...Because it won't.
WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS A LOT OF CUSSING AND SWEARING AT THE INCOMPETENCE OF FASCISTBOOK.
That said,
My permanent address is in Alaska, and I have lived in Chicago and Massachusetts over the past 5 years, but I am now in Bangkok. During my various moves, Facebook has been a way to remain connected with a large network of friends and philosophical libertarians that I am friends or at least "fellow travelers" with. Not any more though. Some idiot in Facebook has made the terrible decision to lock users out of their accounts if they can't identify all of their friends, and don't have the same cell phone they opened the account with turned on.
Facebook currently won't let me sign in. I have a new phone number here, and they are goddamn disconnecting me from all of my ideological allies on the one single platform I thought I could rely on. Damn Facebook!!! They asked me to verify my identity using two utterly useless non-identifiers!!! OPTION ONE: By naming one of my friends "tagged in a photo" BUT GUESS WHAT??? That tag might not be correct, Or I might have no idea what my friend looks like as an infant, or I might only know this friend by their avatar picture, or this friend's friends might have labeled a picture of the US Constitution or a statue with their name, or I might only know them because of our shared interests or their political writings!!!
YEAH, REAL PEOPLE ACTUALLY ADD FRIENDS THEY CANNOT PHYSICALLY IDENTIFY! (And what about blind people, or people who simply have bad memories for names?) Since Facebook's system isn't an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), it can't tell when people are actually tagged correctly, (or why the hell you became friends with someone), ...so if FB uses this as a means of identity verification they are royally fucking people over! ...People like me!
Damn Facebook! Can't they just allow people to keep their accounts secure using the time-tested and logical way of sending email confirmations? If someone hacks both email accounts of mine, then they can damned well have my facebook account as well! ...It's certainly useless to me like this!
Moving on: OPTION TWO: (for "verifying my identity") is for them to send a message to my U.S. cell phone number. Well, guess what? I'm not using my 907-area-code cell phone in Bangkok. I have a SIM card here with a new Bangkok phone number that I keep charged with cash(baht)!
And is that any of Facebook's business? NO. I wish they would quit trying to "track me for my own good"! MESSAGE TO FACEBOOK: Just provide the service you purport to provide, and stay the fuck out of my life, OK?
If I can't sign into FB when it is most useful to me, then how the hell does it mean a damned thing to me?
Answer: it doesn't. It minorly fucks up my life by giving me a false sense of traveling connectedness that doesn't really exist, and then denies me service when I need it most: when I'm in a foreign country where I don't speak the native language, and I have no other good means of keeping in touch with my family and friends. Moreover, there are some people I'd really like to communicate with about life here in Bangkok whom I only know from facebook, (beyond the aquiantance stage).
FACEBOOK: SOCIAL NETWORKING ACCOMPLICES TO THE "OVER-REDUNDANT-SECURITY-ABOVE-ALL-ELSE" ASSHOLES OF THE WORLD!
Crack these books, you bureaucracy-minded government-school-miseducated morons:
"Out of Control" by Kevin Kelly
"Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy (Pay particular attention to the section on the over-securing of computer account passwords.)
Please, Facebook, apply some of the universal principles of privacy, nonintervention, anonymity, and decentralization to your business. Then, you won't lose people like myself as users.
Thanks!
-Jake
International calling country code: 66
Bangkok phone number: 08-9445-3689
Showing posts with label right to travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label right to travel. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
All Individuals Have a Right To Travel Freely
The vast body of consistent libertarian work does not care for protecting the USA from "illegal aliens", but rather seeks to protect the rights of the individual ---ANY INDIVIDUAL--- to travel freely. ANY activity of a police state is an affront to individual freedom. What is "deportation" but the police state at its very worst, initiating force against innocent people? (Arguments against the innocence of illegals are red herring arguments, because nothing about immigrating --in and of itself-- creates a victim. In fact, the "unintended consequences" of immigration prohibition are what creates victims. Just like alcohol prohibition created low-grade moonshine dealers that blinded people, the skirting of border police incentivizes human trafficking by creating trafficking victims who cannot legally seek the help of the law.)
Moreover, there can be no deportation without every other kind of imaginable violation of privacy and personal freedom. Like the "war on drugs", the battle against illegal immigration can only be won by a totalitarian police state that sees all, and knows all. How else do you identify "illegals"?, monitor them up to the point of arrest?, avoid wasting law enforcement resources by "going after" the largest groups of illegals? ...There is no way to wage a war on "illegal relocation".
