Category: General

Judging by the number of comments left, my last post left a bit of confusion. I believe I made my point clear enough the first time, but let me reiterate: no, I do not think that the police should spy on anyone unless they have reason to believe that their suspect is guilty of a crime. I believe that the Constitutional safeguards found in the Bill of Rights form a good, but not all-inclusive model for the safeguards that must be followed to prevent innocents from being harassed by the police. The proper level of precautions to follow is an empirical matter, depending on the nature of the crime (murderers should get more scrutiny that embezzlers, citizens more than foreigners) and the nature of the technology available to the police (with DNA, there is less need for eyewitness accounts.) Nevertheless, security and liberty cannot exist without the other.

By the way, it is inevitable that cops, judges, and juries will make mistakes. Innocents will be searched and convicted of crimes they did not commit, and perhaps even put to death for their crimes. Reason and evidence are rarely perfect, and that fact that mistakes will happen must be accepted as a given. The precautions and safeguards taken to prevent erroneous convictions will necessarily have to vary with the accuracy of the system, but the question of what amount of risk to tolerate, how many guilty men must be set free to prevent the imprisonment of one innocent is an ethical question that depends on the value one places on the sanctity of an individual human life versus the value one places on maintaining peace and order.

How does one weight the need to carry out justice versus the risk of punishing an innocent? I would say that the liberty of the individual must be placed first because it is its own end, while justice is only the means of ensuring it. Again, these are not mutually exclusive values, and I have yet to see a sound philosophical discourse on the topic. One thing that is clear however, is that the greater the accuracy of the system, the less guilty men will go free and the less innocent men will be punished.

Btw, what do you think of the background color changing to gray on mouseover? Should I just change the background to gray, or leave it white?

Also, please keep up the comments – I do find them entertaining, even if some of my readers (no names) need a good dose of reality.

One more thing I’d like to address is the fallacy of "security vs. liberty" — the notion that our choice is between having a Nazi-like police state and a wild, free-for-all, hedonistic orgy/looting spree. The truth of the matter is that there is no dichotomy between liberty and security, and we cannot have one without the other.

Liberty means "the freedom to engage in any activity which does not involve initiating force against other individuals." Security means "freedom from the initiation of force of other individuals." In other words, liberty is the ability to do as we choose, as long as we respect the same right in others, and security is being free from the force or fraud of others. I should be able to stop there, but the notion of "rights" has been so perverted that I feel that I have to elucidate to get my point across.

Consider the so-called conflict between freedom and security in wiretapping. Is liberty threatened by the attempts of the police to maintain security? If the criminal is truly guilty of a crime, then he is limiting the freedom of others by using force or fraud against them. Wiretapping a criminal is not an infringement of the criminal’s security, but the protection of the liberty and security of his victims. As long as the police take due care to not spy on innocent individuals (by following constitutional safeguards, for example) they are not infringing on anyone’s liberty or security. There is a fine line between being too zealous in going after criminals and being too lax – but there is a line nonetheless, not a murky gray area where both freedom and security are threatened. The precise procedures are an empirical matter for experts in criminology to define – but we must be clear on the philosophical point that neither liberty nor security can exist without the other. If the police allow citizens to run wild and do not act to stop crime, then the life, liberty, and property of innocent bystanders is threatened – and if the police go around strip-searching random victims and breaking into random homes, then everyone’s health and privacy is jeopardized.

This point is especially important to keep in mind as liberals and conservatives wrangle over the various Patriot Act(s) and the "balance" between our freedom and security. So how can we know when we are reaching the ideal? When neither government nor any other goons with guns try to stop you from any taking action that does not initiate force or fraud against others, then you can be sure that both your security and liberty are safe.

Thanks to Hootinan for this story on the State Department’s report that deaths due to terrorism are down from 3,300 in 2001 to "only" 725 in 2002, the lowest in more than 30 years. I can already imagine the spin conservatives and liberals are going to give to this story.

Conservative: "This shows the effectiveness of the new Dept. of Homeland Security/Bush Administration/Federal Airport Security!"
Anti-war liberal: "See, I told you the Bush administration just made up a terrorist threat to turn America into a police state!"

I don’t think the decline in terrorism should be attributed to a huge new federal bureaucracy nor a sudden change of heart among former terrorists. The CIA still has a lot of dedicated and talented men trying to find as many terrorists as the bloated and un-responsive bureaucracy will allow them, and the federalized airport security is a security risk as much as it is a drain of our tax dollars. The major difference between early 2001 and 2002 is the government’s resolve. Granted, the initial determination to find the men responsible for 9/11 was greatly weakened after too many "why do they hate us?" and "love thy Muslim neighbors" tv specials, but the Clinton era pragmatism of lobbing a few cruise missiles into the desert as a pathetically weak response to a terrorist attack was replaced by proactive security agencies that didn’t just ignore known planned attacks, but actively went after terrorists and the regimes that supported them. Terrorists, and especially their leaders, who aren’t as willing to be martyrs for Allah as their brainwashed followers, took notice.

Let me say that again: any difference between pre-9/11 and post-9/11 levels of terrorism is not due to increased funding or more bureaucrats (in fact, I bet that the agencies could do just as well of a job fighting terrorism with half their current budget) — the difference is due to the resolve of the government to actually go after terrorists by letting FBI/CIA/etc agents to do their job.

