Modern Slavery

Do you think that there just aren't any powerful people who would like to have you as a slave?  You have to admit that there probably are, right?  But they don't have access to you, right?  You're just one of millions, so how could they get to you to make you a slave?

Do you think they'd let on that they're using you as a slave, if they are?  Or would they hide it?  What would be the symptoms of enslavement, and could they be masked so that even if you are a slave, you wouldn't struggle against it?  You'd do things you don't want to do because you're afraid of punishment, right?  But the agents who inflict the punishment wouldn't be slave masters.  They'd be painted to seem... legitimate, some kind of authority that you are taught to respect because they help you and protect you.

If you don't eat, you starve, and this forces you to eat.  Breathing is the same way.  Is there a slave master who forces you to eat and breathe?  In that sense, you are already a slave to biology and physics.  Does that make it ok to be a slave to other people?  What's the diffference between other people and nature?  Does nature have a choice about keeping you alive when you don't eat or you don't breathe?  Do we have any reason to believe that struggling against that enslavement would free us from having to eat and breathe?  What about other people?  If they didn't spend time punishing slaves for failing to comply with the laws of their enslavement, what would they do during that time?

I see a lot of slavery that is unintentional.  Many people spend time punishing each other for not yielding to each other's demands.  In most cases, the punisher will recognize the ugliness of his or her behavior, and work to improve it, but exploiting those creatures around you who will yield to your threats seems to be instinctual.

I see intentional and deceptive slavery too.  People in positions of power aren't all vapid thugs.  Many of them understand that spending time punishing people for not complying with their demands is a black thing to do, but they do it anyway because they feel their ugliness can be hidden well enough to maintain their happiness.  We all do that a little bit - hide our ugly choices so that people won't hate us.  Some of us try to stop making these choices, and we find the comfort of being innocent.  Even when we find ourselves punishing others for failing to comply, we retain the essence of innocence by recognizing the ugliness and trying to do better.  Others don't bother.  Which side are you on?

When the analysis of their own lives suggests that the stinking rot in their soul is not degrading their lives as much as freeing others from enslavement would, many people just leave it be.  Those in positions of power obviously have an easier time with this, especially when that bad smell is largely transferred to agents who are made to feel it is their duty to inflict punishments on those who don't comply.  This is one of the ways in which power corrupts.  Do you smell that smell yet?

Abolishing slavery is going to take more than some proclamation by a government.  The slave mentality ought to be recognized by the majority of us.  Its disgusting scent ought to be named, and each of us ought to demand freedom.  I wrote this essay in an attempt to help clear the air a bit, to give those people in power a bit more evidence that some of us know where the stench emanates from.  Perhaps they will start cleaning up their act.

Hey TSA, let some planes explode.!

I know I'm heartless, but I think the fear of bankruptcy would create a much richer and more robust safety solution than the US government is capable of creating with tax revenue.  The idea is to allow airlines to decline passengers for any reason they want (can they do that now?  I don't know.)

Once this is in place, each airline that suffers a terrorist attack would bear a significant burden to stay in business.  People would blame the company for letting the nuts on the plane, rather than the nuts, who can't really be blamed because, well, they're nuts.  More importantly, people wouldn't blame whole countries or invent WMDs to justify immoral and wasteful wars against them.

We are suffering from a failure to distinguish.  Some airlines operate in a way that makes it slightly more difficult for the nuts to hurt us.  We should know which airlines they are, and, depending on how important that kind of safety is to us, their market share will adjust accordingly.  The free market is the best mechanism to calculate the portion of air-travel expense that should go toward the thwarting of terrorist attacks (as well as every other calculation of what proportion of expense should go toward what desirable outcome).

The Killing Crutch

Please critique this and I will discard or rewrite as appropriate.

Dave.

