Tag: freedom

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Security expert Bruce Schneier wrote last week about some changes he was making to his blog to remove some anti-security features. Reading over his list of changes, I was pleased to see that I’d mostly avoided adding anti-security features to my blog in the first place.

  • No offsite tracking. Although I’ve experimented with them a couple of times, I don’t have “like” or “share” buttons on my blog posts, so your visits here are not automatically transparent to Facebook, Twitter, Google, or other social media sites. It means you’ll have to copy the link yourself if you want to share my posts. I’d be delighted if you did, so I hope that’s not too onerous.
  • No offsite searching. Similarly, the site’s search facility runs right on the site itself, just doing an SQL query of the database that holds the content of my site. Doing a search here doesn’t expose your query to anyone else. (I once looked to see if I was logging queries and couldn’t find them; as far as I know, doing a search here doesn’t even expose your query to me.)
  • No offsite feed. I also run the RSS feed for the site right on the site, and always have. I thought for a while that I ought to use feedburner, but I never got around to it, and now it’s clear that laziness led me to the right choice.

Any attempt to keep internet activity private is probably hopeless, but that’s no reason not to try.

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I think I know why it has been so difficult to pass any sort of significant gun control legislation in the United States.

Most democracies in the world have gun control laws, which serves as an existence proof that it is possible, and yet in the US gun control has been very much a matter of x steps forward, y steps back (with what you see as the values for x and y very much depending on your political position).

You can point to “historical reasons” or “cultural reasons” for our unique situation, and you’d certainly be right, but I don’t think that serves as much of a guide to anyone who wants change (in either direction). Instead, whether you advocate or oppose gun control, think for a minute what it means to have gun control—or any kind of government control—in a democracy.

In a democracy, you’re going to end up with laws that are (to a first approximation) supported by a majority of the people. In fact, in the sort of representative democracy we have in the US, it’s very hard to get any substantive change in the law unless it’s supported by substantially more than a bare majority, because it’s so easy for a determined minority to delay or block changes.

What that says to me is that, in a democracy, changing the law has to begin with changing people’s opinions.

Trying to do things the other way around—by pushing for legislation in advance of majority support—leads to exactly what we’ve seen these past few decades:

  1. Laws that are ineffectual, because they are loaded up with compromises needed to cobble together a majority in the legislature.
  2. A stiffening of opposition to the legislation, because opponents feel their viewpoint has been ignored.

If you want to get something like this done, your best bet is to follow the model provided by Mothers Against Drunk Driving. They wanted stiffer penalties and lower blood-alcohol limits, but their efforts in the legislator were initially quite ineffective. Where they were first influential was in changing public opinion.

In the early 1960s, drunk driving was something to be laughed at. Many a comedy bit was created around taking some guy so drunk he couldn’t stand up, pouring him into his car, and sending him off weaving down the road. They were funny. Watch those same sketches now and they’re appalling.

Once public opinion was changed, changing the laws was easy—because we live in a democracy.

There’s a second reason public opinion needs to change first: The police are  unable to enforce laws that aren’t broadly supported, except through police-state tactics.

If you have broad support—not just a majority, but a general consensus across society—then it’s easy to enforce laws. Few people break them. When they are broken, witness come forward to report the crimes. When people are prosecuted, juries convict and judges impose sentences as prescribed by law.

How would you enforce a gun law that was opposed by half the population?

It would be easy enough to enforce a law against open carry of a firearm, but enforcing a law against concealed carry would require the police to stop and frisk people on the street. (Of course, this happens already in certain neighborhoods. People who live in those neighborhoods are properly outraged, as are those who believe in freedom. But let it start happening in neighborhoods full of middle-class people—neighborhoods full of voters—and the laws would get changed back very quickly indeed. At least, I hope they would.)