Are online advertisers getting desperate? I don’t know, but I’ve clicked on more text ads in the last two months, than all the ad banners combined. Collectrix is soon going to provide our own text-ad service, so let me know if you know of a good ad-management system.

Take a look at the following email I sent to the GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard) team. I encourage my readers to send similar emails to organizations or websites that put up “no war” banners.

Dear GnuPG team,
I noticed a “no-war” image on your homepage linked to the U.N. Human Rights Resolution. I am unclear however, who’s “human rights” your project supports. Do you support the human rights of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed by Saddam’s murderous regime? Where is your banner for the human rights of the 3,000 Americans killed by terrorists?

Who do you expect to protect these human rights? Libya, the brutal dictatorship elected to Chair the U.N. Human Rights Commission, or Iraq, Chair of the U.N. Disarmament Conference? Which member of the human rights commission do you expect to champion human rights — Cuba, Vietnam, Syria, Saudi Arabia, or the slave-holding Sudan? Or do you support the “human rights” of the UN officials to exploit Iraqi suffering for their personal gain? There is only one body in the world today that supports the rights of both the victims of terrorism and the victims of dictatorships with more than hollow resolutions: the United States. Towards this end, please note the attached image of the American flag, which you may link to your favorite branch of the United States Armed Forces.

Until your website stops supporting dictators and opposing justice, I will not endorse your views by using your products. If you do not believe that my portrayal of your position is accurate, I look forward to an explanation or elaboration of the “official” stance of the GnuPG project.

Sincerely,
David Veksler, Former GnuPG user.

EPA agents are being used a personal servants, more proof that Saddam worked with Bin Laden, my former economics proffesor Dr Reynolds on his experience at the Dept of Labor, and a very informative interview of Victor Davis Hanson about Iraq, education, and left/right bias in universities.

Thanks to Hootinan for this photo of 18-year-old Ahmed Khatib, who blew himself up for Allah. He’s misinterpreting the "peaceful nature of Islam", right? Some people would beg to differ. Any religion can be used to justify violence and oppression — once people are brainwashed into believing that their own senses and reason are subordinate to "faith", it’s not hard to get them to follow the orders of some mystic. However, there is only one faith in the world consistently being used to justify violence and brutal regimes on a worldwide scale — Islam. Again, the lesson here is not that the Qur’an has some magic line that makes its followers violent — but that whenever reason is systematically subordinated to faith and life of individual sacrificed for some "greater cause", it is only a matter of time before that cause is used for violence — and that lesson is just important for Americans as it for the Arab world.

Last year, I bought an IBM keyboard from CyberRebate, which sold stuff at many times the cost of rebate value, promising to give you a 100% rebate in exchange for paying many times the actual worth of the stuff it sold. If that sounds like a pyramid scheme, it was, and CyberRebate went bankrupt (over $11mln in debt) the week before it was supposed to ship me my $110 check for my $15 keyboard. Even worse, the keyboard driver only worked on Win98/NT, which says something about the crappy companies IBM allows to use its brand name.

Anyway, two weeks ago, I won an Ebay auction for a cool new Logitech keyboard, which was shipped by UPS, and finally got here yesterday. Unfortunately, I was taking a class when the brown truck came by, so I couldn’t be home to sign for it. Meanwhile, my fourth bike was stolen from outside my apartment. This was my third bike stolen this year, all from right outside my apartment. It was a cheap, broken down bike, not worth $10 (after having had two expensive bikes being stolen, I learned my lesson) but my regular transportation is also broken at the moment, so I have to walk a mile to class right around finals. What’s even force is that I had a class right around the time the keyboard was to be delivered today, so as I walked home in my jeans and 82°F, I was hoping to get back before the UPS came by. About ¾ of a mile from home, I saw the UPS truck pull away from my home street, and suddenly became sufficiently frustrated with the $#*$& bastards who stole all my bikes to run half a mile after the truck, track it down in a neighboring block, and proceed to get my package delivered in propria persona. I am still out $110 and four bicycles, but with a shiny new keyboard, I feel much better.

In other news, in my foreign policy class today, we were discussion US unilateralism, and I gave a passionate defense of US unilateralism, bashed European collectivism, Bush’s fence-sitting, AND Clinton’s pragmatism. With the possible exception of the two political thought finals next week, I will never again have to regurgitate Statist BS in a commie POLS class. From now on, you’re only going to hear 100% uncensored, unplugged, uncut greedy capitalist propaganda. Down with collectivism and pass the ammunition!

(Btw, I just plugged in my Logitech Internet Navigator keyboard, and not only am I able to use two keyboards at the same time, but Win XP’s native driver has built-in support for the multimedia keys! The keyboard has a great, albeit slightly too light touch, and in addition to my iFeel mouse, and Wingman joystick, Logitech is the only hardware company about which I don’t have any complaints.)

Check out today’s Cox and Forkum on the topic of my earliest post. Then read Turning Iraq Into Another Iran. Also interesting is an acount of media bias at Hootinan.

Michael Moore is a big fat liar. Take away his Oscar, and don’t forget: