I woke up the next day in a hospital robe.”

She said she was heavily sedated by hospital employees, and she told The Daily News that she only mentioned to doctors that the president follows her on Twitter to show them “the type of person I am. I’m a good person, a positive person. Obama follows positive people.”

Instead, the lawsuit alleges the doctor made her discharge contingent upon her denying that Obama follows her on the social media site. According to her “master treatment plan,” one of the objectives that would trigger her release was that she “state that Obama is not following her on Twitter.”

Here’s the real kicker, Obama does follow her on Twitter. The police or doctors could have taken two minutes to verify her claims before forcibly sedating and detaining her. But, you know, that wouldn’t have been as much fun!

This story strikes several nerves with me. The biggest one being that police can drag somebody to a psychiatric ward, forcibly hold them down, and some sick fuck of a doctor will inject sedatives into them completely against their will. Another thing that pisses me off about this story is the doctors blatantly ignoring the claims of a woman who was being kidnapped. Just because a kidnapper wears a badge doesn’t mean due diligence can be ignore (in fact the presence of a badge should make one more skeptical of any claims being made). As you can imagine the fact that the only way the woman could escape her imprisonment was to sign a document that was a blatant lie. Oh, did I mention the fact that she was also billed for the privilege of being subjugated to this? Because she was:

In her lawsuit, Brock is attempting to recoup the $13,637.10 bill she received for her involuntary incarceration, as well as an unspecified amount of additional damages.

In the end this is just another example on a large pile of examples pointing to the fact that this country is a police state. Anybody who argues otherwise is entirely ignorant of what’s going on.

Arizona Moves to Make Police Less Accountable

How could the United Police States of America possibly make police less accountable? By keeping their names secret for 60 days after shooting somebody, which is what Arizona is moving to do:

Critics call Senate Bill 1445 an attack on government transparency at a time when American police departments are trying to earn the public’s trust after a series of controversial shootings.

The bill would prevent law enforcement agencies statewide from releasing the names of police officers “involved in a use of deadly physical force incident that results in death or serious physical injury” for 60 days.

Why 60 days? Because that’s more than enough time for the story to fall off of the media’s radar. In fact 60 days is overkill since the media forgets about stories about two weeks after they happen in most cases. Regardless this bill would ensure that when people learn the identify of the shooter it will have little in the way of consequence. At most it will get a mention on the back page of a newspaper section under a generic title such as “Identify of police officer released.”

Discrimination So Good It Has to Be Mandated By Law

The state is the worst discriminator of them all. While there are a lot of horrible bigoted assholes in the world they lack one thing the state has: the power to force others to discriminate. I can choose not to associate with a single bigoted asshole but if I refuse to discriminate in the manner decreed by the state I can face fines and/or be locked in a cage for years. Politicians in Florida have introduced legislation that would mandate discrimination but that state certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on such shenanigans. The French Parliament has introduced legislation that would require modeling agencies to discriminate against women who are deemed too thin by the arbitrary definitions of the state:

The French Parliament is debating legislation that would effectively set minimum weights for women and girls to work as models, a step that supporters of the bill say is necessary to combat the persistence of anorexia.

If it becomes law — it is backed by President François Hollande’s Socialist government — modeling agencies and fashion houses that employ models whose body mass index measurements do not meet minimum standards would face criminal penalties.

There are two points about this legislation I want to bring up. First it defines a minimum weight utilizing a stupid method. Body mass index (BMI) is a statistical index that doesn’t take any unique characteristics of an individual into consideration. For example, one of my friends is a body builder. He is pretty much the peak of male fitness. According to his BMI, which is calculated using only a person’s mass and height, he’s overweight because muscle weighs more than fat and he has a lot of muscle.

Second it legally requires modeling agencies to discriminate against individuals potentially suffering body image issues. Anorexia as a symptom of having a severely negative body image. As far as I know no mental health professional recommends discrimination as an effective treatment for any mental disorder. In fact I’m fairly certain that’s the exact opposite of what a mental health professional would recommend. If this legislation was actually about fighting anorexia it would do something different such as require modeling agencies to have a mental health professional interview applicants and offer assistance to those who are suffering a mental disorder (I’m not saying that’s a good idea, just something that would actually demonstrate a desire to help people with anorexia).

