Tag: You’re Doing it Wrong

Hobby Lobby

The Nazgûl managed to stir up a bunch of political drama by ruling that privately held companies whose owners hold strong religious beliefs can be exempted for providing funding for certain contraceptives:

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby on Monday that for-profit employers with religious objections can opt out of providing contraception coverage under Obamacare.

The ruling deals directly with only a small provision of Obamacare and will not take down the entire law but it amounts to a huge black eye for Obamacare, the administration and its backers. The justices have given Obamacare opponents their most significant political victory against the health care law, reinforcing their argument that the law and President Barack Obama are encroaching on Americans’ freedoms.

As you can expect the Internet has exploded. Feminists are decrying this as a direct strike against women’s rights and the religious are hailing this as a great victory for religious freedom. Both sides, in their fervor to be louder than the other side, are missing the big picture. This battle isn’t one of women’s rights versus religious freedom, it’s the inevitable outcome of this country’s state-employer-insurer complex. Or as I like to call it the trinity of fuckery.

The state really made this entire fiasco possible. Today most people receive health insurance as part of their employee benefits package. Have you ever wondered why health insurance is tied to your employer? It’s because employers needed a way to provide higher wages during a time when the state implemented wage controls. Since the state said that employers couldn’t pay employees a higher wage employers decided to offer benefits, including health insurance, to bypass the controls. Today the state has further solidified the unity between health insurance and employment by mandating almost every employer provider employees with specific types of health insurance. That last part, requiring specific types of insurance, is the real kicker because it mandates certain types of contraceptives that many religious individuals oppose.

An employer with strongly held religious convictions is going to have problems funding coverage for certain types of contraceptives and abortions. Since they’re being mandated by the state to provide health insurance and that health insurance must cover some of the contraceptives they find objectionable they are using the only avenue left open to them: the courts. Hobby Lobby in this case decided to fight the contraceptive coverage and the state made an arbitrary decision, which sided with Hobby Lobby in this case. You can argue that the ruling was just or unjust until you’re blue in the face but it doesn’t matter what you believe. It only matters what the state believes.

Had the state never implemented wage controls and thus tied health insurance to employment we wouldn’t be in this mess. Assuming a lack of some other form of state meddling, employees would then be free to buy whatever health insurance plan worked for them. People with strong religious convictions against contraceptives could get a health insurance plan that didn’t cover contraceptives while people who want contraceptive coverage could get a plan that offered it. Their employer wouldn’t have a say in the matter since they wouldn’t be providing it. So the only viable solution is to break apart the trinity of fuckery.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

There are approximately five billion different branches of anarchism. I can find some kind of common ground with most of them but one branch that I do not understand is anarcho-primitivism. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, anarcho-primitivism advocates the abandonment of all technology. In other words they want a massive amount of starvation and disease. In fact it’s such a shitty philosophy that its own proponents don’t live by it:

VICE: You advocate for all of civilization to abandon technology and return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. How do you feel about the Skype call that we’re having right now?
John Zerzan: I was on the Art Bell show years ago and he kept saying that to be consistent with my philosophy, I should live in a cave. I said, “Yeah, you’re right, but then this conversation wouldn’t be possible.” You have to try to connect with people. You have to be part of the conversation in society or else you’re not serious.

So, is that the only reason that you don’t go live in the wilderness?
Well, I guess so, although I would have to say that, like most people, I’m pretty damned domesticated. I enjoy when I’m out there, but I’m not as equipped as some people.

Have you had periods where you have lived off the grid?
Not really, though I’ve gone to the mountains for a few days at a time.

That last answer really gets me. Mr. Zerzan believes that we should all abandon technology and live off of the grid. But he admittedly has never done any such thing. If you’re going to advocate for something you should probably try to abide by it. The irony of most self-proclaimed anarcho-primitivists is that they spend a lot of time online instead of hunting and gathering food and sleeping in a cave.

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.

Anti-Gun Activists a Such Friendly People

I think my favorite thing about being a gun rights advocate is how friendly, lovable, and peaceful our opponents are. Even though we disagree on the issue of guns we can still debate things in a civil manner and not stoop to death threats. Take Mike Malloy. You may not have heard of him. He’s a nobody with a talk show that has less listeners then my blog has readers. But he’s one classy dude:

I guess what I’ll do if I’m ever in that situation and I see one of these half-witted yahoos walking in with a weapon, high-caliber rifle like that, I’ll just put on a berserk act.I will just start screaming Gun! Gun! Gun! Watch out, everybody hit the deck! Guns! Guns! Everybody! And then dial 911 and I will say, shots fired, which will bring every god-damned cop within 15 miles. And then the half-wits with the long guns are going to panic and they’re going to run out of the store and if that rifle isn’t shouldered properly, the cop is going to take a look at that and put a bullet right in their forehead.

