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Posts Tagged ‘nanny state’

Moral Climate

Posted in Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , on September 28, 2015| 22 Comments »

You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred.  Ask yourself, What do we want in this country above all?  People want to be happy, isn’t that right?…Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo.  Burn it.  White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  Burn it.  Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs?  The cigarette people are weeping?  Burn the book.  Serenity, Montag.  Peace, Montag.  Take your fight outside.  Better yet, to the incinerator.  –  Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

books cause thoughtThough Ray Bradbury was much more a fantasist than a writer of science fiction, in many ways his predictions about the society of the future have proven far more prescient than those of his contemporaries whose writings are more grounded in hard science.  One striking example is his depiction of future homes and cities as being constantly inundated by music, synthetic voices and fast-changing video images from huge screens and loud speakers in every conceivable location; the TV screens which start playing commercials when one passes them in a store are straight out of Bradbury, as are the video players we carry in our pockets and the earbuds and bluetooth sets in our ears.  Most science fiction writers depicted future people as being better-informed and more scientifically literate; Bradbury realized they would, if anything, be less so.  And while typical 20th-century literary dystopias featured top-down censorship by totalitarian governments who wanted to wanted to keep their citizens in the dark for political reasons, Bradbury alone understood that the censorship of the future would be lateral, grass-roots efforts pushed by ignorant citizens who wanted to remain ignorant and unchallenged by ideas which unsettled them.

We are living in the past of Fahrenheit 451, the early stages of a culture which values feelings above thought, the history of a world in which the solution to any troubling idea is to eradicate it.  Right now it’s going on in the universities, where sheltered young people who have been coddled by overprotective parents for two decades are declaring themselves to be “triggered” or “offended” or even “violated” by ideas – whether spoken or in print – that they haven’t encountered before, or that contradict their opinions, or that they find unpleasant, or that bear some superficial resemblance to any of the preceding.  Just as their parents “protected” them from these unpleasant thoughts by banning them from their homes with internet filters or “parental controls”, so they feel entitled to “protect” themselves – and every other person within their sphere of influence – from those bad, icky ideas by banning them.  And just as they may have been shamed as children for “bad” thoughts, so they seek to shame others who originate such thoughts; sometimes these censors go beyond mere shaming to the desire to punish the Bad People, and often that punishment can be career-destroying or even life-wrecking.

But it’s not completely limited to universities, nor to insular corners of social media; as I wrote in last year’s essay for Banned Books Week (which in case you hadn’t figured it out from the topic, starts today):

…the urge to censor actually is [not]…limited to those traditionally labeled “social conservatives”…nowadays, the most belligerent, aggressive and effective proponents of censorship are those who…describe their targets with words like “sexist”, “racist”, “homophobic”, “objectifying”, etc…promoters of this chic form of censorship very often don’t call for the direct government suppression of their targets; that would, after all, be censorship, and every thinking person knows censorship is bad.  So instead, they just “critique” the things they want banned and sling ad hominems like “misogynistic” at their targets’ creators, hoping to make them so radioactive in the public mind that risk-averse corporations will refuse to fund them…this isn’t technically censorship in the strictest traditional sense of the word, because it isn’t being forcibly executed by a political authority.  Neither is Operation Choke Point direct criminalization of the businesses it targets; that doesn’t change the fact that those businesses are as effectively suppressed as if they had been criminalized…while [such methods] lack the violence associated with actual criminalization of forbidden ideas, they are still very effective in creating an intellectual soil highly toxic to free expression…

It doesn’t matter whether the excuse is “sin” or “feelings”, or the injured party is conceived of as an individual or collective, or the suppression comes from above or below, or the method is violence or economics; the suppression of thought and speech is evil, tyrannical and socially self-lobotomizing.  As Ryan Holiday wrote in The Observer,

Your feelings are your problem, not mine—and vice versa.  Real empowerment and respect is to see our fellow citizens…as adults.  Human beings are not automatons—ruled by drives and triggers they cannot control.  On the contrary, we have the ability to decide not to be offended.  We have the ability to discern intent.  We have the ability to separate someone else’s actions or provocation or ignorance from our own.  This is the great evolution of consciousness—it’s what separates us from the animals…

Up until recently, Western society was built upon the premise that citizens were self-owning adults capable of self-determination and self-regulation, but as citizenship has been expanded over the last century and a half, the rights associated with it have been dramatically curtailed.  As detailed exhaustively in this blog, modern governments believe they own citizens’ bodies and can control what we do with them to a terrifying degree; now our fellow citizens are trying to control what we can do with our minds.  That is a two-pronged recipe for cultural suicide, and though it may be much too late to avert that, I consider it the duty of every freethinking, self-owning individual to do his or her best to at least go down fighting.Fahrenheit 451 woman

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What Were You All Waiting For?