It would be even harder to enforce a law against owning a firearm in your home. Even in the sorts of neighborhoods where people are routinely stopped and frisked, the police are not yet so bold as to enter and search people’s homes. But without that step, illegal guns would linger for decades. Indeed, for generations. And with that step, I suspect we’d see the law changed back very quickly: Many of the same people who support gun control would still object to the police-state tactics that would be necessary to impose a ban on guns.

And, lest I be accused of arguing against a straw man, on the grounds that “no one” is arguing for a ban (just reasonable regulation), I’d like to point out that the enforcement problem is the same.

I suppose the intermediate step that gun control advocates anticipate would be laws that regulate gun ownership, but with enforcement happening only when guns are discovered incidentally: If your house is searched for some other reason, then your illegal guns will be found and their presence will be used to pile on additional penalties. I most particularly object to that scenario, just as I object to all scenarios where ordinary people are required to keep their papers in order or face harsh penalties.

My main point here, though, is that seeking changes in the laws should always be a second step. First, seek a consensus in society that things should be different. Do that and it’s easy to change the law and easy to enforce it.

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US Postal Service Eid stamp

We stopped at the post office on the way home from taiji to mail off our Christmas gifts, and Jackie wanted to buy some stamps as well. The clerk pointed us toward the display of the currently available stamps, pointing out that the Christmas-themed stamps were in the lower left.

Jackie peered at the stamps, her hand hovering over the ones she was looking at, and when her hand strayed away from the Christmas stamps to a spot over the Eid stamps just to the right, the postal clerk said, “You wouldn’t want those.”

My first impulse was to laugh out loud. Jackie said, “I don’t know. I think they’re kind of pretty.”

I’m sure the clerk was just trying to be helpful. She was no doubt thinking back to a day, perhaps not so long ago, when she would have had no idea what Eid was. She was imagining just how embarrassed she’d have been if she’d thought, “I don’t know, I think they’re kind of pretty,” and had sent off her Christmas cards with Eid stamps.

Jackie, of course, knows perfectly well what she’d be doing. She’s lived places where Eid is as big a holiday as Christmas is here. And nobody that we’d be likely to send a card to would be offended by receiving one with an Eid stamp.

I momentarily considered whether I should be offended at the idea of a US government employee steering people away from stamps on the grounds of religious belief, but it was so funny I couldn’t work up any indignation. It’s not like the clerk was trying to keep us from celebrating Eid. She was trying to help a couple of small-town folks avoid committing the terrible faux pas of unknowingly sending Christmas cards with an Eid stamp. I’m sure if couples wearing headscarves and turbans come in, she sells them Eid stamps without comment. (That mental picture has me laughing again.)

After pointing out that the post office really ought to have solstice stamps, Jackie ended up getting a page of Earthscape stamps.

Bonus extremely lame pun: A while back someone posted a bunch of lame puns in the men’s locker room at the Fitness Center. One was “What’s it called when everybody tries to go into the post office at the same time? A stamp-ede!” Knowing that Jackie would have seen the same puns posted in the women’s locker room, when I met her in the lobby I asked, “What’s it called when everybody tries to go into the post office at the same time on the last day of Ramadan? A stamp-Eid Mubarak!”

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The problem solved by checking IDs at the polling place—malefactors impersonating voters—very nearly does not exist at all. The “solution,” however, creates three new problems. Specifically it creates the problems of blocking voters from casting their ballots in three instances:

  1. If their papers are not in order.
  2. If a poll judge evaluates their papers incompetently, and erroneously declares them to be not in order.
  3. If a corrupt poll judge competently evaluates their papers, but in an act of criminal malfeasance falsely declares them to be not in order.

The result in each case is a voter being disenfranchised.

Citizens of the United States are not required to keep their papers in order. (Citizens of the United States are not required even to have papers, although it’s enough of a convenience that most people do.)

