Truth, Justice, and the American Way
Intellectual activism in defense of the American way of life.
Christianity and socialism glorify human suffering
Sep 14th
This is Angelique. She wanted to die with dignity
Here is a tragic tale about a woman affected with a terrible terminal illness who only wished to die in peace. Instead, her months were spent in terrible pain, and her last hour was spent “vomiting faecal matter” as her brother “held a bowls under his sister’s chin.” Before her death, Ms. Flowers begged her society for the right to die as she wanted:
“The law wouldn’t let a dog suffer the agony I’m going through before an inevitable death. It would be put down. Yet under the law, my life is worth less than a dog’s.”
Her brother ads:
“How can that be right? How can society believe terminal patients should be put through awful agonising deaths?
What is to blame for this perverse reversal of morality which defines “compassion” as the glorification of human misery? At first, I was tempted to blame the socialist mentality of Australia’s ruling Labor Party. Under the collectivist ideology, human beings are slaves of the State, and may not live or die except by the State’s judgment that they are of use to Society. On the other hand, the religious ideology is that human beings are animated corpses, souls given a temporary lease on mortal life for the sole purpose of blind obedience to their deity, who may not live or die except by the ruling of his earthly representatives.
In this case, it may be both as Austrialia’s current prime mister is a vocal leftist commited to integrating Christianity into the political sphere.
American Fascism versus the pornographer
Sep 13th
In 2003 I explained why totalitarian regimes like China are so fiercely opposed to human sexuality:
The threat posed by the selfish pursuit of one’s happiness is the driving motivation for authoritarian regimes of all kinds to have joined organized religion in fiercely opposing public acceptance of sexuality as a natural and moral activity.
In 2008, advocating and practicing the right of all human beings to pursue their life, liberty, and happiness as they best see fit is grounds for a lifetime sentence in a federal prison of the United States of America:
Money quote by John Stagliano:
America became great because the founders knew that the power of the majority had to be strictly limited to protect this wonderful concept of “rights.” They knew that the rights of a minority, and especially the most important “minority”, the individual, needed to be protected against the will of the majority. And the most important right that they sought to protect, the FIRST Amendment to the Constitution, is the right to free speech. That is the right to express oneself in whatever way one wished, as long as that person was not “forcing” himself or his ideas on anyone else.
Who knew pornographers were so eloquent?
(More pro-porn activism: DefendOurPorn.com)
Support Tor: fight Internet censorship
Sep 8th
Unless you are utterly ignorant of the outside world, you have heard that the government of China actively monitors and censors its citizen’s access to the Internet. Its tight grip on Internet services is part of an overall policy of brutal suppression of free expression and human rights in China, including organ harvesting, mass murder, forced sterilization, and all the other assorted atrocities that go along with a totalitarian socialist regime. As brutal as China is, the state of human rights in Putin’s Russia may be even worse.
Besides their oppressive governments, China and Russia also share a large number of Internet users. Being a highly decentralized network, the Internet is a critical link for citizens in these countries to connect to each other and the outside world. Unfortunately American companies have eagerly provided technology that the Chinese government uses to block access to banned content and track down and shut down users and content publishers.
Fortunately, the technologies that allow the creation of ubiquitous surveillance also make possible ubiquitous secrecy. One particular tool for circumventing state censorship is the Tor anonymity network. For some time now, I’ve been running a node on the Tor network, which allows users to communicate anonymously on the Net. Tor is an “onion routing” network, which means that I can see the (unencrypted) traffic leaving my node, but I cannot know where it originates.
A common concern with anonymity networks is that they can be used for malicious purposes, such as identity theft, piracy, or child pornography. I was curious to see how my node was being used, so I used some network sniffing software to monitor the sessions leaving my own node. Since my snooping sessions occurred around 1AM, I was not surprised to find that most of the traffic went to Russian (which I speak) and Chinese (which I can translate) sites. As far as I could tell, none of the content was illegal. I found users browsing websites for gaming, online forums, photography, and health information. (A health information blog might seem innocuous in the West, but such information is closely controlled in China.) It only took a few minutes however to find traffic to Secret China.com, a site in Chinese devoted to “promoting freedom of the press, a connecting bridge between the Western culture.” Now as a statistical survey, this is a small sample, but it seems likely to me that at the very least, a substantial part of Tor traffic is being used by people who have legitimate reasons to hide their online activity from their governments.