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , on August 24, 2015| 14 Comments »

There’s this notion of treating sex workers like children who need watching over, but we don’t, and our model is evidence of that.  –  Catherine Healy

eugenics treeFor years I have held the position that the cause of sex worker rights, as part of the whole fabric of recognition of the individual’s right to be unmolested by the state due to private sexual behavior, must inevitably succeed.  As civilization has developed, respect for individual civil rights has steadily grown; certainly the growth has been neither smooth nor consistent, but as a rule the rights of individuals are greater at any randomly-selected point on the timeline of history than they were at any randomly-selected previous point.  For the past century or so the development of individual rights has been impeded by the cancer known as Progressivism, the belief that “experts” have more right to determine what is “good” for any individual than that individual has to determine that for himself, and that said “experts” have the right to dispatch armed thugs to use violence to punish those who dare to violate the arbitrary pronouncements of those experts, in order to terrorize the greater population into meek obedience.  But the bloody consequences of “progressive” thought are at last becoming obvious to all but the True Believers and the hopelessly collectivist, and it’s only a matter of time before drug prohibition follows eugenics, and prohibition of pragmatic sexual activity follows prohibition of non-procreative sexual activity, onto the ash-heap of history.

In recent years, the prohibitionists who saw this trend have been fighting a last, desperate, all-out campaign against the inevitable; it’s no accident that “sex trafficking” hysteria appeared on the scene immediately after three huge developments in sexual freedom (loosening of restrictions on sex work in Germany, decriminalization in New Zealand and the abolition of “sodomy” laws in the US) made it obvious that state control of individual sexual behavior was on its way out.  But any campaign driven entirely by disinformation, conflation, negation of individual agency and pure moral panic cannot last forever, no matter how many billions are pumped into it; slowly but surely the truth will out.  Since the summer of 2012 momentum for decriminalization has been building outside of the demimonde, and a broad coalition of UN agencies, health officials, human rights groups, think tanks, academics and journalists has joined sex workers in demanding that the state keep its filthy hands out of whores’ lingerie.  For over two years now I’ve been waiting for signs that our society had reached the watershed moment, the point at which the momentum would begin to run away from prohibition and toward respect for individual rights again, and I think that finally came two weeks ago when Amnesty International declared its support for decriminalization.  Since then, prohibitionists’ wailing and gnashing of teeth has largely been drowned out by the sounds of jubilation from the harlots’ camp, and a chorus of assent from many who had remained silent on the issue for a long time, such as drug anti-prohibitionist Richard Branson; even prohibitionist-leaning news organizations like The Guardian and Al Jazeera published op-eds cheering the Amnesty decision.  But none of them were as welcome to me as the statement from venerable GLBT rights group Lambda Legal:

…we…applaud and support Amnesty International’s recent resolution to protect the human rights of sex workers by calling for decriminalization of sex work…For many LGBT people, participation in street economies is often critical to survival…Transgender people engage in sex work at a rate ten times that of cisgender women, and 13% of transgender people who experience family rejection have done sex work…LGBT people are regularly profiled, harassed, and criminalized based on the presumption that they are sex workers, contributing to the high rates of incarceration and police brutality experienced by these communities …Laws criminalizing sexual exchange—whether by the seller or the buyer—impede sex workers’ ability to negotiate condom use and other boundaries, and force many to work in hidden or remote places where they are more vulnerable to violence.  Research and experience have shown that these laws serve only to drive the industry further underground…We look forward to working…with sex workers and…Amnesty International, to replace laws that criminalize sex work with public policies that address sex workers’ real…needs.

Lamda-LegalThis is huge; Lambda was a major player in the advances in gay rights over the past forty years, and its support may give our movement the much-needed legal firepower that the ACLU’s abdication of its responsibilities has cheated us of for decades.  To be sure, the conditions mentioned in this statement are nothing new, and had mainstream gay rights organizations not been obsessively dedicated to pursuing the agenda of white, middle-class, monogamous, vanilla gay folk for this entire century so far, they could have been addressing these issues long ago.  But if they’re willing to stop ignoring us at last, and to put their might behind us in earnest, I for one am willing to forgive them.  Gay rights groups, anti-prohibitionist groups, sex-positive groups…I don’t know where you’ve been hiding for the past eleven years, or what you’ve been waiting for to speak up.  But if that’s finally changed, we can discuss it later; right now you’ve got a lot of catching up to do, and we are sorely in need of your help.

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Links #247

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 29, 2015| 8 Comments »

The students do NOT have to eat the Oreo if they do not wish to do so.  –  Mrs. Porter

I’m slowly beginning to catch up, though I still have quite a way to go to be comfortable with my work schedule.  This week’s video was supplied by Popehat, who also provided “protect” and “Jew”; the links above the video came from Wendy Lyon (“resistance”), Jasper Gregory (“cookie”), and Jesse Walker (“911”).

