Quotulatiousness

March 17, 2018

“Schedule 7 of [Britain’s] Terrorism Act … effectively treats speech as terror, ideas as violence”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill on the British government’s decision to refuse admission to Canadian videographer Lauren Southern:

In Britain in the 21st century you can be punished for mocking gods. You can be expelled from the kingdom, frozen out, if you dare to diss Allah. Perversely adopting medieval Islamic blasphemy laws, modern Britain has made it clear that it will tolerate no individual who says scurrilous or reviling things about the Islamic god or prophet. Witness the authorities’ refusal to grant entrance to the nation to the alt-right Christian YouTuber Lauren Southern. Her crime? She once distributed a leaflet in Luton with the words ‘Allah is gay, Allah is trans, Allah is lesbian…’, and according to the letter she received from the Home Office informing her of her ban from Britain, such behaviour poses a ‘threat to the fundamental interests of [British] society’.

This is a very serious matter and the lack of outrage about it in the mainstream press, not least among those who call themselves liberal, is deeply disturbing. For what we have here is the ringfencing of Britain from anti-Islam blasphemy. The purification of the kingdom against those who would take the mick out of the Muslim faith. In refusing leave to enter to Ms Southern because she handed out those leaflets, the UK authorities are making it clear that this is a nation in which certain things cannot be said about Allah. They are sending a message not only to Ms Southern but to Britons, too: trolling of Islam is a ‘threat’ to society and counter to ‘the public policy of the United Kingdom’. They haven’t only banned one woman; they have sought to chill an entire sphere of ‘blasphemy’.

Ms Southern was stopped at the border in Calais. She was reportedly questioned under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act. This is an extraordinarily broad and illiberal part of the law. It can be used to stop anyone at Britain’s borders, even if there is no suspicion that they are involved in terrorism. The individual can be detained and questioned for up to nine hours. There is no right to silence. There is no right to a publicly funded lawyer if the person is at a border. That such a repressive measure was allegedly deployed in the questioning of someone for distributing leaflets, for speech, should horrify anyone who cares about liberty. This effectively treats speech as terror, ideas as violence, mere words as things to be kept out of the nation, setting a terrible precedent for free speech in this country.

H/T to Perry de Havilland for the link.

March 13, 2018

From slavery to Jim Crow to the civil rights movement

Filed under: History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb discusses the role of international affairs in reducing racial inequality in the United States from 1877 to 1981:

The year 1877 is significant in America history, as this was the year in which the Federal Government ceased to interfere in the affairs of its Southern States, and these States began to construct the system of white racial supremacy known as “Jim Crow.” It is also a useful starting point for charting the rise of America to world supremacy. In the years before 1914, the Americans regarded opposition to European colonial rule as a prime foreign policy objective. They resented British/Indian control of the far East and they were strongly opposed to any division of China between the European colonial powers. They preached an ’Open Door Policy’ for China in which none of the white powers would have political control.

Again, this concern for the independence and self-determination of others was inconsistent with their own internal policies. As put by Paul Gilroy in the introduction of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, “the American civil war did not end in 1865.” Until the 1960s and even later blacks remained systematically at a legal and social and economic disadvantage in America. In most of the Southern States, blacks were not allowed to vote or to sit on juries, public and most private services were racially segregated, racial intermarriage was made illegal.

[…]

In the end America did not sign the treaty of Versailles and did not join the League of Nations. American domestic affairs remained insulated from foreign affairs. Wilson himself did much to keep them so. The early twentieth century saw a grown of racial consciousness among American blacks, and a number of charismatic leaders emerged to press the case for black equality. These included intellectual activist W. E. B. Du Bois, entrepreneur C. J. Walker, National Equal Rights League founder William Monroe Trotter, and activist Wells-Barnett, and Marcus Garvey, founder of The Universal Negro Improvement Association. These men wanted to attend and address the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Wilson ensured that they were kept out.

By the 1930s, we see a growing realisation of the conflict between foreign and domestic policy. Look, for example, at chapter 26 of Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill A Mockingbird. It is the 1930s and a teacher in the protagonists’ school denounces Nazi mistreatment of the Jews in Germany. She seems completely unaware that the Nuremburg decrees may have compared rather well with the ‘Jim Crow’ system in which she lived.