If you wish to support freedom and privacy, consider visiting the Tor website, downloading the software, and running a Tor node. You can read some reasons to run Tor on the project’s site, but here are mine:
- I want to protect the rights of all people to communicate without interference or punishment from their governments.
- I am concerned about the U.S. government’s policy of warrantless and unconstitutional surveillance, and want to protect myself against the consequences of its continued progress towards a totalitarian regime.
- I believe that like the right to bear arms, my rights may become useless if they are not exercised.
Some tips for using Tor:
- I am using the “unstable” version just fine.
- You must configure Tor as a relay if you want to run a Tor node.
- Tor will use a lot of traffic if you let it (slowing down your internet access and potentially reaching monthly bandwidth limits if you have any), and may expose you to legal investigation. You should familiarize yourself with its options, as Tor makes it easy to control both the type and volume of traffic is relays.
- If you disable all the exit policies or enable the “help censored users reach the Tor network”, you can run a node without exposing yourself to liability.
- The bandwidth graph will show total usage, so you can adjust the bandwidth limits appropriately. For reference, Comcast has a limit of 250 GB per month.
A visual guide to the 2008 presidential election
Sep 7th
My thanks to Burgess Laughlin and C August for providing this handy visual guide to help me understand the key difference between the candidates: A Visual Guide to the Election
Christian fundamentalists put freaks on parade
Aug 30th
Christians and other mystics sometimes argue that religion makes people moral. I disagree: morality is a practical science which can only be understood by rational consideration, not emotionalism (the epistemological method of faith). To the extent that religious dogmas and religious people preach and act morally, they derive their principles using the same rational methods and the same evidence that is available to everyone. Since rational moral claims need no mystical basis, it is only the irrational and immoral actions which require religious justification. To the extent that religious beliefs as such influence people’s actions, they can only influence them to do wrong – sometimes unspeakable and sometimes trivial, but still evil.
For the most part, modern Western religions, such as those in the United States, merely consist of mindless time-wasting rituals. They are evil in the sense of distracting people from more productive activities, especially from more productive means of finding moral guidance. Nevertheless, for the most part, and despite their religion, most Americans are good and productive people, who pay lip-service to a dogma highly diluted by Western philosophy and modern science.
The prime candidate for the moral monopoly of religion in America is the domain of life and death. This is where the real evil of religious influence becomes evident. One particularly despicable influence of religion was out on display when John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential candidate. One of Governor’s Palin’s qualifications for the presidential ticket is that she gave birth to a baby with Down syndrome in April.
The fact that Palin’s baby has Down syndrome is certainly tragic. Down not only severely impacts the health and life-expectancy of the child, is also a tremendous burden on their caretakers. (Aside from my personal observation, my girlfriend has worked closely with Down parents and their children.) As an unpredictable genetic disorder however, the symptom cannot be blamed on anyone. Except for this: since January 2007, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has recommended Down screening for all pregnant women, and so Governor Palin knew that her fetus had Down’s, and decided to continue her pregnancy anyway. Furthermore, she has turned her decision into political leverage in the upcoming election as proof of her moral virtuousness:
“How refreshing that now we have a woman who reflects the values of mainstream American women,” said Janice Shaw Crouse of the conservative group Concerned Women for America.
Whereas previously, a Down’s child could be born without the prior knowledge of the mother, going forward, a parent with a Down’s child will likely (at least in the developed world) have made a conscious choice to have that child. The child represents a sacrifice made by their parents for their faith. As the recommendations of ACOG are implemented nationwide, Down children (and eventually those with other genetic disorders) will increasingly become symbols of faith – a freak show meant to communicate the “family values” of their parents. They will be a symbol of religious reverence in the same way as the scarred backs of Catholics who flagellate themselves, or Buddhist monks who set themselves on fire, or Sunni Muslims who mutilate their girl’s genitals or Shiites who bloody their and their children’s heads with swords.
Genuine moral virtues – such as integrity, honesty, and productivity are not useful as evidence of religious virtue. To the extent that their practical benefit is visible to everyone, they do not represent the special domain of religion. To demonstrate religious virtue, it is necessary to sacrifice authentic moral values in favor of “religious” values. The particular object of the sacrifice is not important – there is nothing particularly “biblical” about being prolife (the Christian bible just as easily supports the opposite position.) If Christian fundamentalists decided that cutting of one’s hand sufficed as proof of moral virtue, they would still be guilty of evil, but not much more so than the numerous other ways that people of all kinds find to be self-destructive. What is really vicious about fundamentalists in America is that the prey on the most vulnerable –poor pregnant young girls and women, those dying from painful terminal illnesses, the loved ones of brain-dead patients, — and children afflicted with terrible genetic illnesses.
