Walker takes a second look at the Individual Rights Party of British Columbia

February 28, 2012 — xanthippa

In the environment of ever-increasing encroachment on civil liberties from many, many directions, is it surprising that I get excited to hear (read) about any pro-individual movement/party/thought ‘out there’?

It seems I am not alone.

Walker, over at The Blog of Walker, has just done a lengthy piece taking a second look at their message.  It consists of a number of questions Walker posed to the founders of the nascent party, their replies – and, perhaps most critically, Walker supplies the logistics of how it all ‘fits together’.  Interesting.

When Walker took a first look at the party, he got some comments from ‘anonymous’, which were critical of the Individual Rights Party Of British Columbia’s (IRPBC’s) official policy on Islam (which acknowledges the political aspect and considers it to be more defining of the doctrine than its ‘spiritual’ or ‘religious’ aspects).  Walker and I both responded to the comments only to encounter trollish responses from ‘anonymous’.

Trolls may be annoying, but they can also be amusing – and, at times, useful.

The ‘second look’ attracted the same troll back.  I don’t know if he is trolling because of the subject matter or if he is Walker’s pet troll, but I took care not to feed him this time around.  However, Frank Hilliard of the IRPBC, took the time to defend his party’s position on Islam – and had done this so eloquently that (with permission), I would like to reproduce his comment in full (F.H’s response to ‘anonymous’ has been bolded by me):

“Anonymous said…

So you didn’t ask about the Muslim thing, eh? Can’t say I’m surprised.

So when someone in Canada starts an Islamist Party of Canada, and part of their platform is to remove the constitutional protection to peaceful religion practice from Jews and only Jews, I assume that when you interview them the question will be restricted to asking who the treasurer is, right?”

Nice bit of sarcasm Anonymous, but you’ve dodged around the issue if Islam’s political ambitions. Most other religions have moral rules, but Islam has Sharia law which defines not just personal morality but every aspect of private and public life. As such, it conflicts on multiple levels with Canadian civil, criminal and parliamentary law. The Individual Rights Party of BC simply says that if Islamic communities want to change Canadian law, they should accept the obligations and responsibilities of political organization and run candidates in elections.

We don’t have any problem with Islam as a religion but we totally reject Sharia law weather imposed by incrementalism or by force. I’m pretty sure you would too if you realized your right to comment on this issue would be denied if Sharia were already in effect.

Thought provoking, is it not?

 

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Ezra Levant and Pamela Geller on the ‘Zombie Mohammad judge’ scandal

February 28, 2012 — xanthippa

This is truly scandalous:  for a judge in the USA to brandish a holy book of any kind inside the courtroom and apply religious lawinstead of upholding the laws of the land is beyond the pale.

Note:  more has been written about Mark Martin, the ‘Zombie Mohammad judge’ and, apparently, he is indeed a convert to Islam.  This in itself is irrelevant:  it is his actions which count, not his religious convictions.  I raise the point only because in the video, Pamela Geller asserts that he is not a Muslim.  Therefore, I include this link so people can judge for themselves what to think.

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CodeSlinger: The internet is about to get dramatically harder to regulate!

February 27, 2012 — xanthippa

In response to my post about the UN plans to ‘regulate’ the internet, CodeSlinger made a comment which I think deserves a full post of its own:

Good algorithms for dynamic routing through ad hoc wireless mesh networks are already available in the public domain. Most people already have more processing power and bandwidth than they actually use, and the amount of computing power you can buy for a buck just keeps on doubling every 18 months. All this surplus is can be made available to carry other people’s traffic.

The only thing holding back a truly unkillable internet is the fact that most people aren’t willing to spend much money on the uplink side. They will buy a wireless router with enough range to cover their home, but not enough to cover their block. But just let some of these draconian measures pass and see how fast that changes. People will quickly figure out how much better the internet works when everybody is their neighbours’ ISP.

Already, in densely populated areas, we are seeing increasing overlap between the coverage areas of people’s routers and their neighbours’ routers. As this trend accelerates, larger and larger urban areas will de facto become independent sub-networks that cannot be killed or surveiled from outside.

In rural areas, however, the problem is a lot worse because each router has to cover an area that may be miles in diameter in order to achieve overlap. Before you get anywhere near that range, though, you run into CRTC limitations on transmitted power.

And maintaining connectivity between distant population centers is an even bigger problem. However, a German group called the Chaos Computer Club is developing the Hackerspace Global Grid: a system of communications satellites (!) which will interface to inexpensive ground stations that anyone can buy or build.

Here is an article about the project: Hackers plan space satellites to combat censorship.

The internet is about to get dramatically harder to regulate!

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YouTube identifies birdsong as copyrighted music

February 27, 2012 — xanthippa

Really?

This is just getting silly!