[…]

What matters about the Cold war for America is that its race relations became a serious embarrassment to its foreign policy. In order to oppose Communism the Americans had to preach their own versions of human rights which included all the usual liberal freedoms – i.e. freedom of speech, freedom of association, equality before the law, and so forth. It also needed the cooperation of an increasing number of non-white post-colonial governments. At every opportunity the Soviets tried to embarrass the Americans by drawing attention to their internal race relations.

Take, for example, the memorandum written in June 1963 by Thomas Hughes, Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research at the State Department. He summarises some of the main themes of Soviet broadcasts to the Third World: Capitalism provides a natural environment for racism, which will never end so long as the American system needs cheap labour; the federal government’s policy of limited intervention in Southern conflicts is tantamount to support of Southern racism; the United States cannot claim to be the leader of the free world while hypocritically refusing to support civil rights within its own borders.

Hughes adds that, most politically damaging, Soviet broadcasters were arguing that American domestic policy toward its black citizens was ‘indicative of its policy toward peoples of color throughout the world.’ Emerging African, Asian, and South American nations, in other words, should not count on Americans to support their independence.

The journalist Walter Lippmann had noted in 1957 that

    the work of the American propagandist is not at present a happy one…. [Segregation] mocks us and haunts us whenever we become eloquent and indignant in the United Nations…The caste system in this country, particularly when as in Little Rock it is maintained by troops, is an enormous, indeed an almost insuperable, obstacle to our leadership in the cause of freedom and human equality.

We can write the history of the American civil rights movement purely in terms of domestic politics. We can for example write about the Brown decision and ’Massive Resistance’ and the crisis in Little Rock. Of course this is entirely legitimate. The struggle for racial equality has deep roots in American history and may well have triumphed even had there been no other countries in the world. However it does seem reasonable to see an international dimension in the rapid progress of racial equality after the 1940s.

QotD: Seekers of absolute power

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

Barry Goldwater, GOP nomination acceptance speech, 1964.

March 6, 2018

Playboy‘s extortion attempt against Boing Boing dismissed

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Back in January, I linked to the bizarre story of Playboy attempting to sue Boing Boing for the terrible crime of … linking. On the web. I’m not making this up. Thankfully, common sense finally did triumph as reported on Monday:

In January, we let you know that Playboy had sued us. On Valentine’s Day, a court tossed their ridiculous complaint out, skeptical that Playboy could even amend it. Playboy didn’t bother to try.

We are grateful this is over. We are grateful for the wonderful work of the EFF, Durie Tangri, and Blurry Edge, our brilliant attorneys who stood up to Playboy‘s misguided and imaginary claims. We are glad the court quickly saw right through them.

Playboy damaged our business. This lawsuit cost our small team of journalists, artists and creators time and money that would otherwise have been focused on Boing Boing‘s continued mission to share wonderful things.

March 3, 2018

5 Great Libertarian Movies!

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 06:00

ReasonTV
Published on 2 Mar 2018

Forget the Oscars! Here are five great movies made over the past quarter-century that any libertarian will (must?) enjoy.
_____

The Incredibles (2004)

This Pixar film directed by Brad Bird is so full of speeches extolling individualism, it sometimes sounds like an Ayn Rand novel (in fact, Rand is clearly part of inspiration for the character of Edna Bird). Even the supervillain in The Incredibles is a creature of self-invention and self-improvement. While the Incredibles are born with their powers, Syndrome is a normie who worships Mr. Incredible and is desperate to be his sidekick.

Like an animated version of Richard Nixon, Syndrome’s ambition ultimately gets the best of him.

The Barbarian Invasions (2003)

Québécois director Denys Arcand’s brilliant sequel to The Decline of the American Empire is the single-best depiction of the depredations of socialized medicine. Canada’s health-care system is so sclerotic that the movie’s protagonist, a retired academic named Rémy, cannot even score the drugs he needs to commit suicide until his estranged son, a banker, buys them on the black market.

Even more disturbing is the moment when the terminally ill Rémy and his former colleagues admit that their intellectual faddishness led them to embrace every awful left-wing “ism” of the past 30 years despite their massive human toll.

