Election 012

As election time draws nearer in the USA I question whether I should register to vote yet to participate in this one or not.

I don't like or feel good about any of the candidates so if I did I'd be trying to pick the one I thought was the least horrible of them instead of the best. I feel that they are all bad.

CISPA

So CISPA is the new bizarre law that lawmakers want to have passed to allow the government to turn all big brothery to do more warrantless wiretaps on people 'just in case' for not just to counter cyberterrorism but a bunch of other reasons too.

Some people are fighting to limit the "other reasons too" part.
The House passed it with a strong majority. The Senate is going to put it off til some point next month (which means in a week or so). The President had already threatened to veto it but the House members who were for it are gloating that it passed in the House and are making fun of people in the White House for disliking it.

I really hope they don't use it as an excuse to go after everybody who ever did anything questionable or gray on the Internet because that happens to be basically most of the people on the Internet.

It would help if our politicians would set a concrete and limiting definition of terrorism as "political violence in the form of crimes committed against the state" but nobody will, and they like using it as a sort of an umbrella to also categorize a bunch of other crimes, dodgy behaviors, etc. which are not politically motivated violence and/or do not involve crimes committed against the State. Also, what makes CISPA bothersome is that whole set of "and other reasons too" that are allowed. If it's for security and to combat terrorism then technically it should not be also touted as a solution to the war on online piracy, since links between the two are tenuous at best. But hey, I'm not Washington DC. I don't think like them. I'm not allowed to make laws. I am allowed under the First Amendment (still, so far) to comment and critique them though so long as this does not encourage breaking of the laws or doing other illegal activities. Until such a point as criticizing a law becomes a crime. At this point it would be safe to go: "Okay, I guess we aren't a democracy/republic anymore." I mean it wouldn't in that scenario because that would be something bad to say too, but to evaluate it as being so, would not be horribly inaccurate.

The talking heads are attempting to say that all hackers are terrorists. I think if you are trying to sabotage government computers and equipment that would count as trying to harm the State but somebody being a hacker or not doesn't mean they necessarily will or do that. Only some do. And those ones do get punished. I forget what the sentence/terms usually are but, don't they have to go to jail, and aren't allowed to use the internet or computers or cellphones for a really really long time, or something to that effect? I mean yeah, when people use technology to commit crimes, that does count as cybercrime but I think in our overzeal we may go after too many little bad things we dislike people doing and neglect to go after enough of the big scary things. I mean, it's just way too convenient to use appeals that it will go after the big bad stuff to justify going after all the little stuff. Who am I to say though. If you attack machines belonging to a business, they can sue you and you can have a very nasty fine and/or some jailtime on your hands too. That's how it already was before. So if messing with computers and equipment that belong to the government or businesses are both already considered crimes with punishments, then why CISPA?

Election time is coming:

Like clockwork, the candidates shift from vaguely hinting they might (but never specify) quite how they plan on fixing the economy or getting our jobs back they pull up moralistic crusade red herrings about their personal religious beliefs and emotional hot-button issues that have little if anything to do with the practicalities of "if elected, how I and my administration plan on making the economy suck a bit less". Then they get more heavily into namecalling each other. This behavior disgusts me to an extent but what's worse is how they all act so smug and after awhile appear to all have nearly the exact same stances and opinions on every single issue. The diffences go away and they blend into a big ugly bureaucratic chimera or hydra. The democrats and republicans start to sound alike and it's this big dumb amorphous blob of people being emotional and spouting their mouths off without bothering to thoroughly fact check, and so on and so forth.

Untitled:

Why do segments of society seem to take great delight and gusto at blaming science for things?

There are certain flaws in positivism.

However, you never really see that many examples of a "science hero" these days anymore as an archetype in stories. You do still see the science villain. unless it's a period piece set in the past of a bygone era where both the hero and the villain employ feats of logic and gadgetry you don't see science being used by the good guys as much.

When you do have a good doctor or scientist character in the supporting cast they usually die because of their research or trying to figure out some forbidden thing to help advance the plot which gives the actual hero who is a regular action hero or so a tool to defeat the evil badguy or horrible device/scheme or monster he or she has made.