From the Archives

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To the Ground

Posted in History, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on November 5, 2014| 29 Comments »

Governments need to be reminded (at least annually if not constantly)…that [their] overthrow…by a disgruntled minority is always a possibility.  I would like to see most if not all politicians and their minions paying for their power and privilege by being forced to live in a constant state of nervous anxiety.  –  “Guy Fawkes Night”

I only call myself a libertarian because it’s the only popular term which has some general resemblance to the way I see the world.  Technically, what I am is a minarchist, someone who is to an anarchist what an agnostic is to an atheist; I’m also more or less an agorist.  But use either of those terms to most people, even to many libertarians, and you’ll be greeted with blank stares; I had to add both of them to the Microsoft Word dictionary while writing this.  For most uses, “libertarian” is good enough, though it means that I have to endure opprobrium from semi-literates who write for sites like Think Progress, Alternet and Salon and seem to believe that “libertarian” means “caricature of a fundie plutocrat” or even “whatever I don’t like”.  The demonic misnamed “libertarians” in these yahoos’ tiny minds are like cartoon distortions of Ayn Rand characters,Gilded Age political cartoon mustache-twirling (excuse me, “beard-stroking”) villains who are perfectly happy with the system except insofar as their own power-plays are disrupted by the good, noble, valiant white knights in government.  Not counting the cops and the military, of course; those are bad parts of government, totally and completely disconnected from the good parts who only try to “help” people by telling them how to live, why to fuck, whom to associate with, where to shop and what to eat, wear, buy, watch, say, do and think.  Said directives are of course implemented by laws (for our own good, naturally) and enforced (look carefully at that word) by the cops they pretend to disapprove of and locked up in the prisons run by powerful crony-capitalist corporations they pretend to hate (in Facebook posts made on their iPhones).

In truth, I’m as far from many libertarians (especially Libertarians) as I am from most Republicans, Democrats, Greens and Socialists; the main difference is that the vast majority of libertarians, no matter what their flavor, respect my right to have different beliefs from them and different opinions about which issues are most important.  And that makes them in my estimation vastly better human beings than those who assert the right to ownership over my person, my time and my effort, even if I disagree with them on a lot of issues and just can’t get terribly excited about the trials and tribulations of people who’ve made more money since breakfast than I will in my entire life.  One important way, perhaps the most important way, in which I differ from most libertarians (especially Libertarians and “libertarian-leaning” anybodies) is that I do not believe our current system is salvageable.  Unlike most people, I harbor no delusions about American exceptionalism and no 21st-century chauvinism; I refuse to comfort myself with the childish belief that the culture and time in which I live is magically different from all others that have gone before, because of God or science or “democracy” or “feminism” or mass communications or what-have-you.  As a pragmatist and a student of history, I recognize that all cultures  – every last stinking or shining one of them – are as mortal as the humans who build them, albeit on a slightly larger time scale.  No culture is immortal; all of them are born, grow, mature, sicken, decline and die, usually over a period of a few centuries to a millennium at best.  And pretending that wholly different cultures are the same merely because they occupy the same territory and call themselves the same thing is as absurd as insisting that Elizabeth II is actually Queen Victoria.  The United States of history, the patriotic fiction to which so many believe they owe fealty, is as dead as the dodo; it was born with an ugly birth defect which doomed it from the start, and the monstrous doppelganger which grew like some loathsome fungus inside of its carcass would not be worthy of saving even if that were possible.  Nor are the majority of modern Western nations any better.

I’m not calling for a revolution; I’m saying that a revolution is inevitable, whether we like it or not.  The powerful have made it inevitable, despite the best efforts of those philosophically-inclined revolutionaries we call the “Founding Fathers” to minimize the extent to which the power-hungry could take control over the less-able, less-connected, less-ambitious and less-evil.  They wanted to make it impossible for anyone to gain very much power over anyone else; they failed.  It was partly due to the toleration of an institution in which one human being could literally own another (the birth defect to which I alluded earlier), partly due to oversights and errors in the legal instruments they created, and partly due to new and horrific disguises for totalitarianism developed by successive generations, but mostly due to the fact that what they wanted was flat-out impossible; any system of government can and will be remade by the evil to give them power.  Last December, Clark Bianco of Popehat wrote a powerful polemic about what our system has become; in it he refutes the common argument that the system is “broken” (which implies it can be “fixed”, a contention he and I both deny).  It’s well worth your time, but here’s a sample:

Twenty years ago I was a libertarian.  I thought the system could be reformed. I thought that some parts of it “worked”… whatever that means.  I thought that the goals were noble, even if not often achieved.  The older I get, the more I see, the more I read, the more clear it becomes to me that the entire game is rigged…the system is not reformable.  There are multiple classes of people…the bottom of the hierarchy…can, literally, be killed with impunity…Next up…are…regular peons…[who] can have our…rectums explored at the roadside…because the cops got permission from a dog…Next up…are the…disciplined-voting-blocks…[then] the cops…judiciary and…prosecutors…and…at…the [top]…the true ruling class: the cabal of (most) politicians and (some) CEOs, conspiring both against their own competitors and the public at large…The system is not fixable because it is not broken.  It is working, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to give the insiders their royal prerogatives, and to shove the regulations, the laws, and the debt up the asses of everyone else.

Burn it to the ground.

Burn it to the ground.

Burn it to the ground.