From the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom:

I disputed their claim with YouTube’s system — and Rumblefish refuted my dispute, and asserted that: ‘All content owners have reviewed your video and confirmed their claims to some or all of its content: Entity: rumblefish; Content Type: Musical Composition.’ So I asked some questions, and it appears that the birds singing in the background of my video are Rumblefish’s exclusive intellectual property.”

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Thunderf00t: YouTube starts banning ‘religiously offensive’ videos

February 25, 2012 — xanthippa

He’s right.

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Warrants? We don’t need no stinking warrants!!!

February 25, 2012 — xanthippa

This is beyond the pale!

Yes, Mr. Levant is correct to raise the spectre of Pavlik Morozov:  I was certainly taught in school to live up to his example.  But that was on the other side of the iron curtain!  There is no room for twisted crap like that in our schools now!

Let you be the first to read it!

I have a gun.

I even volunteered in a school, teaching children how to use a gun, just like mine.

A glue gun, that is.

I have a whole bunch of glue sticks in an ammo box I bought at an army surplus store – partly because I like puns and partly because it is efficient.

I also own a tape gun – it makes wrapping presents more efficient.

And I have two staple guns.  (OK, one is my hubby’s, but that makes at least half of it mine, no?)

My kids own guns, too!

From the air-zooka (which ‘shoots’ air, if you are not familiar with it) through a marshmallow gun to water guns…

But if I wanted to own a firearm – an actual gun for shooting bullets – I would not feel obligated to tell ‘the state’.  Why?  Because I believe, to the core of my being, that the Magna Carta gives me the right to carry whatever arms I think I need to protect my person, family and property.  Nothing – no law  – can, in my never-humble-opinion – abrogate this natural right to protect myself.

It is precisely because I have the right to carry weapons that police has the power to carry weapons:  they derive that right from me, and you, and all the other citizens. Since the government acts as our proxy, it cannot do what each and every one of us does not have the right to do, irrespective of the government.

This equation goes both ways:  since the state is acting on our behalf, it cannot do anything we are not free to do.  Therefore, if some agents of the state do carry firearms, it therefore follows that each and every citizen has that very same right.  If we did not have that right, then the government agents would have nowhere to get that right from.

I recognize I am not expressing this eloquently – following is a video that does a much better job of it:

When all the rhetoric is washed away, at its core, this is about self-ownership.

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Video from Caledonia from 18th of February, 2012

February 22, 2012 — xanthippa

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UN wants to ‘regulate’ the internet

February 22, 2012 — xanthippa

As if SOPA, ACTA Bill C-30 were not enough, there is a new threat to the information superhighway – from the United Nations, none the less.  From The Wall Street Journal:

On Feb. 27, a diplomatic process will begin in Geneva that could result in a new treaty giving the United Nations unprecedented powers over the Internet. Dozens of countries, including Russia and China, are pushing hard to reach this goal by year’s end. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last June, his goal and that of his allies is to establish “international control over the Internet” through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a treaty-based organization under U.N. auspices.

If successful, these new regulatory proposals would upend the Internet’s flourishing regime, which has been in place since 1988. That year, delegates from 114 countries gathered in Australia to agree to a treaty that set the stage for dramatic liberalization of international telecommunications. This insulated the Internet from economic and technical regulation and quickly became the greatest deregulatory success story of all time.

 

Really?

Does this not illustrate that it is:

  • time to leave the UN – iff we cannot de-legitimize and dismantle the organization as a whole
  • time to really push to establish an internet substitute which is diffused, so that there are no pipelines which could be controlled by any regulatory body (the current technology that could be used for this is still under development – and much too slow)

Yeah, I have called for both these things in the past, but perhaps the time is running out faster than we expected…

Posted in freedoms, politics, society, technology. Tags: , , , , . 1 Comment »

Daniel Hannan: Politicians can’t create jobs

February 21, 2012 — xanthippa

This is an important point – and one that all politicians ought to be reminded of, often and firmly.

I am not an economist, so there is no way I am going to articulate this eloquently or even remotely well, but…I would not be myself if I didn’t give it a shot.

There is an old joke – very old – that could get people sent to jail if they said a variation of it back behind the iron curtain, where I grew up:

What is the fastest way to get rid of all the sand in the Sahara desert?

Create a government department with the sole purpose of supplying sand to the Sahara.  Give it a steering committee, a 5 year plan and lots of money and power to enforce policies.  For a little while, nothing will happen.  Then:  BOOM!  Sand will be more scarce in the Sahara than meat is in butcher shops!