Dallas Buyers Club (2013)

Set in the 1980s, Matthew McConaughey plays Ron Woodroof, a boozey roughneck who is given 30 days to live after being diagnosed with AIDS. Faced with a death sentence, he schools himself on a wide variety of treatments, first in Mexico and then all over the world. With the help of a cross-dressing party girl named Rayon, Woodroof skirts FDA prohibitions against importing, using, and selling unapproved drugs by creating a “buyers club,” in which members pay a monthly fee and assume all risks.

The depiction of official indifference to patient suffering and the bureaucratic quashing of medical freedom even for people who are certain to die is inspirational, especially now that even Donald Trump has endorsed “right-to-try” legislation that would allow terminally ill patients access to non-approved medicines.

Joy (2015)

Jennifer Lawrence became a mega-star playing the anti-government rebel Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games movies. While there’s no shortage of libertarian sentiment coursing through that trilogy, it’s actually a quieter movie starring Lawrence that embodies libertarian virtues of hard work, commercial innovation, and entrepreneurship.

In Joy, Lawrence plays real-life “Miracle Mop” inventor Joy Magano, who helped make cleaning your floors easier while making herself rich. The film is nothing less than a paean to capitalism’s genius at allowing self-expression and self-fulfillment.

In a dramatic scene with Bradley Cooper, who plays an executive at a home-shopping network, Joy summarizes in a few sentences what it took Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman whole books to say.

As former Reason Editor Virginia Postrel wrote, the film “acknowledges the wealth-creating value of incremental improvements even in the most mundane items.”

Ghostbusters (1984)

Released in 1984, Ghostbusters quickly became one of most successful comedies in film history.

The movie was perfectly in synch with the Reagan Revolution’s valorization of business and demonization of government. Ghostbusters begins with a team of paranormal investigators getting kicked out of Columbia University and starting a ghost-hunting business. But even though New York is literally being invaded by evil spirits, the real villain of the movie is not the otherwordly demon Gozer but an Environmental Protection Agency bureaucrat named Walter Peck, who shuts down their operation and puts the city at risk.

Well, what do you think? How far off the mark are we? What great libertarian movies would you add to the list? Let us know in the comments.

Produced by Todd Krainin. Written and narrated by Nick Gillespie.

March 1, 2018

Penn & Teller – The Right Not to be Offended

Filed under: Education, Humour, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

DeadJ0ker27
Published on 19 Feb 2010

I’m personally offended by people who get offended.

February 28, 2018

QotD: Words as “physical violence”

Filed under: Education, Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Berkeley. Evergreen. Middlebury. Missou. Yale. Brown. McMasters. Wilfred Laurier. The list goes on. One must wonder where this trend will ultimately take us. There have been several justifications given for this increasing rash of no-platforming, shaming, and at times, physical violence on North American campuses. In essence, these justifications can be distilled into a triad of well-meaning but ultimately flawed theses, namely, 1.) that all discourse is about power and that any speech that renders a listener physiologically uncomfortable therefore rises to the level of a physical attack upon that individual, thereby justifying actual physical violence in response, 2.) that for the sake of historically marginalized voices, persons who are members of historically privileged groups should forfeit their right to free speech or ought to remain silent, 3.) that certain assertions, even if possibly true, are nonetheless morally impermissible to make since to do so will likely create conditions whereby bad-intentioned persons will inevitably and successfully advance their morally heinous projects.

This first thesis — that all discourse is fundamentally about power — finds its philosophical origins in the likes of post-modernists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. To quote Foucault, “Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations.” Thus, on Foucalt’s view, if all discourse is, at heart, really just veiled force relations between competing groups; if language isn’t fundamentally capable of being about objective truth or about the world in any meaningful sense, then the ink symbols written on the page and the shaped air admitted from one’s mouth in the forms of ‘rationality’, ‘facts’, ‘knowledge’, and ‘truth’ are just another set of weapons in a person’s overall arsenal to seize and maintain power, no different in kind from weapons of a physical sort. To speak then, on Foucault’s view, is to wield a weapon, albeit a subtler and refined one. The uncomfortable physiological feeling of hearing offensive speech, it would then seem, vindicates this view that one is being attacked. One might thus conclude, “Why not attack back with heavier, more effective, and more expedient weapons?”

Michael Robillard, “In Defense of Offense”, Quillette, 2018-02-05.