The fires have already started, though the Powers That Be are expending considerable effort to extinguish them while simultaneously denying that they exist.  Sooner or later they will develop into a conflagration which will consume the current edifice; with any luck those who next build on the site will be able to salvage a few sound parts of the old structure to incorporate into the new one.  Maybe the next experiment will get a bit closer to the goal and last a bit longer before it, too, degenerates into tyranny.  But history teaches us that is rarely the case; things have indeed slowly improved over the ages, and there’s no reason to suspect that trajectory will change.  But the improvements always come from virile young cultures learning from the mistakes of the old ones, not from moribund old ones too obsessed with past triumphs to bother gazing upon their own decaying visages in the mirror of time. burning capitol

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Fictional Interlude: Eurydice

Posted in Fiction, Tyranny, tagged , , , on July 16, 2014| 11 Comments »

Weave again for sweet Eurydice life’s pattern that was taken from the loom too quick.  –  Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book X

After more than eighteen hours of struggle, during which half a dozen different solutions had been developed and tried, Tanya finally had to accept the fact that the mission for which they had trained so long was a failure.  Their orbit was decaying; already the heat resulting from atmospheric friction was too much for the climate control to handle, and her clothes were plastered to her body with sweat.  Richard was pale when he should have been flushed, and she knew that he, too, grasped the full import of the situation:  they were going to die when the ship broke up, and there was absolutely nothing either they or Mission Control back on Earth could do about it.

“Orpheus One to Mission Control,” he said calmly into the mike.  “Request permission to initiate protocol six-seven-four.”  She did not let her face betray her sinking feelings; though she well understood that the self-destruct mechanism would be far less awful than waiting as many as twelve or fourteen more hours for the inevitable end, this was being televised to the whole world and she was unsure how the authorities were explaining it to the viewers.  “Repeat, protocol Six.  Seven.  Four.”

Venus“Request for protocol six-seven-four received and understood.  Stand by, Orpheus One; will advise shortly.”  Then, more quietly on the private channel:  “Hang in there, Rich, we’ll get an answer for you ASAP.”  Richard smiled bravely at her and squeezed her hand.  The two of them had been selected for compatibility; they both believed passionately in the project and had trained together for two years even before embarking on the months-long voyage to Venus in the cramped quarters of the seeding ship.  It would have been a miracle if they hadn’t fallen in love.  But there was no time to talk about it now when there were still dozens of tasks to perform; even if they were doomed, the telemetry and their reports would make Orpheus Two’s descent into Hell much less likely to fail.

The response from Earth came back with surprising speed; obviously Mission Control concurred with their assessment of the situation.  “Orpheus One, you are cleared for protocol six-seven-four once the commanding and biology officer’s reports are filed.”  And on the private channel: “I’m sorry, Rich, Tanya.  Whenever you’re ready.”

Though they had hoped it would never be necessary, they had drilled this a dozen times.  Tanya had already filed her final report; since the engineering problem had developed before they even started to seed the clouds, there was very little to report.  She checked the valves that would release the anesthesia gas into the cockpit, then opened them once Rich gave the all-clear; as soon as the computer registered that they were completely unconscious, the self-destruct device would automatically engage and the shattered fragments of Orpheus One and her two human occupants would soon come to rest on the surface of the hostile world they hoped to one day make fit for human habitation.

“I love you,” he whispered, embracing her for the last time.

“Oh, I love you so!” she answered through tears, as she slipped into sleep.

***************************************************************

The next thing Tanya was aware of was that it was very cold and much too bright; she thought she must only feel cold because it had been so hot before, but that begged the question of why she should feel anything at all when she was dead.  Eventually her drugged brain concluded that she must not be dead, however impossible that seemed; she started to make out fragments of conversation that seemed to be about her, and then understood that someone – a doctor or nurse? – was telling her that she was safe.  She ventured a complaint about the light, but it was ignored until she had repeated it several times; she then asked for a blanket and that was granted much more quickly.  Then it was a dizzying and unpleasant trip by gurney to a quieter, darker room, strong arms lifting her into a soft bed, and oblivion again.

The next time she woke her mind was instantly alert and full of questions; the attending nurse claimed not to know anything, and called for help when Tanya responded to her advice to lie calm with a string of profanity and demands to talk to someone who “Does know something goddammit!”  That succeeded in getting a hospital administrator there, and he assured her that he didn’t know much more than she did, that he was under orders not to discuss the little he did know, and that a VIP would be there to explain things to her in a few hours.  She used the time to eat, to take her first proper shower in months and to ascertain that wherever she was, it was definitely on Earth (judging by air and gravity) but had no windows.  After an interminable amount of time an orderly brought her one of her own uniforms (freshly laundered) and bade her dress, and then she waited still longer.

Finally, she was ushered into a briefing room, and the VIP turned out to be no less than the Undersecretary of Space Exploration himself.  He had visited the project many times during the training period, and Tanya felt she knew him well enough to be blunt with him; after he greeted her and shook her hand, she responded with “No offense, Mr. Secretary, but what the hell is going on here?”

He sighed and steepled his fingers.  “Tanya, I know you may find this hard to accept at first, but your mission didn’t fail; it succeeded.”

“How so?  The hull design turned out to be unable to withstand the conditions in the upper Venusian atmosphere, and its integrity was compromised before we could even begin the seeding run.”