One can at least grasp the moral indifference with which a fundamentalist can force a single young mother to abandon her goals and dreams and condemn her and her child to poverty. But what can we say about a parent that chooses a life of suffering upon their child? If we are morally outraged by child rapists, how should we judge a parent who chooses a lifetime of suffering on their own child?
FCC rewards piracy in the name of “net neutrality”
Aug 21st
According to Ars Technica, yesterday the FCC ordered Comcast to stop slowing down the Internet traffic of users who use excessive file-sharing (P2P) software. Instead, Comcast will slow down the Internet service of all users who use a lot of traffic, regardless of the content. Other ISP’s will probably follow Comcast’s lead.
Basically, this order means that users who are anonymously sharing software and movies using file-sharing software (the vast majority of which is pirated and illegal) must be treated the same as users who are doing things such as video chat, telecommuting, and other applications that rely on real-time communications. While not all P2P traffic is illegitimate, surely real-time applications should be given a lower priority than file-sharing. Either way – ISP’s have the right to decide how to best route traffic on their networks. Yet no law was necessary – just another politically-motivated decree from some nameless bureaucrat.
Score yet another victory for anti-corporate hysteria and the egalitarian ideology which is destroying capitalism and the rule of law in the name of “neutrality.”
The vicious lie behind the global warming scare
Jun 25th
The environmentalist movement believes that unless immediate and drastic measures are taken to combat global warming, “disease, desolation and famine” are “inevitable” on a scale that might spell the end of life on earth, making earth “as hot as Venus.“ Surely, such an apocalyptic threat demands immediate action. Given the resistance to curtailing industrial production (not to mention the economic destruction and mass death that such a curtailment would entail), environmentalists should eagerly supports experiments that attempt to compensate rather than eliminate the impact of industry on the environment.
In fact, a number of relatively simple, low-cost measures have been proposed by scientists and entrepreneurs, one of which is documented in the June 2008 issue of Popular Science (PDF). As early as 1988, oceanographers proposed seeding the oceans with iron, which would cause an algae bloom that could rapidly compensate for the entire effect of industrial civilization for far less money that it would cost to eliminate CO2 emissions. Seeding experiments by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have demonstrated that the technique works, although further experimentation is required. A number of entrepreneurs, such as Russ George of Planktos Corp (TED video) stepped forward to carry out the required work.
How would you expect environmental groups to react to such an opportunity? If you guessed outright or even cautious optimism, you would be dead wrong. “I don’t think any quick geo-engineering fixes are going to work,” said one Greenpeace scientist. “There are only two ways that we’re going to solve climate change: reduce the amount of energy that we use and dramatically change the methods we use to generate it.” According to Scientific American, environmental groups were essentially united in the belief that “if society relies on quick techno-fixes to ameliorate global warming … people will stop putting in the hard work necessary to cut carbon emissions.”
Think about what that statement means. “Hard work” means government coercion to destroy the industrial production that feeds (sometimes barely) a rapidly growing human population. “Quick engineering fix” means a fast, cheap, technological solution that allows us to have our cake (the wealthy, healthy life that industry makes possible) and eat it too (literally, algae eating CO2). Notice that their objection is not that iron seeding won’t work, but that it eliminates the incentive to destroy industrial civilization.
As the article make clear, environmentalists are violently opposed to even exploring any measure that attempts to neutralize the “threat” of global warming rather than deal with the cause. Lies and intimidation are integral to the movement: the terrorist group Sea Shepherd, which has sunk nine ships since 1979, threatened any future seeding experiments, their PR machine used fear of nanotechnology to claim that iron ore (plain rust) is “engineered nanoparticles,” while their political branch got the Spanish government to ban seeding on the grounds that it constitutes “toxic waste” dumping.
As should be clear by now, environmentalism is not actually opposed to global warming – ending the “threat” posed by global warming is the last thing on their agenda. Their real goal is to use the global warming scare to bully the developed world into reverting into the pre-industrial, pre-civilized age. They oppose viable alternative energy sources for the same reason that they oppose viable fixes to the crises they invent – they oppose nuclear energy, hydro power, and they are organizing to oppose wind power just as it has become viable. If solar panels ever become viable, they will certainly invent reasons to oppose them too.