Turning this around a bit imagine if the legislation mandated discriminating against people who are labeled overweight based on their BMI. Would you find it acceptable if, say, restaurants were prohibited from hiring people whose BMI listed them as overweight? No (if you answered yes then you’re an asshole). So it shouldn’t be considered acceptable just because somebody falls into another defined category on the BMI.

Stupid shit like this is the result of looking to the state to solve a problem. Instead of solving the problem you end up having a bunch of politicians, who generally lack any training in fields related to the problem, making arbitrary decisions based on their political ideologies. Since almost every politician’s political ideology is fascism it means you always get legislation that decrees people obey or face punishment.

It’s too Late to Change Anything After the Polling Place Opens

What’s the solution to all of this nation’s problem? More democracy! At least that’s what Obama seems to think:

President Obama on Wednesday suggested that if U.S. voters want to counter the outsized influence of money in politics, it might be a good idea to adopt mandatory voting.

“Other countries have mandatory voting,” Mr. Obama said at a town hall-style event in Cleveland, Ohio, citing places like Australia. “It would be transformative if everybody voted — that would counteract money more than anything.”

Mandatory voting might have a transformative effect if ballots had an option to disband offices. But that option is never available so mandatory voting laws would just coerce you into choosing a master. And since money in politics shapes the ballots it’s already too late to counteract it by the time the polls open (but Obama isn’t an idiot, he already knows that). By the time you’ve gone to the polls the big money players have helped appoint nominees for the two major parties and electoral regulations severely limit what third-party candidates, if any, appear on the ballot (and they don’t have the money for a major media campaign anyways nor are they usually allowed into debates).

It doesn’t matter how many people vote because voting is just confirming the choices already curated for you by your overlords. Another comment by Obama points out another transformative effect of mandatory voting laws:

The president continued, “The people who tend not to vote are young, they’re lower income, they’re skewed more heavily toward immigrant groups and minorities… There’s a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls.”

The keywords here are lower income. Expropriating wealth from people who have little is difficult for the state to justify without looking like a complete asshole. Income and sales taxes don’t raise much money from people with little income to tax or buy things with. Civil forfeiture laws are limited in scope so can’t be applied across the entire demographic. But Australia has shown other states the way by fining people who fail to show up at polling places. Suddenly the state can justify expropriating more wealth from lower income people. It also knows that lower income people have a harder time getting to polling places since they often lack transportation, can’t get time off of work, etc. so the probability of getting to fine them under mandatory voting laws is very high.

Mandatory voting laws are just another sham to make people believe they have a say in politics and a convenient trick to steal their money. As an added benefit, as can be noted by North Korea’s bragging about 100% voter turnout, mandatory voting laws also provide the state with propaganda it can use to justify its legitimacy. How could one, for example, argue that Kim Jong-un isn’t a legitimate ruler when 100% of the population voted for him?

How the State Manipulates Statistics

Any Internet argument that goes on for more than a few comments will inevitably result in all sides throwing statistics at one another. Statistics are the Internet argument equivalent of artillery fire and no form of statistics is as effective as government statistics. Government statistics, for some bizarre reason, are considered the most impartial by most people. However government statistics are usually skewed to favor, well, the government. From removing entire groups of people from unemployment statistics to conveniently ignoring the difference between full-time and part-time employment the state likes to cook the books to make its story sound good.

But governments don’t just manipulate statistics to pain a rosy picture. Sometimes they manipulate statistics to create a crisis. I’m fairly certain that’s what’s going on in Britain as its National Health Service (NHS) redefines female genital mutilation (FGM) to include voluntary vaginal piercings:

The NHS compulsory reporting regulations are intended to protect women and girls from the sometimes fatal practice of intentionally altering or causing injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.