“Didn’t you find that at all suspicious?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we’ve studied Venus for decades; we’re almost as familiar with its atmospheric conditions as we are with Earth’s.  We’ve sent dozens of unmanned probes there; don’t you think we should know how to build a ship that would stand up to it by now?”

“I’m not an engineer,” Tanya retorted, but she inwardly felt very foolish; of course they could.

“The ship didn’t break up, Tanya; it did exactly what it was designed to do, which was to simulate a doomed terraforming mission.”

“Simulate?” she asked weakly.  “But there was a real ship.  We saw it several times a week for two years.”

“A real mockup.  When you entered the cockpit module, the crane transferred you into the simulator instead of the dummy ship.”

“But why?  What was the point?  I mean obviously you wanted to put on some big survival drama for television, and you didn’t tell us…was Richard in on this?” she asked angrily.

“Richard was as much in the dark as you were.  We wanted your reactions to be authentic.”

“WHY?” she exploded.  “For the love of God, what was it all for?  It must have cost billions!”

He sighed more deeply this time, and seemed to let his practiced poise drop a little.  “Tanya, there are twelve billion people on the planet now; thanks to advances of the past century hunger is a thing of the past, and the number of people in dire poverty is so low it’s barely worth mentioning.  Automation handles all of the jobs that are too dangerous for humans, and we’ve banned all dangerous sports and unhealthy activities; the average person now lives to be one hundred and eight, and spends most of his non-working hours immersed in unproductive fantasy.  Depression is epidemic, and our whole society is drowning in ennui; the population needs a great adventure they can experience vicariously, something they can believe in.  Because when people have nothing to look forward to, they have no reason to go on living.”

“Richard and I often wondered why the government was sending humans on a dangerous mission a robot ship could’ve handled just as well.”

“Now you know.  The point of the mission wasn’t to terraform Venus, which won’t be technically feasible for decades yet despite those bogus figures you were taught; the point was to get the world excited about a huge adventure, to give them heroes to root for and love and cry over and mourn for.  Tomorrow I’m going to a ceremony to unveil plans for a giant memorial for you and Richard.”

“But we’re still alive!”

“A technicality.  We couldn’t allow two such talented scientists to be lost, especially with all the training the state has invested in you; you’ll be given new faces and new identities, and retrained for other work.”

“So we don’t even get to enjoy being heroes,” Tanya said bitterly.

“This isn’t about you.”

“Obviously not.”

“Look, Tanya, I understand you’re upset; the rug’s just been yanked out from under you and everything you thought you knew has been turned upside-down.  I’ve authorized a 50% salary increase plus a very generous bonus package, and I’ve had all your baggage moved from the training center to a secure residence facility near here; soon you’ll be discharged from the hospital and moved there, and you can take as much time off as you need.  We won’t start your retraining until you’re ready, OK?”

“Yeah, great.  Thanks.”

When Tanya was left alone in her new quarters hours later, she proceeded to nervously dig through her bags, hoping to find something which had been among her toiletries at the training center.  At last, she found it; the housekeeper had apparently received no instructions other than to collect all of her things, because if anyone had given it some thought this bottle would almost certainly have been confiscated.  She carefully counted out the pills, allowing four extra to provide a margin for error; she had always had almost textbook reactions to medicine, so she was certain it would be enough.  For the first time since they had embarked on their fake voyage, there was no telemetry taped to her body; by the time anyone checked on her tomorrow, she would already be cold.  As she swallowed the pills in small handfuls with a glass of filtered water, she reflected that the secretary was right about one thing:  she had believed in Project Orpheus with all her heart, and was fervently dedicated to the goal of opening another world up to human colonization.  But that had all been ripped away from her in the last 24 hours, along with her name, her identity, the man she loved and her entire life history.  She had nothing left, except whatever the state decided to magnanimously dole out to her; given the way she had been used without her consent, she had absolutely no faith that her new life would be anything worth looking forward to.  And when people have nothing to look forward to…

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Links #203

Posted in Biography, Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 25, 2014| 3 Comments »

Whiter Shade of Pale was a great song but you’ve gone too far in Nigeria.  –  Wise King Aido

This week, our videos are a couple of commercials.  The first (via Zenon Evans) is a Danish PSA intended to encourage young people to vote; it was pulled after only 24 hours, not for its mockery of nanny-state micromanagement but rather for “sexism”.  The second (via EconJeff, who also contributed “Tom Lehrer”) is a sweet ad for a new airport in a remote part of Turkey; you don’t need to speak the language to appreciate it.  Everything down to the first video was provided by Radley Balko, and those between the videos by Jesse Walker (“headline”),  Furry Girl (“Pygmalion”), Wikileaks (“Sweden”), Dave Barry (“crocodile”), Rick Horowitz (“electrocute” and “contempt”), Cop Block (“together”), Ally Fogg  (“conspiracy”), and Grace (“libertarianism”).