See how wonderful he is? He’s not trying to start a bloodbath or get the police to murder people who disagree with him. Nope. He wants a peaceful world free of guns. Well at least free of guns not being used to murder people he disagrees with. But beyond that he’s one classy dude. And there are many gun control advocates just like him, which is why the gun discussion may be heated at times but it never stoops to threats of violence.

Is Your Neighbor a Snitch

There are tradeoffs to anywhere you live. Poorer neighborhoods tend to have higher crime rates. But wealthier neighborhoods tend to have a more insidious problem: snitches. You know the type, a nosy neighbor who calls the city if they notice anything they don’t like about a neighbor’s property. Brian Collins decided to put up one of those adorable little free libraries that you see springing up throughout metropolitan areas. They’re little more than cabinets where people can withdraw and deposit books. Usually they’re based on the honor system where for every book you take you leave one in its place. But the city recently caught wind of Mr. Collins’ free library and told him that it had to go:

LEAWOOD, KS (KCTV) – Can a library be illegal? The City of Leawood says yes.

Little Free Libraries are popping up across the metro. They allow book lovers to borrow and share their favorite books whenever they want.

“We came back to find a letter from the code enforcement telling us it was an illegal dwelling or structure,” Brian Collins said.

Whenever city officials move in on little things like this it’s always in response from a neighborhood snitch. Can you spot the snitch in this story? There he is:

Not everyone thinks it’s fun. Another neighbor told KCTV5 off camera he’s glad the city is making Collins remove the library because he believes it’s an eyesore for the neighborhood.

And like any neighborhood snitch he’s too much of a chickenshit to reveal his identity. As the popular saying goes, this is why we can’t have nice thing. These free libraries are a neat idea that I believe promote literacy. They offer a free, convenient way for people in a neighborhood to share books. But every neighborhood has that one asshole who calls the city whenever he sees something he doesn’t expressly approve of, regardless of how petty his complaint is.

This is Why I Try to Know as Little About the Authors I Like as Possible

I’m a huge fan of science fiction but if you ask me about my favorite authors I can seldom tell you more than their name. This is purposeful because I want my relationship with my entertainers to be of one where they provide me entertainment and I give them money. The more you add on top of this the more difficult it becomes to simply enjoy the author’s works on its merit.

One of the series that I greatly enjoyed is Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. The man is a good author, I just want to make that clear before I continue. Scalzi’s philosophy and politics differ from my own. I advocate voluntary association and he advocates using violence to make everybody conform to his person views. As far as I’m concerned a person is entitled to their opinion so I never dwelled on it much. But it wasn’t until last night that I found out how judgmental this supposed advocate for equality really was.

It all started, as many things do, with Twitter. Scalzi decided to start an Internet fight with another of my favorite authors, Larry Correia. For those of you who follow his blog you know that he’s not well liked amongst his fellow authors. Correia’s politics fall under libertarian statism. While I do agree with his staunch stance on gun rights I disagree with a lot of his other political views. Again, he’s entitled to his opinion. But last night Scalzi, seemingly out of the blue, makes the following passive aggressive tweet:

This is in regards to Correia’s post titled The Naive Idiocy of Teaching Rapists Not To Rape. It’s a good article that explains, as only Correia can, why the concept of simply teaching men not to rape won’t actually stop rape. Since he couldn’t find any fault with the content of the post Scalzi decided to criticize the title.

As this point I decided to settle in for a wonderfully entertaining Twitter battle. For the most part it was pretty entertaining but it was pretty obvious that Scalzi hadn’t read Correia’s post and was merely trying to attack him for, well, reasons. But then he decided to get very petty:

You would think that an author who believes himself to be an advocate for equality wouldn’t resort to insulting entire groups of people based solely on their literature preference. But he decided that anybody who reads Correia must “miss a few clues about misogyny”. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I try to avoid learning about the authors I enjoy. Too often I find that people who can write thought provoking science fiction are also judgmental pricks. Of course I can’t resist a good opportunity to take a quick jab at the self-righteous so I did:

Really I was just trying to point out who foolish it is to insult people based on the literature they read because you may very likely be insulting somebody who reads your work, which he did. But by extension Scalzi also admitted that some of his readers “miss a few clues about misogyny” since, not surprisingly, there is some crossover between readers of Scalzi and Correia.

