You’re Doing it Wrong – Page 33

Politics is a Sport

A new study has been released that confirms what everybody already knew:

A new study published at Political Research Quarterly indicates that many Americans who identify with one of the major parties make their electoral decisions more like a sports fan than an informed voter.

What motivates partisans to vote is “not high-minded, good-government, issue-based goals,” says Patrick Miller of the University of Kansas, who co-authored the research with the University of North Carolina’s Pamela Johnston Conover. Instead, “It’s, ‘I hate the other party. I’m going to go out, and we’re going to beat them.'”

I’m not exactly sure what “high-minded, good-government” is but I do understand the gist of the study. Voters closely resemble those annoying drunks at sportsball events that paint their preferred team’s colors on their body, wear some stupid hate, and scream loudly every time their preferred team does something. The only difference, and I believe this is a major downside, is that voters tend to be more restrained. I would much prefer it if voters got drunk, painted themselves, and screamed loudly at political events. At least that would be mildly entertaining and treat the subject matter with the seriousness it deserves. But I’ve been to political events and the fans are usually stuffy codgers in suits, or at the very least business casual dress, who merely clap when their preferred politician says something they like.

We should take the treating of elections to the next logical step. All political events should involve keg stands, beer pong, and drinking games. Nothing any politician says will change what team the fans vote for so they might as well turn their boring speeches into fun parities.

It’s also probably worth noting that this is why you will change nothing through voting. Most people don’t give a shit about the issues. All they care about is that their team beats the other team.

Using Copyright Laws to Push Independent Mechanics Out of the Market

You have two options when your out of warranty vehicle needs repairs. Option one is to spend a small fortune taking your vehicle to the certified dealer and having their mechanics fix it. The other option is to spend far less money and either repair it yourself or take it to an independent mechanic. Because automobile manufacturers make tons of money off repairing the vehicles they sell they have a direct interest in locking out independent mechanics (both professional and hobbyists).

It’s difficult to lock people out of purely mechanical devices. Any part on a car can be fabricated with enough machining tools and many people rely on this fact to restore old vehicles. But computer technology is offering automobile manufacturers an option to legally lock out independent mechanics through copyright law:

Allowing them to continue to fix their cars has become “legally problematic,” according to a written statement from the Auto Alliance, the main lobbying arm of automakers.

The dispute arises from a section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that no one thought could apply to vehicles when it was signed into law in 1998. But now, in an era where cars are rolling computing platforms, the U.S. Copyright Office is examining whether provisions of the law that protect intellectual property should prohibit people from modifying and tuning their cars.

[…]

In comments submitted so far, automakers have expressed concern that allowing outsiders to access electronic control units that run critical vehicle functions like steering, throttle inputs and braking “leads to an imbalance by which the negative consequences far outweigh any suggested benefits,” according to the Alliance of Global Automakers. In the worst cases, the organizations said an exemption for enthusiasts “leads to disastrous consequences.”

If automobile manufacturers are allowed to charge people who modify a vehicle’s electronics it opens the door for locking independent mechanics out of the automobile repair business. All it would take is including some rudimentary electronics on every major component of a vehicle (which often exist already) and require it to receive the proper digital signature from the on-board computer to operate. Then, in order for the vehicle to start, the manufacturer can set a requirement that each part must transmit the proper digital signature to the on-board computer. If any part or the on-board computer fails to provide the proper digital signature the car can simply refuse to start (for security purposes, of course).

By holding the private keys to create the correct digital signatures an automobile manufacturer could tightly control who can and cannot create parts for their vehicles. It could also control who it is willing to supply parts to. Right now investing so much money into implementing such a scheme is pointless because there’s no recourse for manufacturers to take against those who modify the electronics. That would change quickly if they could charge anybody who modifies the electronics of a vehicle under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Then they could get the state to go after anybody who modifies a vehicle’s electronics for them. Anybody who modifies the electronics on a vehicle would then face serious cage time and fines at little cost to the manufacturer.

Officer Safety

Police officers like to justify their trigger happy nature but uttering the magical words “officer safety”. When an officer beats and unarmed man to death? Officer safety! When 10 officers unload 1,000 rounds into a truck that wasn’t even being driven by a suspect? Officer safety! What happens when officer safety puts officers at risk though? That’s what happened when a group of Miami police officers when all officer safety on a couple unarmed individuals:

As the car was wedged helplessly between a light pole and a tree, nearly a minute passed before officers opened up – firing approximately 50 bullets at the car and the two unarmed men inside the vehicle.