From the Archives

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Links #188

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Obituary, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 9, 2014| 40 Comments »

The human body is not essentially…pornographic, and I think to make it so is a mistake.  –  Pat Robertson

This was one of those weeks in which I couldn’t be sure who was going to take the top position; it went back and forth several times before Radley Balko took it with six.  Popehat and Grace were tied for second place with four each (“irony”, “911”, “nanny”, and “fireman” for Popehat; “Palm Beach”, “3rd”, “hair”, and “spray” for Grace);  Jesse Walker (“gothic”, “Pat Robertson”),  Cop Block  (“10”, “20”) and Edward Cunningham (“together”, “test”) had two each,  and the rest of the links were provided by Franklin Harris (“RIP”), Walter Olson  (“physics”), Police Misconduct (“cop-lovers”), Jasper Gregory (“scrolls”), Jason Kuznicki (“cost”), Jemima (“strip”), Mike Siegel (“ABC”), and Lenore Skenazy  (“sign”).  The Via North Carolina Harm Reduction requested I share the second video, and I discovered the first while reading this article in order to answer a reader question.

From the Archives

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Links #185

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 19, 2014| 20 Comments »

You should view each interaction with the cops with an extreme caution bordering on paranoia, as you would handle a dangerous wild animal.
–  Ken White

Lots and lots of links this week, but a very small average per contributor; even the leader, Radley Balko, had only three (counting the first video, which is extremely funny and well worth ten minutes of your time).  The second video was mentioned by Cliterati back before Christmas, but if North America gets another severe cold snap maybe this will help.  The links between the two videos were provided by Jemima (“Beowulf”), Clarkhat (“four”), Cthulhuchick (“tased”), Jesse Walker (“journalism”), Walter Olson (“chefs”), Aspasia (“atheists”), Nun Ya (“headline”), Laura Lee (“lede”), Grace (“child support”), Mike Siegel (“Hell” & “Barbie”), Mistress Matisse (“link”), Popehat (“texting”), Jason Kuznicki (“prohibitionists”), Lucy Steigerwald (“cage”), Korhomme (“never call cops”), and Jasper Gregory (“Nazi”).

From the Archives

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Fictional Interlude: Millennium

Posted in Fiction, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 15, 2014| 21 Comments »

Righteousness…seems but an unrealized ideal, after all; and those maxims which, in the hope of bringing about a Millennium, we busily teach to the heathen, we Christians ourselves disregard.  –  Herman Melville, White-Jacket

The Second ComingIt was the day for which humanity had been waiting for so long:  the Millennium, the arrival of the Kingdom, the day religions had awaited for half of recorded history.  But when the saviors arrived to usher in a Golden Age of peace and prosperity, they were neither gods nor angels nor prophets, nor even the odd fetus-like entities so many movies and books had depicted for decades; they were people, very much like ourselves.  Oh, there were some obvious differences; they were taller, and more symmetrical, and their skins were as white as alabaster, and there was not a sign of disease or deformity or developmental difficulty amongst them:  in more primitive times they would most certainly have been taken for gods.  But, they hastened to assure us, they were as mortal as we, and really not very different except for being more technologically advanced.  Furthermore, they had come to share their wisdom and technology with us so that we, too, might achieve the level of perfection and happiness they had achieved.

At first, people had thought the video was a clever fake, a hoax that was sure to go viral and thereby promote some new Hollywood film.  But as the weeks went by and no trickster appeared, and the free goods people sent for via their website were revealed by scientists as having no earthly origin, the truth began to dawn:  this time it was real.  Later, the Visitors explained that because they had no wish to frighten us by a sudden arrival, they had observed us for some time and decided that this was the best way to introduce themselves.  It also, some pointed out, conveniently bypassed the possibility that governments approached via diplomatic channels might deny them permission to contact the citizenry, or even hide the fact that they existed, and thereby keep all the goodies the Visitors had to offer for themselves.

And what goodies they were!  Little sticks that plugged into computers or phones and protected them from all hazards, from viruses to surveillance to power surges.  Easily-installed devices that allowed a car to get 100 km per liter of gasoline without producing any hazardous emissions.  Keychain-attachable “panic buttons” that rendered the user impervious to unwanted physical contact.  Filters that silently scrubbed the air in a building of all known pollutants without rendering it stale.  Stylish clothing that fit anyone and never got dirty or wore out.  Nonstick cookware whose surfaces couldn’t be scratched by utensils or eroded by washing.  Everlasting batteries for low-power devices.  And many, many more, all for the asking.  Once they had established their goodwill, they announced that these “trinkets” (their word) represented just the tip of the iceberg, those aspects of their technology which we could use directly and without special instruction; there was plenty more which their trained personnel would be happy to use on our behalf, and to teach our professionals to use also:  weather control.  Super-light, super-strong materials.  Anti-gravity.  Ways to boost immune response so the body could fight off any infection, and a means of healing any injury.  Teleportation.  Synthesis of any substance, no matter how rare.