February 25, 2018

Assassin’s Creed: Games with a Libertarian View of the World

Filed under: Gaming, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published on 23 Feb 2018

A look into the philosophy of Ubisoft’s long-running franchise.

—————-

Video games have become one of our most influential, popular, and creative forms of media. Last year, the industry generated almost $150 billion in revenue worldwide, rivaling books and films and dwarfing music.

Gamers spend over three billion hours a week in the virtual worlds of their choosing. And more so than other contemporary forms of media, video games explore the themes of freedom and personal agency, allowing players to go where they want and do what they please — as long as they’re prepared to bear the consequences. Two of the three best selling video games of all time are Grand Theft Auto 5 and Minecraft. They’re polar opposites in terms of violence and target audience, but both were designed to offer players the opportunity to make their own destinies.

But it’s the Assassin’s Creed series, published by Ubisoft, that puts the conflict between liberty and authority at the center of its plots, its characters, and the alternate history in which the games are set. Reason takes a look at the series’ narrative merits, and at the titular creed.

Written and edited by Ian Keyser. Read by Andrew Heaton. Gameplay footage by Sean Keyser.

“Plague” by Kai Engel is used under CC BY 4.0.

February 23, 2018

Timothy Sandefur’s Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man

Filed under: Books, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jonathan Bean responds to a negative review of Sandefur’s new biography in the New York Times:

Frederick Douglass, whose bicentennial birthday fell on Valentine’s Day, is one of the great figures in American history, a hero whose legacy is celebrated even by those who might otherwise contest his actual ideas.

Illustrating this truth, the New York Times marked the occasion by publishing a largely negative review of Timothy Sandefur’s new biography, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man — a book that depicts the African-American ex-slave and social reformer as a classical liberal who championed individual liberty based upon natural rights, self-reliance, and Rule of Law.

The book reviewer, Yale University historian David W. Blight, criticizes Sandefur and other “conservatives” for “co-opting” Douglass. (Sandefur is a self-described libertarian, but in Blight’s mind, ‘libertarian’ and ‘conservative’ are distinctions without a difference.) In making this complaint, Blight demonstrates his confusion as to the meaning of “the Right” and classical liberalism.

Blight concedes that Douglass was a “radical thinker and a proponent of classic 19th-century political liberalism” who “loved the Declaration of Independence” and “the natural-rights tradition.” On these issues, Blight’s view is consistent with Sandefur’s libertarian interpretation of Douglass.

Yet, Blight goes on to protest that the libertarians (or conservatives — he conflates the two groups) are wrong to co-opt Douglass because the great abolitionist “believed that freedom was safe only with the state and under law.”

But this view of freedom’s security is not one that libertarians would dispute. To say otherwise is to make a classic straw man argument.

[…]

Blight’s review gets two things about political classification especially wrong. First, classical liberalism is neither Left nor Right. Throughout history, classical liberals have extolled “unalienable Rights,” individual freedom from government control, the U.S. Constitution as a guarantor of freedom, color-blind law, and capitalism. These values distinguish classical liberalism from left-wing liberalism, with its emphasis on group rights, equality of outcomes, and hostility to free-market capitalism. They also put classical liberals squarely in opposition to nativists and white supremacists who used the law as a weapon to exclude “undesirable” immigrants or separate the races in the American South.

Second, “libertarianism” — the modern descendant of classical liberalism — is not and never has been a “do-nothing” philosophy. Classic liberals (or libertarians) were activists for abolishing slavery, eradicating segregation, defending immigrants’ rights, passing anti-lynching measures, and much more. Indeed, although they recognized the role that law played in protecting the exercise of liberty, it was the law that so often violated the inalienable rights of Americans. Classical liberals fought slavery, segregation, pernicious immigration quotas, internment, and “affirmative action” because these government measures denied individuals equal protection of the law.

Blight’s conceptual errors may account for why he sometimes badly misreads his subject. He claims, for example, that Douglass loved “the reinvented Constitution — the one rewritten in Washington during Reconstruction, not the one created in Philadelphia in 1789.” This is a gross mischaracterization of Douglass’s views.