To the extent that the state has a legitimate interest in making sure that voters meet the qualifications—age, citizenship, residence, and so—those checks should be made at registration time. Doing so neatly avoids all three problems. If additional documentation is required to prove they are qualified to vote, there is time to procure that documentation. And in the case of an incompetent or corrupt poll judge, there is time to appeal to higher authority and have the error corrected.

Checks of this sort should not be made at the polling place, because it creates unnecessary time pressure—any little glitch leads to the voter being disenfranchised. To my mind, disenfranchising a voter is as un-American as insisting that citizens keep their papers in order. Perhaps more so—it strikes at the very heart of democracy.

Half-measures aimed at reducing the problem, such as provisional votes, are unsatisfactory. Voters have the right to cast votes, not provisional votes.

Voter impersonation can be almost entirely prevented simply by checking the signature of the voter against the signature in the registration rolls—a check that can be done without reference to ID cards. This also largely minimizes the threat of corrupt poll judges, because the signature specimen exists, and the judge knows that a false claim that it doesn’t match will be discovered. (Unlike a voter ID scheme, which lends itself to corrupt or incompetent poll judges arguing later about whether this or that ID was presented, or whether it met the criteria spelled out in the law.)

This post was prompted by a discussion I’ve been having on Facebook with a guy who’s worried about an article with this headline: Group says it found 30,000 dead North Carolinians registered to vote.

I responded, pointing out that everyone who’s ever registered is probably still registered, because there’s no central reporting mechanism for working back from death certificates to every address where the deceased might once have registered to vote.

This guy’s response was that all those registrations of people who are dead could be used by malefactors to vote multiple times.

I rather liked my response (the opportunity to quote it here is the main reason I wrote this post):

Sure—but that would be a crime. You could also show up at the polling place with automatic weapons and make everyone stand against the wall while you stuffed in 1000 ballots marked for your preferred candidates.

It’s a pretty easy crime to detect, too—just get a list of death certificates and compare that list to the list of people who voted. And people have gone through that exercise, and discovered that criminals impersonating dead people to cast additional votes is a crime that’s about as common as people showing up with automatic weapons and stuffing the ballot box.

All voter ID laws gain anyone is an opportunity to disenfranchise voters, a terribly un-American goal.

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I’ve got a quandary. It’s in the area of civics.

I was on jury duty last month, and was in the pool of potential jurors for a cocaine possession case. Several of the candidate jurors mentioned that they had issues with drug prohibition, and were excused from serving on the jury—whether or not they said they could set their personal feelings aside and follow the law. (I wasn’t taking notes, but my recollection is that the ones who said they didn’t think they could follow the law were excused by the judge while the ones who merely expressed personal reservations about drug prohibition as a matter of public policy had to be peremptorily challenged by the prosecutor.)

I too think that drug prohibition is terrible public policy. It’s harmful to society at every level. It corrupts the police and the judicial system. It clogs the courts and the prisons. It drains money that could be better spent on useful things (or left in the hands of the people who earn it). It adds yet another layer of harm onto drug users—people who are already suffering—making it harder, riskier, and more expensive for them to either go on using drugs or seek help to quit.

Most especially, criminalizing commerce in drugs means that makers and sellers of drugs have no recourse to the police or the courts when they’re robbed or defrauded. That produces another whole layer of violence—one that only occasionally touches people who aren’t buying or selling (or stealing) drugs, but that would be completely absent if drugs were legal.

Despite all that, as I imagined my answers to the questions they were asking, I found that I was inclined to say that I could give both sides a fair trial—meaning that I thought, if the prosecution proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was in possession of some amount of cocaine, I could vote to find him guilty.

I thought about why, and eventually decided it was because I think democracy is important.

I’ve got no doubt that drug prohibition is a dumb idea, but I’ve also got no doubt that the right way to fix it is by changing the law. I’m pretty sure that screwing around on the edges of the law, such as by acquitting people who are technically guilty, is the wrong way to solve the problem. And yet, each time someone like me applies the law, another person who already has more than his or her measure of problems gets another few—a felony conviction,  loss of access to things like public housing and school loans, and most likely a prison sentence.