FGM has been illegal in the UK since 1985, though recent studies suggest some 170,000 women and girls have undergone the procedure, while the NSPCC says 70 women a month seek treatment for the crime.

But under a directive which follows the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) definition of FGM, the term also applies to any women who has consented to having her clitoris or labia pierced for fashion or sexual reasons, meaning medical professionals will be obliged to record such adornments as such.

What does this do to the FGM statistic? It makes it appear to be a much larger problem than it is. Mind you FGM is a horrendous practice but manipulating the statistic to make it appear more common than it really is doesn’t help anybody. Except the state, of course. No crisis goes to waste when a government is around and a sudden “increase” (i.e. change in how the statistic is recorded) in FGM makes a good argument for the government to pass legislation that grants it more investigative and enforcement powers.

Keep this story in mind when you’re looking for a statistic to make your point or somebody throws a government statistic at you as a counterargument. If it’s a government statistic that doesn’t automatically make it impartial or accurate. The statistic very well may have been manipulated for any number of reasons. Furthermore any major changes noted in a statistic could be methodology related and have no bearing on a problem actually being discussed.

Where Libertarianism and Social Justice Share a Common Foe

It’s time for me to earn my dirty anti-libertarian leftist social justice warrior creds. Except I’m actually going to discuss a situation where libertarianism and so-called social justice warriors have a common cause (in reality what libertarians often disparagingly refer to as social justice has a lot in common with libertarianism).

Libertarianism and property rights tend to go hand in hand. In fact the biggest gripe many libertarians have with the state is its constant violation of individual property rights through taxation, confiscation, eminent domain, and other powers it has granted itself. Of all the ways the state violates property rights though the most egregious is probably the issuance of decrees that either prohibit property owners from performing or require property owners to perform certain actions with their property.

The social justice movement tends to fight against discrimination in any form. Recently many members of the social justice movement have been working to fight discrimination against transgender individuals. Although they oftentimes clash with libertarians over the property rights issue, as some social justice advocates want the state to prohibit individuals from discriminating even on their private property, they actually share a common enemy. The most egregious violator of property rights and the most dangerous discriminator happens to be the state.

Florida has become a battleground where violation of property rights and discrimination will be one and the same if HB 583 passes. The bill would make it a first degree misdemeanor for a transgender individual to use the bathroom of the gender they identify as. Likewise the bill would also open any property owner who allows transgender individuals to use the bathroom of the gender they identify as to civil lawsuits in the state’s monopolized courts.

In other words the bill, which has passed out of committee, would require property owners to enforce bathroom usage in the manner decreed by the state and that manner happens to be discriminatory.

Libertarians often have a knee-jerk negative reaction to anything the social justice movement advocates and vice versa. These knee-jerk reactions often cause each side to refuse to work with the other side even when they share a common foe. It’s stupid and allows the state to use divide and conquer tactics to stomp on all of us. Both groups should be able to put aside their labels, declare a truce, and work together when they face a common enemy. Who knows, maybe both sides can learn a little bit from each other and create a longer lasting alliance.

The DMCA is a Corporate Subsidy

Planned obsolescence is a term generally used by the economically ignorant to explain the improvement of products over time. The claim is that, for example, Apple doesn’t make as good of phones as they could because they want them to be obsolete next year so consumers will buy the new one. This ignores the fact that using the latest and greatest hardware drastically increases costs so manufacturers of mass produced devices tend to use components that are still very powerful but cheaper as they rely on older technology. It also ignores the fact that a phone isn’t suddenly obsolete just because a new model has been released. If there were the case there would be no market for used phones.

But there are times when examples of planned obsolescence, that is to say times when companies invested time and resources guaranteeing a product would cease to function after a certain period of time, can be found. Not surprisingly most of these examples rely on various corporate subsidies put into place by the state. One of those subsidies is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA criminalizes the production and distribution of technology that circumvents copyright protection schemes, which are commonly referred to as Digital Rights Management (DRM). How is that a corporate subsidy? Let’s take this case of actual planned obsolescence as an example:

The IlluMask is a $30 “light therapy” mask that utilizes LED lights to zap away bacteria, stimulate skin cells and otherwise fight acne/aging (depending on what model you purchase.) Sounds great (if you buy IlluMask’s claims). A lifetime of skin revitalization, and all for just $30. Oh, wait.