(If you are one of the younger readers who does not remember what life behind the iron curtain was like, let me just say that butcher shops usually had very, very little to offer.  If a supply of meat was even rumoured to be coming in, people would stand in lines for hours, sometimes lining up all night just so they may be one of the first few in line in the morning because the supplies were so meager that even with limits per customer, only the first few people in line would get to buy any meat.  Bread and milk were usually available, but again, even with bread, the supply would run out before the demand.  I remember days when the limit would be set at one quarter loaf of bread per customer, so that my mom would go line up and send me to line upseparately, so we’d get half a loaf between us.  No kidding.  We had money – but there was no ‘stuff’ to buy with it.)

‘Governments creating jobs’ is one of those easy to fall into fallacies.  Like ‘the broken window’ fallacy:

The fact is that governments do not just ‘have money’ to spend:  their money comes from taxes, current or future.  Taxes are taken from people who earn it by the threat of force:  these people now no longer have that money to spend to look after themselves and their family.

Ah, say government spending proponents, but what if people want to save their money instead of spending it?  That would be bad for the economy and that is why governments must take it from them and spend it!

Isn’t that just a little oppressive?  And arrogant?

A government is supposed to represent the people and do the people’s bidding – not force people to do the government’s bidding!

The suggestion that governments should spend the people’s money because people don’t want to spend it themselves is illustrative of how the relationship between the citizens and our government has been inverted:  insted of being our servant, the government has become our master, forcing us to do what we do not want to do.

That we are proposing ‘government stimulus spending’ and ‘government creating jobs’ as desirable actions should give us a moment of pause to consider what this implies about our relationship to our governments and the status of our civil liberties!

Posted in freedoms, politics, society. Tags: , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

More thoughts about the issues of ‘privcy’ and ‘presumption of privacy’

February 21, 2012 — xanthippa

Over the weekend, this video, purported to be from ‘Anonymous’, was released.  It demands that the Canadian Minister, Vic Toews, remove bill C-30 (which would permit civil servants unlimited snooping powers on the citizens via the internet without judicial oversight) and that he step down immediately.

The following video also purports to be from ‘Anonymous’.  As I have no connection to that group, I have no idea if it is authentic.  However, I do think it is worth posting because it raises several issues worth further discussion:

This video raises the connection between the desire by various governments to regulate arms and to regulate the internet.

This is a deeper connection that one may think, at first glance.  But, deep down, both are attempts to take away the citizen’s ability to protect themselves – including, if necessary, to resist their government.  Both are ways in which governments make their citizens less secure, more isolated, and more afraid of their government.

Even if you are not as libertarian in your views as I am (I think that monopoly control over infrastructure – even, or perhaps especially, information infrastructure – is perilous to civil liberties), it is easy to see how governments are threatened by citizenry that is difficult to control and willing and able to oppose them.

Firearms are a means of physical self-defense and an equalizer between the strong and the weak.  Even a small woman can protect herself from a rapist with the use of a gun:  her physical safety is no longer dependant solely on the timely response of the state to come to her aid.  This threatens the government monopoly on the enforcement of laws:  as every monopoly’s natural reaction would be, the government’s reaction is to restrict this competition.

Let’s be clear about this:  government ‘regulation’ of firearms is not about increasing public safety by having many well trained, well armed citizens available in public spaces who would be able to stop law-breakers and thus increase public safety.  To the contrary:  it is always specifically designed to restrict gun ownership, use, and the very presence of privately owned guns in public spaces.  This intolerance on the part of government of guns in private hands – even though this increases public safety – is indicative of the government’s disrespect for its citizenry, with the goal to increase government coercive powers at the root of all ‘arms regulations’.

Information is a weapon and a powerful one.

So is anonymous speech.

The internet enables both.

As a matter of principle, anonymous speech is necessary for the preservation of the very freedom of speech.  For example, The Federalist Papers could never have been published had their authors not had absolute anonymity at the time of publication!  The bigger the government is, the more dangerous it is to speak up against it openly.  Without anonymous speech, governments do indeed become more totalitarian and more tyrannical in nature:  this cycle has been repeated so often, it is blatant.

Yet, the ever-growing governments in the formerly-free world now wish to have complete and unfettered access to the information which would identify each and every internet user:  to be able to attach a name to every sentence uttered on the internet, from seeking sensitive advice at an online support group to dissenting political speech!

Of course, the governments are also increasing citizen surveillance on so many fronts…  There will soon be no arena where we do have ‘presumption to privacy’, not even in our homes and certainly not anywhere else.  So, the whole ‘getting a warrant’ might be a mute issue…

Technology is beautiful – but it is a tool, to be used for good or evil.  It is necessary that we understand these tools because our society will need to evolve along with them.  What am I talking about?

For example, drone-based aerial surveillance…

Or this totally awesome ‘bug thech’!  (Do watch the video, it is art and technology combined!)

What is my point?

As new technologies arise, we will need to develop laws to govern their use.  However, these laws (all laws, really) ought to be focused on protecting the civil libeties of individual citizens – not legitimizing the ways that governments and big business can circumvent them!

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