And so my quandary. Is democracy worth that much? It’s worth a lot, but is it worth wreaking that much harm on someone who was merely self-medicating because they hadn’t found a better way to deal with life?

I find I’m not sure.

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I’ve got a guest post up at Asta Lander’s blog Simply Living, about the trade-offs that people make when they choose to work for wages or a salary, and how you can get most of the benefits while avoiding most of the downside.

It’s called Choosing Freedom.

There was a time when most people were self-sufficient. They acquired what they needed through some mix of hunting, gathering, fishing, farming, raising animals, and making things themselves. Not many people do that any more.

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I’m something of an absolutist on free speech. Not a complete absolutist—I’m fine with rules against libel and slander, and I’m glad that there’s a copyright scheme (even if our current scheme has the copyright running for far too long). But that’s about it.

Still, I find myself disagreeing with Catherine Shaffer on using boycotts or similar sorts of pressure to influence the sponsors of speech I disagree with.

I guess my logic is this: I totally support the right of people to say things I disagree with; I just don’t feel like they have a right to make a good living saying it.

I’d oppose a boycott aimed at an ISP who hosts objectionable speech—that’s an effort to block the speech. I’d feel the same way about an effort aimed at convincing a venue not to allow a speaker to present his message.

But even a fairly successful effort to convince advertisers to pull funding from an objectionable speaker wouldn’t bring the speaker’s income to zero. There’ll always be some sponsors out there who’ll support even the most offensive speech, and if they want to pay enough to be associated with it to allow the speaker to pay his domain registration and hosting fees, I’m all for it. Heck, if they’ll pay enough to allow a radio personality enough to see the show broadcast on the airwaves, that’s okay too. But if pressure on the advertisers means that the speaker has to get a day job because his offensive speech no longer earns enough money to cover the rest of the bills, I think that’s probably a win.

(In practice, except for the most universally offensive speech, trying to organize a boycott is probably counterproductive, because people who agree with the speech will rally around.)

A modestly (or even highly) effective effort to reduce the income-earning power of offensive speech seems like a good thing. I don’t think it works against free speech.

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Plaque commemerating a lecture by Susan B. Anthony

Plaque commemorating a lecture by Susan B. AnthonyI’ve long been peeved by how little credit people give to the power of their vote.

So many people seem to think that a vote isn’t effective unless it holds the balance of power, as if their vote only counted when the other voters were equally split, so that their vote would sway the election one way or the other.

This isn’t true for individuals, and it most especially is not true for groups.

Back in the run-up to the 2008 election, I heard a  story on NPR that provided a good counterexample. An Indian tribe in (I think) New Mexico was getting attention from state and national candidates of both parties, because they had started voting. Pretty much all of a sudden, after their voting turnout had shot up, their issues became important to politicians at all levels. And their issues weren’t just important when there was a close election and their votes might make the difference: Because they voted in every election, every politician needed to pay attention to their issues all the time.

If you’re a member of a group that votes, your group’s issues will be taken seriously. You don’t need to be a majority. You don’t even need to vote as a block. (In fact, it’s probably better if you don’t: You want politicians thinking that each individual vote is up for grabs, if they institute the right policies.)

The image at the top of this post is of a plaque in downtown Champaign, commemorating a lecture on “Work, Wages, and the Ballot,” that Susan B. Anthony gave here back in 1870. I’ve seen the plaque many times, but couple of days ago, I thought to take a picture of the plaque, and that prompted me to do a proper search, which yielded some results.

This Project Gutenberg Book Susan B. Anthony: Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian, by Alma Lutz is pretty good:

She had at hand a perfect example in the unsuccessful strike of Kate Mullaney’s strong, well-organized union of 500 collar laundry workers in Troy, New York. Aware that Kate blamed their defeat on the ruthless newspaper campaign, inspired and paid for by employers, Susan asked her, “If you had been 500 carpenters or 500 masons, do you not think you would have succeeded?”