For all the faulting of empiricism for disrespecting magical beliefs or not supposedly accepting the allegedly equally equal subjective feelings based perceptions of each and every person if they temper tantrum enough you have to also understand that alternatives don't really seek out to understand through finding out and examing things the way experimenting through the scientific method does. Always question everything. Part of the beauty in the scientific way of doing things is that unlike the dogma of religion and politics you start out assuming you do not already know everything and seek things out to understand more. Do politics manage to creep into the scientific community? Yes because scientists are people too but when it comes to organized methods to try and understand physical phenomena, I still think science is pretty much our best piece of equipment in the toolbox. Without it we would still be attempting to attribute susceptibility to diseases or birth defects to individual moral foibles or flaws in character. Unfortunately some people still try to. That's not a value neutral way to look at things. Yes, there are some flaws in trying to be 100% objective but throwing it out the window to embrace a standardless subjectivism seems nonsensical to me. I do think there is some merit in use of bias minimization techniques. Is it 100% perfect? No. Yet, one WOULD figure that it's better than not trying at all.

Yes I just dissed postmodernism, anarchoprimitivism and extreme feminism somewhat. All in one blow.

I'd like to see at least one movie set in modern or future times where a belief system was part of the villain's arsenal or regular society was the badguy and learning or a scientist were the good guys. I don't think in our anti-intellectual society and the current political atmosphere this would ever gain mainstream traction anytime soon though.

Risk misManagement:

You realize of course that nothing in statistical reality is ever 100% safe at all times to all people around or using it, yes? A person could theoretically choke to death on a textureless boiled soggy piece of broccoli if they were breathing heavily in the midst of arguing and eating at the same time. That doesn't mean everybody should skip eating boiled vegetables in order to be safe though. Likewise, there's a statistically infinitesmally small chance of the occurrence of a rare but lethal microbe landing on you that got carried over from someplace else and blown onto you by the wind while you are just minding your own business outside in a regular place under regular circumstances but that doesn't mean we should all never again go outside and only do so in protective clothing with masks and rebreathers or sealed air tanks!

It is then much to my worry that people walk around demanding absolutely NO RISK in ANYTHING EVER. That things be proven 100% SAFE. That NO RISKS OR EVEN POSSIBLE POTENTIAL RISKS ARE EVER ACCEPTABLE.

The most well engineered vehicle or tool ever designed and built might only have 85-92% safety to it. There is a rough, small CHANCE OF MECHANICAL FAILURE, NATURAL DISASTER, SABOTAGE OR "ACTS OF GOD" no matter how well planned or made something is. That's how real life in the world works and the laws of the universe and of motion that seem to govern everything outside a committee room or concerned citizens group town hall meetings seemingly function. You have disaster and safety procedures to deal with containment or cleaning up of accidents when they occur but you do not try to sell people on that they should expect nothing bad to ever happen. Not unless you want perpetually unskilled helpless losers who are always hurting themselves on things all the time and panicking about garbage happening...

Rather than tell people to expect things to be good or always be horrible, is it not more sensible to give them disaster plans, accident procedures and safety protocols for things that are dangerous or when things do go wrong?

Life, liberty and pursuit of offshore tax-sheltering:

We are to live in a government for the people, of the corporations and by the corporations.

This year a whole string of rather ugly "Internet blacklist bills" keep being motioned in Congress. <- Allegedly, to combat online piracy and as part of this whole "getting tough on crime" shtick politicians still can never seem to quite get enough of. Now, far be it for me to actually directly state something in support of bootlegging (because hey if you're a content creator and somebody pirates your ideas or intellectual property then yes, they will be on your people to sue the crap out of shitlist) but as long as the part of the First Amendment's freedom of speech and part about loosely interpreted freedom of expression that cover political cartoons both remain intact... well, I can still make some to take the piss out of bad legislation I dislike.

What goes unsaid:

> Being poor is a crime!
> Everybody should give those who already have more, even more, because that is the pattern of how things have worked.
> Forcibly redistributing things also has pitfalls!
> There are often more than just two sides to any given story!
> Questioning things even though it is sometimes dangerous and can be socially frowned upon can be good for you and society!

> We will exclude those who do not behaviorally and physically (with fashions) conform to norms which are for the most part dictated by or encouraged by large businesses.

> We will say things are better for being new, not necessarily because they are better in terms of functionality, but simply for being new and because forcibly changing things in extreme ways keeps an appearance of progress... (even if doing so may turn out to be a step backwards in functionality).

>An average person may to an extent mistakenly associate branded content as being superior to other branded or nonbranded content on face value in an unquestioning way.

>We will pretend that attempts at large scale outsourcing do not negatively impact local small businesses.