(Note that I am not actually advocating iron ore seeding. I am not convinced that the climate is warming as rapidly as claimed, or that CO2 is the cause, and even it is, it is likely that higher CO2 levels and a warmer climate offer tremendous benefits to both plant and animal life. If anything, we should be encouraging measures that make our world greener and more comfortable.)
CO2 rise making the earth greener, more diverse
Jun 9th
According to NASA satellite data:
Over a period of almost two decades, the Earth as a whole became more bountiful by a whopping 6.2%. About 25% of the Earth’s vegetated landmass — almost 110 million square kilometres — enjoyed significant increases and only 7% showed significant declines. When the satellite data zooms in, it finds that each square metre of land, on average, now produces almost 500 grams of greenery per year.
[A] 2004 study, and other more recent ones, point to the warming of the planet and the presence of CO2, a gas indispensable to plant life. CO2 is nature’s fertilizer, bathing the biota with its life-giving nutrients. Plants take the carbon from CO2 to bulk themselves up — carbon is the building block of life — and release the oxygen, which along with the plants, then sustain animal life. As summarized in a report last month, released along with a petition signed by 32,000 U. S. scientists who vouched for the benefits of CO2: “Higher CO2 enables plants to grow faster and larger and to live in drier climates. Plants provide food for animals, which are thereby also enhanced. The extent and diversity of plant and animal life have both increased substantially during the past half-century.”
Despite the evidence that cutting CO2 would cause environmental destruction and a net loss of bio-diversity,
Amazingly, although the risks of action are arguably at least as real as the risks of inaction, Canada and other countries are rushing into Earth-altering carbon schemes with nary a doubt.
More.
Yaron Brook: Why Unregulated Capitalism Is Moral
May 18th
Watch more great videos at the Ayn Rand Institute channel on YouTube
Freedom and Toleration
Apr 24th
This post is inspired by the State of Texas’ recent abduction of 416 kids from a polygamist compound.
One way to measure the degree of freedom in a society is by looking at the kinds of associations made by its members. A free people can choose to enter into any association they wish, and are not forced into any associations against their will. By associations, I include both social associations, such as friendships, meeting, publications, and marriages, as well as material associations, such as gifts, trade, business agreements, and common property. Voluntary associations are those entered into by mutual consent to mutual benefit. Non-voluntary associations (the status of minors aside) include taxes, crime, restrictions on trade and commerce, and any other regulation of consensual behavior that is imposed on individuals against their own judgment.
A free society requires a certain kind of tolerance for other people’s beliefs and associations. Because the term is unclear, it is necessary to distinguish two kinds of toleration. Political toleration is equal treatment under the law – the presumption that every human being has the same rights as everyone else. A violation of this kind of toleration is only possible in interactions that involve the threat or use of force. Political discrimination includes preferential or detrimental treatment of any group or individual based on any criteria other than an individual’s respect for the rights of others. Examples of political intolerance include laws that favor the rich or poor (such any government tax or fee that is not fixed), racial quotas, or limitations on contracts based on sexual orientation or the market share of one’s business.
In contrast to political toleration, social toleration is non-judgmentalism. As applied to cultural distinctions, it is known as multiculturalism. A total commitment to social toleration requires the presumption that no particular culture, way of life, or value system is superior to any other. Practically everyone engages in various kinds of social intolerance when they issue moral praise and condemnation, or choose to associate or dissociate with various people or groups based on their beliefs or identities. There are many levels of intolerance — we might buy our groceries from someone we would not necessarily want as a business partner or spouse.
I believe that a free people must be politically tolerant, but socially intolerant. Political tolerance is necessary because the freedom of association requires that individuals be able to establish any voluntary association they choose, including those that the majority disapproves of, such as polygamous relationships. A society that does not respect this right will eventually succumb to pressure group warfare followed by dictatorship, as conflicting moral views battle in the political arena until one seizes power by force. Social intolerance on the other hand, is necessary because in a society that does not use political means to prohibit destructive (but voluntary) behavior and ideas, people must rely on their own judgment for moral guidance. In order to live successfully in a politically pluralistic society, individuals need to use their own judgment to decide which associations are harmful or beneficial within the context of voluntary associations. (In this context, a presumption of innocence is equally important in social as well as political tolerance.)
Politically, freedom means the freedom to disagree – to be free to make choices regardless of the approval of others. A free people must be free to create and join religious cults, no matter how absurd their beliefs or how self-destructive their practices are. Socially, freedom requires an ethic of self-reliance and independent moral judgment. To survive and thrive in a free society, we must decide which people and groups to join and which ones to condemn and avoid.
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