Of course, there were objections from those whose businesses were undercut or even eliminated by the alien’s gifts, but they responded by launching a program to retrain professionals and give grants to convert factories into producing the new goods…all for free.  As you might expect, some people objected to that as well; they hinted darkly at devil’s bargains, hidden price tags and bills mankind might be loath to pay when they came due.  But there was no enslavement, no cookbook,To Serve Man no looting of Earth’s resources; the Visitors explained that their religion taught them to help others, and that the payment for which they hoped was spiritual, not economic.  That announcement was the tipping point; most of the remaining resistance evaporated afterward, and most of those who still grumbled were atheists and clergymen who were unhappy with the throngs converting to the alien’s religion (for which temples were springing up like mushrooms).  Them, and the people who profit from human misery:  with both want and mental illness eradicated, cops and prosecutors had at first turned toward enforcing victimless crimes with a vengeance, only to find the new technology made that nearly impossible; the Visitors offered them pensions under their “displaced professions” program.

My first glimpse of the big picture came less than two years after they arrived; it started with my skipping a period, and learning to my chagrin that I was pregnant despite having been on the pill since high school.  My gynecologist knew better than to suggest that I had done something wrong, so she wrote it off as “one of those things” and directed me to her new partner, who was handling the obstetrical side of the practice now.  It was the first time I had been in a room with one of them alone; she was as tall as any man I ever dated, and though her voice was gentle and her mouth smiling, her golden eyes pierced me and I was seized by a fear I could not explain.

“So, the nurse tells me congratulations are in order!” she beamed.

“Congratulations?  How do you get that?  I didn’t exactly plan this, you know.”

“Life is full of happy surprises; your people didn’t know we were coming until we arrived, either!”

Under the circumstances, that statement seemed vaguely menacing.  “Yeah, well, that would be fine if I wanted a baby right now, but I don’t.”

“Oh, don’t worry; we have a program to support mothers-to-be with financial difficulties.”  I tried not to recoil from the hand she had placed on my arm; its cool, pale, long fingers made me feel as though some sort of reptile had climbed up on me.

“It’s not that; I have a good job.  It’s just that I’m only twenty-five; I’m not ready to settle down with a baby yet.”

“Oh, but you’re at almost the ideal age!” she cooed reassuringly.

“I would think your science would make considerations like that moot.”

Was that a flicker of hostility in her eyes?  “Well, of course, but isn’t it better to have fewer complications even if those complications can be corrected?”

“You’re changing the subject.  I’m not worried about complications; I’m just not ready to be a mother yet.”

“I understand.  Well, don’t worry, we have an adoption program, too.”

“No, you clearly don’t understand.  I don’t want to go through a pregnancy and then endure the emotional wrench of giving it away; I just want an abortion.”

The eyes registered horror, but just for a moment.  “Oh, well, we don’t do those here.”

“Yes, I know that, but I thought you could recommend a good facility.”

“Well, there aren’t as many of them as there used to be, you know; now that we can save babies down to sixteen weeks, a lot of women are just opting for fetal adoption instead of abortion.”  In response to my “What the hell?” look she continued, “at sixteen weeks we schedule an appointment to transfer the fetus to an artificial womb, from which it can be adopted either immediately or after birth.  Here, you can read up on it,” she said, pressing a pamphlet into my hand; “we’ll schedule a follow-up for next week so you can have time to think.”

From there, I went straight to the lab where my friend George works, and handed him a package from my purse.  “Can you test these and tell me what’s in them?”

“They’re birth control pills; I don’t have to test them.  We can just look it up.”

“Humor me.”

Birth Control Pill ContainerHe looked exasperated for a second, then suddenly brightened.  “Hey, I can use this new analyzer we just got from the Visitors; it’ll give us their exact composition in seconds!”  He put one of the pills into the analysis chamber, followed the menus to set everything up, and then frowned again as the results came up.  “Damn, I must’ve done something wrong.  Cholecalciferol, pyridoxine hydrochloride, cyanocobalamin, calcium pantothenate, ascorbic acid…this is the formula for a multi-vitamin, not a hormonal contraceptive.”

“A prenatal vitamin, I’ll bet.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Nothing.  You didn’t do anything wrong.  But tell me, could these have been manufactured by the Visitors?”

“Well, in a plant using their machines and personnel, very likely.”

“Thanks, you’re a doll.”

“What’s this about?”

“Later,” I whispered.  “The walls have ears.”

I was able to take care of my problem without the doctor’s help, but it wasn’t easy; in fact, the nearest open clinic I could find was three hours away.  And then I started investigating, and though what I found did not really surprise me, it certainly scared me.  Pregnancies in most of the world way up, but those in certain areas way down; I couldn’t see what the low-birthrate areas had in common, but I suspect it’s a high prevalence of some bad genetic trait.  Same-sex marriages down, same sex divorces way up.  Occupancy in psychiatric hospitals and substance abuse programs dramatically down…as are sales of beer, liquor, tobacco and cannabis.  And fast food.  And sweets, pastries, potato chips, ice cream and everything else Puritans had long condemned as “unhealthy”.  Movie and fiction sales way down, self-help book sales way up.  Attendance at the Visitor temples way, way, way up.  And so on, and so forth; the world is turning into a prohibitionist’s idea of paradise.