This morning I heard that Michelle Obama had visited a farmer's market near the White House.  I thought it was wonderful.  However, having read a little Rothbard, I knew there was something wrong with this picture.  How could the administration be encouraging local growers and such when the big corporate interests are so threatened by them, and when local growers create such independence and strength in the citizenry?  It turns out they have a rather brilliant (albeit perverted) plan.

Google "atrophy crutch" (without quotes). Read the one at Everything2: http://everything2.com/title/crutch

Atrophy is the general goal of government and explains a lot of the seemingly unnecessary "help" it provides to people, such as what Michelle said: "I want to reinforce the fact that this market and other farmers' markets around the city participate in the WIC program, the SNAP program, the Double Dollar program, and the Seniors benefits program. And each SNAP and WIC dollar equals two dollars at a farmers' market to purchase fresh produce."

What atrophies here is the farmer's markets' motivation and ability to advertise and educate people who are not on welfare. She's basically saying, look, if you're poor, be a customer of these local food growers and we'll get all the taxpayers to help pay your way.

But why would the government have atrophy as a goal? Don't worry it isn't obvious until you think about it. The weaker you are, the more likely you are to choose the brute force of a government over the hard work of finding and building trading relationships with other citizens to support yourself.  Grow weak and stupid, and see how hard it is to "just say no" when his lordship the president offers to make your neighbor give you dinner.  We wouldn't sink if they weren't trying to sink us, but they know that we wouldn't need them either.  This is the problem England faced in the late 1700s.  They tried using their brute force to keep us enslaved, but that didn't work out too well.  So now governments force support on us wherever we have strength in order to diminish it, and Farmer's Markets is an excellent example.

However, there's a whole other side to the reason government intentionally creates atrophy.  We all know that DC is a whorehouse in which corporations are the tricks, the politicians are the whores, and the taxpayers are their families – the ones who really get screwed. Atrophying the specific abilities citizens have that enable them to avoid using the services of a corporation is a natural goal of the corporation. Since the corporate-government partnership is so seedy and well supported ($2.8B lobbying industry: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P3-1461231811.html), we should expect to see government stealthily atrophying whatever they can, and generally that means competition from the little guy.

In any case, I learned that this goes a little deeper.  The NPR story that I heard reports that "Tom Vilsack showed up at that farmer's market, and announced $4.5 million in grants to promote farmers markets nationwide." (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112983926). So there's another $4.5M crutch that the government will be using to destroy farmer's markets while pretending to help. If they really wanted to help, domestic military schools and camps like Pendleton and Anapolis would be buying their produce from farmer's markets. Look into that and note the great void.

You may be wondering if I see any role for the money collected through taxation - because if they use it to help, I call it a crutch, and if they use it to harm, I lambast them for harming us.  True enough:  I see no role whatsoever for money collected through taxation.  Once money is taken by force, the only good use of it is to be returned to those who earned it.  The government would have to provide services that people - the people who pay the "tax" - actually wanted.  If they did this, it wouldn't be a tax - it would be a price, just like what private enterprise charges its (hard earned) customers.

This is one small example of the disease that plagues this country.  Please join me in spreading the awareness that government has grown into a deceitful parasite gorging itself with taxes and destroying our independence.  It is a wolf in sheep's clothing.  It soothes us with calming words and superficial kindness as it drains our lifeblood.  But it will be diminished, and sooner if you help.

The Sword of Damocles

The versions of the story from modern times suggest that an imminent danger comes with having wealth.  I have no idea why the story would be told that way.  It seems more an injuction against the method one uses to gain the wealth rather than the actual having of it.  The wealthy person, in this case was, after all, a cruel and unjust king who was known as a tyrant.

James Baldwin wrote the version I just read, and in it, he writes that Damocles says "I now see that I was mistaken, and that the rich and powerful are not so happy as they seem."  Would he have said to King Dionysius, "King Dionysius, whatever threatens you does not threaten me.  This is why you have hung that sword there - because my use of your riches does not put me in danger of your enemies.  I did not ask for the rage and anger that you have brought upon yourself by being cruel and unjust, but only to see how the rich and powerful live.  Surely there are good kings, kind and just, who also have such power and riches.  You could show me that, but you chose to add the sword that your cruelty has created."