The two men inside the car survived that initial volley of gunfire, according to witnesses, who said they could see the men moving inside the Volvo. Everything went quiet for nearly two minutes before the officers opened up a second time – unleashing an unrelenting torrent of bullets that lasted almost 25 seconds. By the time it was over, the two men inside the car were dead.

CBS4 News has learned a total of 23 officers fired a total of at least 377 rounds.

Nothing unusual about this story, right? But wait, there’s more:

Montesano and Valdes were killed by the dozens of rounds that tore through their bodies.

But Montesano and Valdes weren’t the only ones struck – two Miami Dade police officers were hit as well – caught in the crossfire. One officer was shot in the arm and the second was hit in the arm and grazed in the head. If the bullet had struck just a half an inch to the side the officer would have been killed.

The officers were going officer safety so hard on the unarmed suspects that they ended up hitting two of their own in the crossfire. Considering this was the unloading of 377 rounds into two unarmed suspects really defensible under the magical words “officer safety”?

Don’t Stay at Motel 6

As a general principle I avoid doing business with snitches. What this means is that I don’t do business with individuals or organizations that I know voluntarily hand over customer information to law enforcement personnel (I understand they can’t do much about it when a warrant is issued though). This isn’t a big deal since most businesses aren’t handing over customer lists to local law enforcers. Motel 6, on the other hand, has decided to do exactly that:

WARWICK, R.I. — City police have arrested four people staying at the Motel 6 on Jefferson Boulevard as a result of the hotel chain’s agreement to provide police with a daily guest list, Mayor Scott Avedisian said Tuesday.

The names of Motel 6 guests, which police then check for outstanding warrants, is one of five steps Motel 6 corporate managers agreed to take in response to a string of high-profile incidents and concerns the establishment was becoming a haven for passing criminals.

The other measures listed in an agreement Motel 6 executives signed Tuesday include raising the minimum age to rent a room from 18 years old to 21, hiring a police detail every night, sharing their national “do not rent list” with police and conducting regular training, including on how to spot human trafficking.

I don’t understand this strategy. To alleviate concerns that Motel 6 is a haven for passing criminals the company is going to get more deeply involved with the biggest gang of criminals wherever it operates. That doesn’t make sense. But it looks like a good deal for the gangs. In addition to receiving customer lists the local agencies are looking to make some extra cash on the side since Motel 6 will be hiring officers for “protection”.

Mind you, I’ve never really planned to stay at a Motel 6 before but I will make sure to avoid the chain wherever I travel. The last thing I’m going to do is hand over cash to a company that has gotten into bed with the most dangerous local gangs.

Central Banks aren’t Radical or Revolutionary

Radical, according to Google, means “advocating or based on thorough or complete political or social reform; representing or supporting an extreme section of a political party.” Revolutionary, according to Google again, means “involving or causing a complete or dramatic change.” I theorize that a majority of people who use these words haven’t looked up either in a dictionary.

Iceland made headlines recently by entertaining the idea of a, according to many, radical policy of giving a central bank the authority to print money. Many have even declared the proposal revolutionary:

Who knew that the revolution would start with those radical Icelanders? It does, though. One Frosti Sigurjonsson, a lawmaker from the ruling Progress Party, issued a report today that suggests taking the power to create money away from commercial banks, and hand it to the central bank and, ultimately, Parliament.

What in the gods’ names is revolutionary about giving the power to print money to a government controlled central bank? That’s a page out of the playbook of basically every other major nation on Earth. This is why I’m left to believe people who use the terms radical and revolutionary are entirely ignorant of their meanings.

A radical or revolutionary move would be to take the power of making money away from any central authority and allow markets to handle it. Markets are another concept that people are almost entirely ignorant of today. People often mistakenly believe that granting power to commercial banks to print money is a market solution. But markets are what happens in the absence of any coercive authority. In other words markets are the result of individuals making choices themselves.

If you want an example of a market solution to money you need only look to Emperor Norton:

Norton also issued his own money to pay for his debts, and it became an accepted local currency in San Francisco. These notes came in denominations between fifty cents and ten dollars; the few surviving notes are collector’s items.

Norton didn’t coerce anybody into accepting his currency. He merely created it and offered it in payment of his debts. His creditors accepted it of their own volition. A market solution to money is simple. Each individual is free to propose their own currency. Success is determined by whether or not people are willing to accept a currency in exchange for goods and services. No coercion is necessary.