February 22, 2018

QotD: The importance of defining your terms

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If you don’t understand these [gun-related] terms already, why should you care? You should care because when you misuse them, you signal substantially broader gun restrictions than you may actually be advocating. So, for instance, if you have no idea what semi-automatic means, but you’ve heard it and it sounds scary, and you assume that it means some kind of machine gun, so you argue semi-automatics should be restricted, you’ve just conveyed that most modern handguns (save for revolvers) should be restricted, even if that’s not what you meant.

It’s hard to grasp the reaction of someone who understands gun terminology to someone who doesn’t. So imagine we’re going through one of our periodic moral panics over dogs and I’m trying to persuade you that there should be restrictions on, say, Rottweilers.

Me: I don’t want to take away dog owners’ rights. But we need to do something about Rottweilers.
You: So what do you propose?
Me: I just think that there should be some sort of training or restrictions on owning an attack dog.
You: Wait. What’s an “attack dog?”
Me: You know what I mean. Like military dogs.
You: Huh? Rottweilers aren’t military dogs. In fact “military dogs” isn’t a thing. You mean like German Shepherds?
Me: Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody’s trying to take away your German Shepherds. But civilians shouldn’t own fighting dogs.
You: I have no idea what dogs you’re talking about now.
Me: You’re being both picky and obtuse. You know I mean hounds.
You: What the fuck.
Me: OK, maybe not actually ::air quotes:: hounds ::air quotes::. Maybe I have the terminology wrong. I’m not obsessed with vicious dogs like you. But we can identify kinds of dogs that civilians just don’t need to own.
You: Can we?

Because I’m just talking out of my ass, the impression I convey is that I want to ban some arbitrary, uninformed category of dogs that I can’t articulate. Are you comfortable that my rule is going to be drawn in a principled, informed, narrow way?

So. If you’d like to persuade people to accept some sort of restrictions on guns, consider educating yourself so you understand the terminology that you’re using. And if you’re reacting to someone suggesting gun restrictions, and they seem to suggest something nonsensical, consider a polite question of clarification about terminology.

Ken White, “Talking Productively About Guns”, Popehat, 2015-12-07.

February 18, 2018

“The minority of one is the most oppressed minority of all”

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Matt Ridley on the rising tide of neo-Victorian prudery in western society:

Is it so different here or are we slipping down the same slope? Pre-Raphaelite paintings that show the top halves of female nudes are temporarily removed from an art gallery’s walls; young girls are forced to wear headscarves in school; darts players and racing drivers may not be accompanied by women in short skirts; women are treated differently from men at universities, as if they were the weaker sex, and saved from seeing upsetting paragraphs in novels; sex is negotiated in advance with the help of chaperones. We have been here before.

In Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s novel of 1928, she portrayed the transition from the 18th century to the Victorian period thus: “Love, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases. The sexes drew further and further apart. No open conversation was tolerated. Evasions and concealments were sedulously practised on both sides.”

How we laughed at such absurdity in my youth. But even for making the point that some of the new feminism seems “retrograde” in promoting the view that women are fragile, the American academic Katie Roiphe suffered a vicious campaign to have her article in Harper’s magazine banned before publication. “I find the Stalinist tenor of this conversation shocking,” she told The Sunday Times. “The basic assumption of freedom of speech is imperilled in our culture right now.”

The sin of blasphemy is back. There are things you simply cannot say about Islam and increasingly about Christianity, about climate change, about gender, to mention a few from a very long and growing list, without being accused of, and possibly prosecuted for, “hate speech”. Is it hate speech to say that Muhammad “delivers his country to iron and flame; that he cuts the throats of fathers and kidnaps daughters; that he gives to the defeated the choice of his religion or death: this is assuredly nothing any man can excuse”? That was Voltaire, one of my heroes. You may disagree with him but you should, in accordance with his principle, defend his right to say it. In demanding tolerance of minorities, many younger people seem to be remarkably intolerant.

There is an odd contradiction between the declared wish to live and let live — “diversity!”, “don’t judge!” — and the actual behaviour, which is ruthlessly and priggishly judgmental. They never stop drafting acts of uniformity, always in the name of the collective against the individual. The minority of one is the most oppressed minority of all.