No, of course he wouldn't have said that.  Instead, he plays the king's game, pretending that it is his power and riches, rather than the injustice and cruelty he used to get them, that presents imminent danger.  But the story itself does this too, for it says (in Baldwin's words) "And so long as he lived, he never again wanted to be rich, or to change places, even for a moment, with the king."

Did this come through the story, or was it added by Mr. Baldwin?  Does it matter?  Does this story create a fear of being wealthy in you?  Can we, today, tell our politicians off because they use deceit and empty promises to gain power and then abuse it to gain more?  Or will the media pay more attention to the lack of decorum to which our passion drives us (Wilson), than to the unjust cruelty out of which that passion is born?  Or will they invoke the Patriot Act and silence us with threats, or use previously illegal wiretapping to spy on us and stealthily degrade our livelihood in order to prevent us from making these accusations?

The meaning of the sword has been hijacked.  I write to right this wrong.  It is not wealth that raises the sword to your necks, my friends, but cruelty, injustice, and deceit.

Sorting in a Firefox extension

If you're developing a Firefox extension, and you use Javascript's Array.sort to sort an associative array, you might not like the results.  As far as I can tell, it does nothing.  I built an array keyed on a field called loc, which wasn't to be used in sorting, and another field seq, which was to be used.  Multiple rows could have the same loc, so the associative array was handy in allowing me to easily make sure only the latest seq for each loc was recorded.  Alas, it was not to be.

However, you can get around this by giving your array numeric indexes.  I needed to ensure that each loc only used one index and if it was already in sorted, I should overwrite that array element.  Here's the bit of code I used to make a sortable array:

    var sorted = new Array();
    var locKeys = new Array();
   
    for( var r in rows )
    {
        var ad = rows[r];

        instance.seq = getSeq(ad);
        instance.loc = getLoc(ad);
        if( !(instance.loc in locKeys) )
        {
            locKeys[instance.loc] = sorted.length;
        }
        sorted[locKeys[instance.loc]] = instance;
    }

Now sorted will actually re-arrange itself when I call sorted.sort().

Modern Borrowing

If you let someone borrow something, you must accept the risk that they will not willingly return to you as much value as they borrowed.  Modern society allows this mistake to run rampant by providing the illusion that you can force someone to return that value.  It's an illusion because the cost of forcing them to return the value quite high.  The illusion and it's ugly consequences persist because these costs are spread so thinly across everyone.

Socialism, for or against?

BOTH, actually!

It is my hope to show all socialists the difference between encouraging socialist choices on an individual level, which has real benefits, and forcing them, which causes real harm. I have discovered that I am very socialist when it is my choice to share or contribute, but when it is imposed on me, because I value individual choice so much, I resist.

There are two negatives when socialist behavior is legislated. The first is that those who benefit from it are weakened. We have a natural fear of wasting too much of what we get, and of not doing enough to take care of ourselves, but when we have a legislated right to "social support," these fears are weakened, and the good outcomes they produce are therefore diminished. Family ties, caring for one's community, supporting your parents when they grow old, saving, and living below ones means are all good examples of things we start losing when welfare grows.

The second negative effect of legislated socialism is that the role of charitable feelings that some people have toward the less fortunate is diminished. Being charitable makes people feel good and provides them with a sense of community and solidarity with others. When socialist programs crowd out our opportunities to feel these feelings, people become more selfish and isolated.

I have discovered that I am a champion of socialism when it is encouraged as a sign of being a good person, but very much an enemy of it when it is imposed through legislation. The surest way to prevent learning is to force it on people, and the surest way to make someone selfish is by taking stuff from them and "sharing" it with others. I think we can watch this play out in Russia because it takes decades for socialism's harmful effects to get washed out by time.