How are they doing it?  My guess is that if they’re willing to give women placebo birth control, they’re not above slipping mind-altering chemicals into food, water or whatever else they can get their sterile white hands on.  And if they can turn people off to booze, weed and chocolate, they can probably shape the human mind any way they like; I’m sure those who remain unmoved can be “cured” by more intensive therapy, just like they’re “curing” gay people and women who didn’t want children.  As for why, well, isn’t it obvious?  They’re more like us than we imagined.  The word for someone who crosses vast distances to help and enlighten primitives is “missionary”; the Visitors have come to save our souls, whether we like it or not.

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What Next?

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 7, 2014| 14 Comments »

If people point to some prostitutes as victims they should realize, as the judges did, that the very laws in place were much of the cause of that.  –  Terri-Jean Bedford

Merry Christmas from the SCCOn December 20th, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled on the government’s attempt to block the Himel decision (which struck down Canada’s prostitution laws on September 28th, 2010).  The one-line version:  “The prohibitions at issue…prevent people engaged in a risky – but legal – activity from taking steps to protect themselves from the risk.” If you want more detail, here’s the 705-word version, and here’s the whole thing (almost 20,000 words).  The good news is, the court agreed with sex worker rights activists that the chief danger of sex work is not intrinsic to it, but rather results from the laws imposed upon it.  The bad news is, the court suspended its decision for a year to give the government time to write new laws, and there is nothing in it to prevent the imposition of American-style criminalization:

…the Supreme Court’s decision doesn’t touch on the principle of sexual autonomy.  Rather, it cleaves to a tighter, narrower logic…The central metaphor in Bedford is, perhaps oddly, bicycling.  It would be wrong for Canada to allow citizens to ride bicycles, but forbid them to wear helmets.  If a law makes a legal activity more dangerous, it is suspect…sex work is a legal activity, but related prohibitions made it less safe, so the Supreme Court struck down those prohibitions…[but] said nothing about whether sex work itself should be legal…if Parliament introduces new laws that directly criminalize sex work…the logic of Bedford will have very little to add to the next legal fight about prostitution…

Were this the United States, you can bet the legislature’s immediate response would be criminalization.  However, it’s a little different in Canada; though some politicians have been huffing and puffing about the decision every sane person knew was coming for months now, Canada has since the late 1960s maintained a strong tradition (well, much stronger than that of the US, anyhow) that “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.”  In 1988, the historic Morgentaler decision included the statement “[T]he basic theory underlying the Charter [of Rights and Freedoms is] that the state will respect choices made by individuals and, to the greatest extent possible, will avoid subordinating those choices to any one conception of the good life.”  That would seem a strong argument against criminalization, but…

…as with Morgentaler, as with the Chaoulli medicare case in 2005, the court has not presumed to judge the purposes the legislature had in mind.  Whether the state may restrict abortion, or establish a public health-care monopoly, or regulate prostitution are all subjects on which the court has expressly declined to intervene.  All it has insisted in each case is that, in the pursuit of these objectives, the state may not actually kill people, or put their safety at risk…

On the other hand, the government has heavily invested its prohibitionist case in neofeminist rhetoric, and recently adopted the Swedish model as its official position; several MPs have released long-winded “explanations” of the “fact” that women are permanent victims who shouldn’t be allowed to choose sex work.  There is little likelihood that a system proven to increase violence and stigmatization of sex workers would pass muster under Bedford, yet at the same time it would be rather embarrassing for the government to push for the direct criminalization of sex workers after proclaiming us too weak to avoid being controlled by morally-superior clients and “pimps”.

Nikki Thomas, Terri-Jean Bedford and Valerie ScottSo at this point, it’s difficult to predict what might happen next.  Reactions are all over the map; while sex worker activists hail the decision as a victory and prohibitionists either moan that it’s a disaster or bizarrely misinterpret the decision as reinforcement of their catechism, the media is generally being cautious:  The Ottawa Citizen went so far as to print both Jimmy Carter’s (yes, THAT Jimmy Carter) clueless and ignorant plea for the Swedish model, then a debunking of both the plea and the model three days later.  And while it isn’t at all surprising to see pro-decrim articles in Reason or Reality Check, it’s definitely not the usual fare at the Washington Post:

…In the mainstream media, prostitution is almost always conflated with sex trafficking.  One only has to look at Nicholas Kristof’s pieces in The New York Times, for example…But…the…focus on trafficking has not led to policies that keep sex workers safe and healthy.  Especially in the United States, the equation…has led to more spending on law enforcement…If policymakers want to make sex workers’ lives safer, there are many organizations they can learn from.  Sex workers advocate for their rights through groups like the Global Network of Sex Work Projects…the St. James Infirmary… Stella in Montreal, the PACE Society in Vancouver, and Maggie’s in Toronto.  These organizations are effective because they view sex work as work…Every year on Dec. 17, sex worker rights advocates worldwide host events to…underscore the harm of anti-prostitution policies…the Canadian Supreme Court has taken an important step towards abolishing the legal conditions that create this violence.  We should not roll back the clock.

Given that the WaPo recently hired libertarian journalist Radley Balko and several years ago published the first major (though sadly isolated) American debunking of “sex trafficking” mythology, perhaps the wind is shifting away from prohibition there as it is at the UN and the vast majority of human rights organizations.  But just as is the case in Canada, only time will tell.

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