The trouble is, it is limited to 30 daily uses of 15 minutes each, totaling just 7 1/2 hours, effectively lasting you a month. At the end of which, you just discard the device and get a new one. That seems like a ridiculous waste of a perfectly fine, functional device whose LED’s can last at least 30,000 to 40,000 hours.

Even if we ignore the negative environmental impact of discarding plastic masks loaded with perfectly good LEDs, there’s still the incredible audacity of IlluMask’s claim that its mask will only last 30 days, at which point the LEDs doing all of the facial revitalization/bacteria zapping are suddenly useless, even with well over 99.97% of their lifespan still ahead of them (based on 35,000 hours).

The manufacturers of the IlluMask utilize DRM to prevent the device from working after 30 days. Fortunately bypassing the DRM is easy:

1. Change the batteries if lights are getting dimmer.
2. Use a screwdriver and open the case. Then remove batteries and unscrew screws so the plastic battery holder on top of the circuit board can be moved over. Be careful NOT to damage any of the delicate wiring.
3. Now that the circuit board is exposed, put the batteries back in their slots.
4. Using a piece of wire (such as a paper clip) touch one end of your wire and place it where the thin copper wire connects to the circuit board (silver spot marked LED). Touch the other end to the little RESET copper circle–located on the left of the circuit board (use the copper circle above the word RESET, not below).
5. Press the start button while the wire is in place.
6. Move your wire from the RESET button to the TEST button.
7. Press the start button again while the wire is in place, and the count should reset to 30!

Unfortunately the DMCA makes disabling the DRM a potentially criminal offense. And herein lies the subsidy. Thanks to the DMCA developing DRM technology can be worth the investment in time and resources. Even though DRM can always be bypassed, which would making it a poor investment in time and resources under normal circumstances, the existence of the DMCA means that anybody who does develop methods of bypassing DRM faces fines and prison time for doing so. The state threatens violence against anybody who attempts to bypass DRM, which drastically raises the cost of doing so. And the tax victims gets to foot the bill for sending the heavily armed cops to kidnap developers of DRM bypassing technology, having highly paid prosecutors and judges argue and rule the developer’s guilt, and guarding the prison the developer will be kept in for years. Were the DMCA not in place bypassing DRM would carry no risks and manufacturers would have no recourse other than attempt to develop a hardier DRM mechanism.

Yet Another Reason to Use HTTPS On Your Site

Transport Layer Security (TLS), often referred to by its predecessor SSL, helps protect the privacy of your users and prevents malicious actors from altering the content being sent between them and your servers. Since it’s such a powerful tool you should think every site would enable it by default but they don’t. If the privacy of your users and the integrity of your data isn’t enough to convince you to enable TLS maybe this will:

With CloudFlare, websites can afford extra security to users with Full SSL (Strict) encryption. Long story short, this strips certain identifiers from the traffic data ISPs use to block websites like TPB; since the information is routed through CloudFlare, website IP addresses are also hidden behind the delivery network. In the UK, where all major ISPs were strong-armed into blocking TPB in 2012, this has all but turned back time, with thepiratebay.se now accessible for Virgin, EE, BT and TalkTalk customers. Sky is the only popular provider still managing to block the site; you aren’t notified, as such, but the page won’t load anyhow.

TLS makes blocking access to websites more difficult (although not entirely impossible). Many web filters rely on identifiable information viewable in plaintext streams. When you encrypt those streams with TLS those filters are no longer able to see the identifiable information and therefore can’t block access.

Avoiding censorship is just another reason why you should not only enable TLS on your site but make its use mandatory by disabling unsecured connections (or redirecting them to secured connections as I do with this blog).