Overmoralistic:

On the one hand I experienced the whiny neoliberalism that took away my city's choice whether have plastic or paper grocery bags and forced everyone to use reusable cloth sacks (and instituted a sintax on if you chose paper, not a large tax but a bit of an annoyance) but at the same time on aesthetic grounds opposes people hanging their laundry out to dry on account of it looking tacky and how nobody else wants to see somebody else's sundries hanging out to dry.  On the other I see Neocon hardliners sticking their noses in where they don't belong trying to pass moralistic based legislation that criminalizes certain shady but previously ambiguous behaviors or practices because the idea of an even sometimes shades of gray world that isn't entirely just black and white is to be found appalling.  I find it ironic that some of the same people who would complain about taxes and large government feel it so imperative to spend large sums of money on task forces to police and micromanage the behavior of others in society.  I am also sick of liberal whining.  I don't like how every time I go onto a certain public web encyclopedia (which I am avoiding naming because I'm unsure of its copyright status) I get shown ads with mugshots of the owner imploring people to donate money.  When it isn't doing that it's trying to redirect me to vote for or against certain pieces of legislation (while I do agree that some of those proposed laws are terribad and should be petitioned against I don't like being told to do so by something I go to for looking up information on various errata).

It bothers me how racist and xenophobic some of the right wing groups are too and [I] do feel like this fearmongering hysteria about this, that or the other moral-thing-to-be-upset-about of-the-week ^TM is going to be a great excuse to have another sort of a red scare -like witchhunt with HUAC-esque committees to bully and interrogate dissidents or rivals into shutting up. Stick to your guns (sorry for the crappy figurative pun there people!). If you say you are for less taxes and smaller government then don't waste gobs of cash micromanaging and trying to police the moral behavior of the rest of society at large.

Every historical instance of implementing such moralistic kinds of laws I can think of has correlated in an increase in organized crime (look at prohibition, and the war-on-drugs).
Also, hypocritically some substances which are fairly bad for you are made okay because the consumer must pay a sin tax for purchasing them whereas other things (also bad for you) are contraband. If you over-regulate the hell out of everything I think businesses and the economy are to suffer the most bluntly from it in addition to this becoming a much less fun place to live.

Though I will not express support of piracy I do have a want to take the piss out of big media for their current moralistic war on online file sharing, use of torrents and crusade against anonymity by which they are attempting to forcefully tame the untamed frontier that is the Internet. It is this: "I am led to believe that record executives are upset they will get to have cocaine (+expensive champagne and exotic hookers) a day or so (a few days) less a week than they currently do."

The lie perpetrated on the general public that digital online distribution through a large online content distributor (of which there are sadly only a handful, & of those - perhaps somebody ought to look into that with some antitrust or to see about if it otherwise encourages anticompetitive practices, which if their lobbying groups weren't so large perhaps some legislators might have the backbone to do) benefits anyone other than the content distributor has been so thoroughly touted by advertisers that most consumers don't even bother to question it anymore. The fact of the matter is artists and musicians make less money per sale of MP3s than they do or did with albums and the bulk of any profits go to the vendor. This remains sadly true with authors trying to electronically publish (for the most part) & it's not a pretty picture.

This excessive mollycoddling toward offended people by increasingly censoring things is worrisome to me too. If people are never previously exposed to something "bad" or upsetting, you are increasingly ensuring the likelihood that they will be very shocked and not know how to cope (instead of being able to ask questions about it and in doing so, learn something valuable!) the very first time they are exposed to it. I say there needs to be some controversy and decent things for people to get angry about or be upset with... otherwise it's just a bunch of silly stupid little mindless things that don't deal with the real issues and we as a whole as a culture are not going to mature or progress past the puritan colonial days, McCarthyism, and dark age superstitions.

Not knowing about something doesn't make you safe from it. On the contrary, it leaves you ill-informed to deal with it later on when it does rear its unpleasant head. But not knowing about things makes people feel content instead of ill-at-ease so they'd rather purposefully be unsafe than rationally approach problems to acknowledge they exist. Fighting superficial problems gives the satisfying appearance of doing something about things without dealing with the larger underlying issues plaguing people which could be sticky and unpleasant or involve being self-critical just a tad. The illusion that we are all good people most especially when we do bad things is something that groups have used for centuries to keep their padded ego (although psychologically what we call the ego in informal day to day use usually is what they call the id) intact*. When will somebody propose a different and novel set of tactics to deal with unusual situations?


*Social psychologists call the phenomenon of behaviors being used to do that cognitive dissonance reduction.