Statists will come up with any number of excuses as to why money creation must be monopolized by the state. Most of them will then turn around and bitch that the state doesn’t print enough or prints too much. They demand control and they get pissed when that control isn’t used in the manner they prefer.

There are only two real options when it comes to choices. You can either give power to somebody else to make choices for you or you can make them yourself. In this era of statism the radical or revolutionary option is to make choices for yourself.

The Democratic Party Better Hope Elizabeth Warren Enters the Presidential Race

Hillary Clinton, a person so callous that she literally laughs about murdering people, has thrown her hat into the presidential ring. Her announcement obviously fired up the Democratic base, right? Wrong. As it turns out even the most pious Democratic supporters are having a difficult time justifying their support for a Republican. One of my friends, who is as pious of a Democrat as they come, posted the following meme on Facebook:

For as long as I’ve known him my friend has been a true believer in the Democratic Party. Anything the party said became gospel; facts to the contrary were always ignored or spun as Republican propaganda. When Barack Obama ran the first time my friend was one of the biggest anti-war activist I knew. During Obama’s second presidential campaign, after he spent four years proving he was as much of a war hawk as his predecessor, my friend dropped the issue of war entirely. Even he cannot come up with a better reason to support Hillary other than she’s not a Republican.

The Democratic Party better start praying that Elizabeth Warren throws her hat into the presidential race. If Hillary can’t even get the true believers of her party enthusiastically supporting her then it’s going to be hard to sell the majority of people in this country gullible enough to vote.

Government So Small It Fits In Your Bathroom

This weekend the Minnesota Republican Party had its State Central Committee Meeting. I’ve never attended one of those nor will I ever but I have friends who were there so I got to see some of the shenanigans that went on during the event. At first I didn’t think there was going to be much to write about. The meeting just sounded like another political party circlejerk where elected party politician ‘A’ says some nice things about elected party politician ‘B’ and is reciprocated.

But you can always count on somebody showing up to a political event and ruining it for everybody. In the case of this meeting, being a Republican Party function, that prize went to the Child Protection League (CPL). After looking them up I discovered that the CPL seems to be primarily focused on shaming members of the kink community and getting transgender individuals to commit suicide.

Via Rob Doar’s Twitter feed I was able to see the fly handed out at the meeting by the CPL:

There’s nothing like take a male model; dressing him in a wig, mascara, and unbutton pants; and using him to scare ignorant people into associating him with transgender individuals to get the old bigotry juices flowing. The CPL is trying to confuse people into thinking that transgender individuals are crossdressers and exploiting that confusion to insinuate that transgender individuals, specifically male to female individuals, are trying to gain access to the women’s bathroom for sexual gratification.

Under the guise of protecting the children, a guise favored by every politician, the CPL is showing it has no interest in protecting transgender children. If it did it wouldn’t be pushing state legislation that would further oppress transgender individuals because that oppression comes with an extremely high suicide rate.

In addition to showing the complete ignorance of transgender individuals the CPL holds this flyer also demonstrates the problem with political solutions. What the CPL is advocating is a state law. The estimated population of Minnesota is 5,457,173. That means the CPL wants a law passed that would mandate over 5 million people behave in a certain way. Specifically it would mandate that every public school in the state force transgender students to use the bathroom of the gender they don’t identify as. This would undo local decisions such as the policy enacted in Minneapolis.

Although I was raised Catholic nobody would accuse me of being a good Catholic. But there is one Catholic teaching I do greatly cherish and that is subsidiarity. Subsidiarity teaches that decisions should be handled at the most local level possible. Issues facing individuals should be decided by the individuals, issues facing families should be decided by the families, and so on. As much as I would prefer each school to allow transgender students to use the bathroom of the gender they identify as I would far prefer a piecemeal system where each school can decide its own policy than a blanket statewide mandate. Why? Because that would at least give transgender students an option to change schools instead of having to suffer the same persecution wherever they went. One may then ask why I wouldn’t prefer a state law mandating schools to allow transgender students to use the bathroom of the gender they identify as. My reason for not advocating such a law is because once the power to make such a decision rests at the state level it rest there forever. Since laws are arbitrary a good statewide policy could be replaced by a bad statewide policy after a single election. The more local a decision is the less people it impacts.