“Certainly,” Kate Mullaney replied, adding that the striking bricklayers had won everything they demanded. Susan then reminded her that because the bricklayers were voters, newspapers respected them and would hesitate to arouse their displeasure, realizing that in the next election they would need the votes of all union men for their candidates. “If you collar women had been voters,” she told them, “you too would have held the balance of political power in that little city of Troy.”

I turned 18 shortly after the voting age in the US had been lowered to 18. The drinking age had been lowered along with it, so it was legal for me to drink. But a big jump in drunk driving accidents prompted many states to raise their drinking age.

In Michigan it turned out to be an oddly complex process. A state law was passed, raising the drinking age to 19, but grandfathering in people who were already old enough to have started drinking before the law went into effect. After that law was passed, but before it went into effect, a state constitutional amendment was put on the ballot, that would raise the drinking age to 21, without any grandfathering. That would create a whole cohort of people who’d been able to buy alcohol for a year or more, who would lose that right. And all of them could vote.

I voted against it, of course. But nobody else I knew who was going to be in the affected group bothered to vote. They didn’t much care about the issue—it was as easy for under-age drinkers to buy booze then as now—and they didn’t think their vote would count for much. And, as it turned out, they were right. But only because their peers didn’t vote. Not only could a solid voting block of 18-to-20 year olds have affected the outcome, I rather doubt if the issue would have even gone on the ballot, if 18-to-20 year olds voted at the rates that senior citizens do.

The way voting helps is not by winning individual elections (although that does happen and it’s nice when it does). The way voting helps is that if you’re a voter, politicians take your interests into account all the time.

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In many places with repressive governments, nascent political parties (unable to achieve political power via the ballot box, because elections are rigged or the group is banned from participating) provide public services as an organizing tactic. They provide food for children, health care, mediation services, neighborhood watch, financial aid to victims of government actions, and so on.

This tactic has proven to be effective, so I’ve always been a little surprised that we don’t see more of it in the US. So, I was interested to see a post about the Black Panther’s free breakfast program, and the FBI’s concerns about it.

Upon reflection, I figure that the main reason we see little of this in the US is that in the US we really do have public services. There are government programs to feed hungry children, provide medical care to the sick and injured, police the streets, adjudicate conflicts, and so on. They’re flawed and limited, but they do exist. They’re good enough, that it would take a lot of money to compete—and if you have that much money, there are better ways to seek power, especially since our political system is reasonably open.

But this is becoming less true. With constant pressure on public services, holes are opening up that can be—and are being—filled by private organizations. So far, those organizations are mostly charitable non-profits, but there’s no reason that a political party couldn’t join in.

I think we’ll see it pretty soon, especially at the local level. People who have felt disenfranchised will be very willing to support political parties that directly provide what the government won’t and ask nothing in return except that you consider voting for their candidates.

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There’s a bill, the Enemy Expatriation Act, that aims to strip US citizens of their citizenship if they are accused of “engaging in, or purposefully and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States.” (The term “hostilities” is defined to mean any conflict subject to the laws of war.)

This is almost certainly unconstitutional. The US Supreme Court held some years ago that it was impossible for a US citizen to unintentionally give up his citizenship. In particular, formally renouncing your citizenship in front of a foreign official was not enough to actually lose your citizenship, because maybe you intended to retain your citizenship (and were just going through the motions of renouncing it as part of obtaining citizenship of some other country).

Now, the Supreme Court has become pretty unreliable on this sort of thing of late, but it seems to me that if formally renouncing your citizenship is ineffective, just in case you didn’t really mean it, then a whole lot of things that fall under the general heading of “supporting” (such as donating money to a charity that is later found to have been diverting some of that money to groups that are in some way connected with other groups that are accused of) hostility certainly don’t qualify as intentional renunciation.