February 14, 2018

George Orwell’s 1984 in 5 mins – Animated

Filed under: Books, Liberty — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Shaun McKinnon
Published on 8 Jan 2014

A Happy Orwellian 2014 to you all!
Winston Smith’s adventure animated in cartoon form.
Check out George Orwell’s 1984 Video: Synopsis, analysis, and discussion of major characters and themes in the novel.
Doublethink. Thought Police. Big Brother is Watching You. Julia. Ministry of Truth.
Nineteen Eighty-Four. Room 101.
Obama. NSA. Snowden.
SparkNote Documentary. Audiobook.
Made by Shaun McKinnon in Australia.

February 10, 2018

Protecting (some) women from their own decisions

Filed under: Business, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Kirio Birks on the Formula One “grid girls”:

Objectification, we are told, is degrading. Why? Because any job that requires employees to be sexually attractive and gazed upon for that reason necessarily dehumanises them. It encourages others to treat them as pretty ‘things’ rather than as autonomous people with their own lives, passions, thoughts, and desires. Or so the thinking goes. ‘Grid Girls’ – models employed by Formula One for promotional purposes – have just discovered that their role is to be discontinued. As Formula One’s managing director of commercial operations explained: “While the practice of employing grid girls has been a staple of Formula 1 Grands Prix for decades, we feel this custom does not resonate with our brand values and clearly is at odds with modern day societal norms.”

But in their hurry to spare Grid Girls the indignity of the male gaze, nobody making this argument seems to have stopped to wonder whether Grid Girls might have an interest in defending what they do. Instead, a collective of ostensibly progressive voices leapt to their defence without bothering to ask the girls themselves if they needed defending at all. In response, Formula One abandoned its Grid Girls so that it can be seen to be moving with the times and hip to contemporary mores. In doing so, Formula One’s executives have implicitly conceded that they have spent too long objectifying women instead of empowering them. They would like it to known that they’d rather see women driving the cars, or as members of the engineering teams, or just about anywhere other than track-side holding a driver’s name-board and looking beautiful.

What baffles me is that a move supposed to empower women came at the expense of other women, and only because a minority of outsiders found Grid Girls inappropriate, problematic, and otherwise an offence against good taste. But even if Grid Girls are being objectified, then – contra the explanation offered above – it’s not at all clear that objectification is wrong in and of itself. It is acceptable to use people as a means to an end – that’s called employment. Grid Girls obviously know that they will be objectified and they make an autonomous, informed decision to take the job anyway. They are not harmed, they are paid for their time and their work, and many of them have come forward to say, with understandable indignation, that they enjoy what they do. Needless to say, this has not impressed those feminists who applauded their redundancies. But surely a woman has a right to be the object of somebody else’s desire if she wants and surely it doesn’t matter if she is being paid for it?

Opponents may suggest that Grid Girls have internalised their own oppression in a society shaped by patriarchal values, but not without making two claims: (1) that Grid Girls are unable to adequately think for themselves because of the society they live in and (2) that thinking for yourself is only evidenced by acknowledging the existence of a patriarchal status quo and resisting it.

February 9, 2018

John Perry Barlow, RIP

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Gareth Corfield on the death of John Perry Barlow, author of the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:

John Perry Barlow, a co-founder of the US Electronic Frontier Foundation, and also a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, has died aged 70.

Barlow passed away “quietly in his sleep” yesterday, according to the EFF, which he helped set up in 1990.

“It is no exaggeration to say that major parts of the Internet we all know and love today exist and thrive because of Barlow’s vision and leadership. He always saw the Internet as a fundamental place of freedom, where voices long silenced can find an audience and people can connect with others regardless of physical distance,” said the foundation’s executive director, Cindy Cohn.

The BBC reported that Barlow had been ill for several years but “few details were given about his medical problems”.

In the history of the Internet, Barlow will be forever remembered for his 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

“I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear,” wrote Barlow, a bold vision of the future that, sadly, did not come to pass.

The EFF defended Barlow against the inevitable criticisms of the Declaration, with Cohn acknowledging that he was “sometimes held up as a straw man for a kind of naive techno-utopianism” but insisting that he understood “new technology could create and empower evil as much as it could create and empower good”.

I wasn’t a fan of the Grateful Dead, but I read his Declaration soon after it was released and found it inspiring (if not particularly realistic, even then). Few people can have a significant role in a single endeavour, but Barlow was undeniably prominent in the music scene and the early internet community. We’re all poorer for his passing.