In my experience self-righteous people who have even a modicum of fame don’t bother letting nobodies like me get under their skin. I tweet them and they ignore me. But Scalzi is so full of himself that he actually took the time to tweet back to me:

He’s upfront, I’ll give him that. But I didn’t think he would actually take the time to tweet back if I replied so, well, I replied:

But I was wrong! He couldn’t help but point out that he has plenty of customers already so he doesn’t need the likes of Correia’s readers:

Beautiful. Seriously, I love publicly drawing out the egos of people online. You know a guy who tries to start a fight with somebody over the title of that person’s blog post is already pretty full of himself. But when he has to take time out of his day to point out that he has plenty of customers without needing wretches who dare read a certain other author’s material it really demonstrates how high on the horse he is. Because I’m not actually full of myself I did tell him that he is a good author even though he makes baseless accusations:

After all, there’s no reason I can’t be professional even if the person I’m conversing with isn’t.

But this exchange was an amusing example of three things. First, you need to be the right kind of person to give Scalzi money. Second, Scalzi like to make baseless accusations against people who read authors he doesn’t personally approve of. Third, Scalzi loves to hate on authors who disagree with him even if he has to grasp at straws to do so. I think the real irony here is that Correia receives tons of baseless accusations from the self-described political left (who are fake leftists) even though he’s far less judgmental then they are. Meanwhile Scalzi, who seems to think of himself as a warrior for equality, is judgmental of basically everybody.

Unfortunately this exchange has ensured that I won’t give Scalzi any more money (not that he cares, my application to give him money was obviously found wanting). I like his works but even I can only overlook so much self-righteousness in authors. And I really see no reason to give money to somebody who insults me for something as petty as my choice in fiction not written by him

That Whole Fair Trial Thing Was Woefully Out of Date Anyways

Do you remember that whole fair trial thing that people used to talk about? It involved zany things like the defendant being able to review all of the evidence that was going to be used to the prosecution. That mess lead to a lot of undesirable outcomes, namely people the state was targeting being found innocent of wrongdoing by a jury. Thankfully our benevolent overlords have corrected this problem and now allow the prosecution to withhold evidence from the defendant:

The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has ruled against terrorism suspect Adel Daoud, saying that he and his attorneys cannot access the evidence gathered against him. The Monday ruling overturns an earlier lower district court ruling that had allowed Daoud and his lawyers to review the legality of digital surveillance warrants used against him.

[…]

When Daoud’s lawyers discovered that this case involved secret evidence that they had not been privy to, they eventually asked the court to notify them if any evidence gathered had been done so under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) order. Under the normal procedures of American jurisprudence, a defendant has the right to see the evidence against him or her and can challenge the basis on which such a warrant was authorized.

The government responded with its own affidavit from Attorney General Eric Holder, who told the court that disclosing such material would harm national security.

Now if we can just get rid of those inconvenient juries we will finally have a system that can throw anybody in prison for any reason whatsoever. I’m sure a convincing argument can be made for why juries are a threat to national security. After all a jury trial would involve 12 regular Americans hearing all of the evidence, which certainly qualifies as a threat to national security.

Shit like this is why I don’t take arguments claiming we need a government to administer justice seriously.

The Tor Challenge is Apparently Going Strong

On June 4th the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) kicked off the Tor Challenge, which is its attempt to encourage more people to run Tor Relays. Running a relay is fun and easy to do but I never imagined that the Tor Challenge would be such a rousing success:

However, Adrian Leppard, the guy in charge of the City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit (funded both by taxpayers and legacy entertainment companies) spoke at an IP Enforcement Summit in London and his comments, relayed by Torrentfreak, should raise questions about whether or not this is the right person to have anything to do with stopping “crime” on the internet:

“Whether it’s Bitnet, The Tor – which is 90% of the Internet – peer-to-peer sharing, or the streaming capability worldwide. At what point does civil society say that as well as the benefits that brings, this enables huge risk and threat to our society that we need to take action against?”

The Tor is now 90% of the Internet?* Holy shit, that’s one hell of an increase since June 4th! Congratulations to the EFF for transforming almost the entire Internet into an anonymous network in less than one month!