Ironically what I’ve just described is what small government advocates always pretend to want. Republicans usually claim to be small government advocates but many of them get excited every time somebody presents them with a state or federal law that would mandate discrimination against a group they dislike. Fortunately my friends at the meeting scoffed at this flyer but I know there are a lot of Republicans that agree with what it says. Widespread support within the party is the reason the CPL came to the meeting to hand out flyers. Until the vast majority of the Republican Party speak out against laws such as HF 1546 nobody is going to take it seriously when its members call themselves the party of small government.

Supposed Study on Violence Omits Violent People

Gun control advocates have spent a great deal of time and money trying to prove that their religious crusade is scientific. The result of this has been a seemingly endless stream of shoddy research. Their latest study tried to argue that nine percent of Americans have anger issues and easy access to firearms:

Almost 9 percent of American adults — or about 22 million people — have a history of impulsive angry behavior and have easy access to at least one gun, according to a study published last week in the journal Behavioral Sciences & the Law.

Furthermore, about 1.5 percent of people — about 3.7 million people — have impulsive anger issues and carry guns around with them when they are outside their homes.

What does the study mean by impulsive angry behavior? The paper is locked firmly behind a pay wall, like most of these studies, so it’s anybody guess unless they pony up. None of the articles discussing this research firmly define what impulsive angry behavior is and therefore the term is useless as it could mean anything from yelling at a misbehaving child to punching an unruly drunkard.

But this study has a major flaw:

(People whose job required them to carry a firearm, such as police officers, were excluded from the study.)

Why would a study about anger management issues and access to firearms leave out a portion of the population known for having anger management issues and access to firearms? The only reason I can come up with is that gun control advocates don’t want to ruffle the feathers of police officers because they know police officers are necessary to enforce any form of gun control. Therein lies the fallacy of gun control. Gun control requires guns to enforce and it is therefore not about controlling access to firearms but monopolizing it.

If you want to study the affects of anger and firearm access you can’t omit police officers. They are the perfect demographic for such a study because they also suffer almost no consequences when they act on their anger, which means you get a glimpse at what people with anger management issues really want to do with firearms. Without including them you can’t begin to estimate the impact consequences have. Somebody who suffers from impulsive angry behavior, whatever that is, and has access to firearms may pose no risk whatsoever because they still realize that there are consequences to using a firearm to act on their anger. Had the study included police officers one could estimate the value consequences have at preventing people who suffer from impulsive angry behavior from acting on their anger.

Leaving out the affect consequences have on behavior renders the study irrelevant. The researches could’ve asked people with impulsive angry behavior if they have access to an automobile and still learn nothing because asking that question doesn’t establish the affect consequences have at preventing them from ramming their vehicle into another vehicle that just cut them off.

The Best We’re Going to Get

The biggest downside to Rand Paul running for president is that Rand Paul is running for president. Normally I wouldn’t care but I’m a libertarian and that has caused a lot of people to ask me what my opinion of Rand is. To make matters worse they expect my response to be positive and get upset when it’s not. Usually they say some variation of “He’s the best we’re going to get!”

That’s like marrying an abusive significant other because you think that they’re the best you’re going to get. You shouldn’t settle for shit just because your other suitors are slightly shittier. Spend some time being single, or in this case not involved in politics, and enjoy your life until something genuinely good comes around.

You Can’t Stop the Signal

Two days ago a giant bust of Edward Snowden was found perched atop the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument in Fort Greene Park. The sculpture was of the best sort, illicit. It didn’t take long for the authorities to coverup and then remove Snowden from the park, which sent a more prominent message than anything else they could have done. But the signal can’t be stopped. Yesterday a different group of artists created a hologram of Snowden at the site of the previous sculpture:

NEW YORK — Hours after police removed an illicit bust of Edward Snowden from its perch in a Brooklyn park on Monday, artists replaced it with a hologram.

The group of artists — who collectively call themselves “The Illuminator” and are not related to the trio behind the original sculpture — used laptops and projection equipment to cast an image of Snowden in a haze of smoke at the spot where the sculpture once stood.

They say the action was a message of defiance aimed at the authorities who “censored” the piece, according to a tumblr post.

I believe if anybody is deserving of a monument it’s Snowden. He belongs to that rare breed of people willing to risk it all to bring our rulers’ dirty laundry to light. Someday I hope a monument of him and Chelsea Manning are erected in dedication to the idea that breaking the law is sometimes the most heroic thing one can do.