February 6, 2018

The “Socialist Caucus” of the US “Libertarian” Party

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

L. Neil Smith is unhappy with the US Libertarian Party, but this is nothing new — he’s been against the party’s long drift away from philosophical libertarian principles and policies for decades. However, after hearing that the party had turned down Ron Paul and Andrew Napolitano as speakers at the next national convention at the urging of a pack of drooling morons calling themselves the “Socialist Caucus of the Libertarian Party”:

The first article I read (in a movement publication) about the current situation wanted to claim that Ron started the libertarian movement, or at least the party, and maybe set the Moon and stars in the sky, but that’s not true, and I don’t believe that kindly Dr. Paul would ever make a claim like that for himself. It overlooks the lives and lifelong labor, decades earlier, of freedom-fighters like Leonard Reed, Ayn Rand, John Hospers, and Roger Lea MacBride (look them up) not to overlook Dave Nolan. Nevertheless, Ron has been an integral member of the tribe that calls itself “libertarian” for more than forty years, and was such a consistently libertarian member of Congress that his less-principled colleagues (when they weren’t asking him how to vote) called him “Dr. No”.

Thus, to proclaim with grand stupidity, as LP Convention Coordinator Daniel Hayes does (whoever he is), that the former Congressman has no idea what the Party stands for, speaks of abysmal ignorance and profound disrespect. The fact that this ass-clown is also an At Large member of the Libertarian Party National Committee, shows what massive trouble the Party is in. Trouble that it is very likely not to survive.

And now I’ll confess to some ignorance of my own. When I started this article, I thought I knew who Judge Andrew Napolitano is. I have always enjoyed seeing him on FOX, visiting with the ladies. However I followed my own advice and looked him up, in Wikipedia, because that’s easiest. This guy is an unapologetic, uncompromising libertarian on steroids. I urge you to look him up, yourself, you will be amazed.

Dr. Paul, it appears, is in trouble because he criticized the LP’s laughable 2016 campaign, an effort that only needed another 23 clowns and a tiny car to make the picture complete. Apparently, the Party is now run to cozy up to a vile creature named Mike Shipley, founder of an obscene excrescence called the Socialist Caucus of the Libertarian Party. If I weren’t already out of the Party, that, alone, would cause me to quit. Don’t the teachings of Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises mean anything anymore? Socialism is the “philosophy” that murdered two hundred million people in the 20th century and there is no difference in principle between it and the blackest, most evil communism that ever existed. Besides a profound and willful historical blindness, what mental illness afflicts low, crawling organisms like this Shipley? Or those who tolerate him and welcome him into the ideological home that others (and betters) built?

This is what comes of claiming in the lilting rich and fruity falsetto voice of Political Correctness, that there are “right” libertarians and “left” libertarians, What bloody nonsense. There are, in fact, only libertarians, those governed by the Principle of Non-Aggression (which the LP has tried to toss overboard every minute of the past twenty years), and those non-libertarians who are not. There is also, apparently, a creature called Nicholas Sarwark, the National Chairman who, according to the article I read, thinks Bernie Sanders is a libertarian. I looked him up, too; he’s a typical product of the confused Arizona politics that gave us John McCain, Jeff Flake, and Jan Brewer. He is on record having called the Ludwig von Mises Institute a Nazi organization and wouldn’t know a real libertarian if it walked up to him and pissed in his ear. The fact that he’s been “embedded” in the LP for so long (look him up, too) is a further symptom of its dire distress.

Years ago, when the LP nominated a candidate of dubious integrity who handed out over a million dollars in campaign contributions to his cronies and family as “consultant fees”, I ran against him in one state (Arizona, again) to deprive the LP of 50-state ballot status, something they seemed to think was important. It wasn’t much, and many people still hate me for it, but a statement had to be made against corruption. I made it and I will never regret it.

This current disaster is the direct result of tolerating Political Correctness even a little bit. It is no different, in principle, from inviting Anti-Fa into your living room. The LP needs a purge, and then the system of internal education I proposed almost 40 years ago. Until then, Hayes, Shipley. Sarwark, and others of your collectivist ilk, watch your ballots for something called “The Real Libertarian Party” — and see the LP vote split right down the middle.

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