Seriously, this guy is a fucking tool who shouldn’t be allowed to head anything, let alone a crime unit focused on intellectual “property” violations.

* Just in case it’s unclear 90% of the Internet is not The Tor. The guy is simply an idiot.

As If She Hadn’t Assaulted Us With Enough Terrible Literature Already

Even thought she’s in the grave Ayn Rand can’t help but assault us with more of her shitty literature:

IRVINE, CA–(Marketwired – June 16, 2014) – The Ayn Rand Institute is excited to announce the new publication of a lost Ayn Rand novel. Ayn Rand’s work Ideal, written in 1934, is scheduled for release by Penguin Random House in July of 2015 and will be paired with Rand’s play of the same name into a single volume. The introduction will be written by Rand’s designated heir, Leonard Peikoff.

“We are delighted to share this wonderful news,” said ARI executive director Yaron Brook.

I guess somebody has to be delighted. On the upside it was written in 1934, so it predates Atlas Shrugged. That means it probably won’t contain a three billion word monolog by Objectivist Jesus. On the downside it’s written by Ayn Rand. That means it will have one dimensional characters, a boring story, and the pain that comes from being beaten over the head with Objectivism.

I’m sure there are a lot of libertarians who are already jerking themselves off to the idea of another Ayn Rand novel. Me, I prefer literature that is entertaining and doesn’t try to preach a One True Religion to me.

Economy in a Slump? Just Blow Some Shit Up!

The New York Times, the same publication that gives Paul Krugman space to print is insanity, has a piece under the heading “The Pitfalls of Peace”. As you can imagine from a publication that gives Paul “Boost the Economy By Warring with Aliens” Krugman space, the article is about how war is good for the economy:

The world just hasn’t had that much warfare lately, at least not by historical standards. Some of the recent headlines about Iraq or South Sudan make our world sound like a very bloody place, but today’s casualties pale in light of the tens of millions of people killed in the two world wars in the first half of the 20th century. Even the Vietnam War had many more deaths than any recent war involving an affluent country.

Counterintuitive though it may sound, the greater peacefulness of the world may make the attainment of higher rates of economic growth less urgent and thus less likely. This view does not claim that fighting wars improves economies, as of course the actual conflict brings death and destruction. The claim is also distinct from the Keynesian argument that preparing for war lifts government spending and puts people to work. Rather, the very possibility of war focuses the attention of governments on getting some basic decisions right — whether investing in science or simply liberalizing the economy. Such focus ends up improving a nation’s longer-run prospects.

Emphasis mine. Let us start off with the obvious, if a state is at war it has already failed at the most basic of basics, not getting involved in a war. Wars are only good for two things: destruction and death. And not surprisingly both of those things are bad for the economy. Recreating that which was lost is not economic growth, creating new wealth is. And death is always bad for an economy because is reduces both the number of producers and consumers.

Now let’s get to the second point. According to the author war leads to an investment in science or a, pardon me because this is hard to say with a straight face, liberalizing of the economy. Science is not something that only gets invested in by the state nor only during a time of war. Science is constantly being invested in because science leads to better products. Without being engaged in an all encompassing war we have seen computers go from room sized monstrosities that could only perform a few tasks to devices that fit in our pockets and contain more computing power than their full sized brethren from only a decade back. There is a bitchin’ fully electric car on the market today. The private sector is closer to returning to space than the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and it has a plan to mine asteroids for resources (seriously, how cool is that). Of course I don’t want to sell the state entirely short. As it is involved in several minor wars it is investing money into science. It currently possesses the best remotely controlled bombers on the planet! Granted, they’re not really good for anything productive but they exist and that counts for something.

We should also discuss the liberalization of the economy that supposedly occurs during a time of war. World War II, being the last all encompassing war, is a good example. Everything from metal to food to rubber were rationed for civilians so that those resources could be put into the war effort. Perhaps the author has a different definition of liberalize than I do.

Economists often discuss all of the scientific advancements that occur because of war. What they ignore are the scientific advancements made by the private sector regardless of war. The difference between the two methods of scientific investment is that the state focuses on impractical things whereas the private sector focuses on things the average person can fucking use. Give me better computers, cell phones, cars, and e-readers over remotely controlled bombers and aircraft carriers any day.

But, hey, nothing sounds better to the state than war being good for the economy. If there’s one thing the state is good at it’s war. Which is why it only hires economists who say war is good for the economy to its advisory boards.