There is pain and suffering caused by breaking apart of families. When "illegal" breadwinners are "deported", the remaining family cries for "relief from that tyranny" and demands compensating welfare handouts that recursively destroy the system. Deportations also undermine the consistency of the message of individual freedom in elections (The very first anti-Ron-Paul website mocked his stance on illegal immigration, and turned away scores of leftists and purist libertarian independents who were otherwise open to his message). Deportations also weaken the economy by removing the source of low-cost entry-level labor that operates at closer to its true value. And, of course, cheap "black market" labor indicates that the minimum wage does, in fact, create joblessness.
Every ill ascribed to "illegals" is actually an ill caused by two standards of documentation: one for "documented citizens" and another for "illegals". The incremental cure is simple: unite everyone under one standard, voluntarily offered and voluntarily accepted by all. Those who exist totally outside the system have no access to the system's protections, as "outlaws". (As desribed in the famous youtube video by Schaeffer Cox, "The Plan".) This way, collectivism is shown as being the curse it is, for everyone.
Of course, the standard of justice and private property rights that America is based on cannot support collectivism. Collectivism cannot support influxes of incentivized collectivists (tax eaters). ...But collectivization destroys ANY system! The answer is to eliminate the collectivism, not the influx of new individuals (individuals who will operate as incentivized individualists in an individualist system, and incentivized collectivists in a collectivist system). No welfare state can survive. If illegals pouring into our welfare state hasten its destruction, they actually do us a favor: ask: "Do we want a prolongued depression, or a speedy crash?" In the "prolongued failure" scenario, the police state might survive into an era when it gains powerful computational tools of absolute control over the individual: at that time, the welfare state results in democide ---a terrifying reality! Might it not be better to reap what we've sown --a destroyed socialist state-- sooner? A complete failure's ashes can be built upon, but a burgeoning "big brother" cannot. To that end, I welcome illegal immigrants to our current system, and I preach the message that they are not at any fault, so long as they do not support welfare statism.
...I have created many new libertarians in conversations that way, as have libertarians like Marc Stevens, with his youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrwXYhCU9pQ
The illegals didn't vote for collectivism, year after year, since 1913. But they can and will end it, ...catastrophically. I say, "more power to them!" Let's stop pretending we have a constitutional government, and solely consider strategies toward creating a government that protects individual rights. "Rewinding the clock" cannot work: America was sold to a central bank in 1913. Perhaps we cannot go back to Jefferson's constitution. But we can reinstate free speech, jury trials, and property rights, in their fundamental form.
We can blame illegal immigrants for the fact that the clock cannot be turned back, or we can put the blame squarely where it belongs: on US voters who ignored the birth of the Libertarian political alternative in 1971.
Let's teach illegal immigrants about the ideas of Harry Browne, Samuel Konkin, Marc Stevens, G Edward Griffin, and other libertarian philosophers. After all, they crossed a river, government checkpoints and barricades, drug dogs, and border police, and they have seen the worst of the American police state. (They are our most natural demographic!)
Illegal immigrants are a growth market for libertarian and individualist ideas. By supporting ideological opposition to immigration, we undermine our own message, and set ourselves up for imminent failure by conceding moral libertarian highground to the Democrat and Republican Parties that have caved in (kind of) to allowing (some) illegal immigration.
A supremely intelligent supercomputer would predict that opposing illegal immigration is doomed to failure. If there is a market pressure that rewards immigration, it will happen. Moreover, the purist libertarian position favors free immigration. (Only a narrow market of contrarian quasi-libertarians oppose immigration, because they are marketing to a tiny but vocal market of contrarians.) The purist libertarian position here is winning, but instead of saying "I told you so!" and welcoming thousands of new libertarians into our midst, we allow "La Raza" (a ragtag bunch of collectivists!) to take the moral high ground (and the potential political victory!) that has belonged --unused-- to libertarians for the prior 30 years!
Rather than marching against "La Raza", we should be marching with them, and opposing only the portions of their message that are collectivist. The "the path is over here!" method of political competition is the best. Go to where the crowds are, and show the crowds the message of truth!
Opposition to immigration is another example of the libertarian/individualist movement snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. We should be smarter than that.
Moreover, there can be no deportation without every other kind of imaginable violation of privacy and personal freedom. Like the "war on drugs", the battle against illegal immigration can only be won by a totalitarian police state that sees all, and knows all. How else do you identify "illegals"?, monitor them up to the point of arrest?, avoid wasting law enforcement resources by "going after" the largest groups of illegals? ...There is no way to wage a war on "illegal relocation".
There is pain and suffering caused by breaking apart of families. When "illegal" breadwinners are "deported", the remaining family cries for "relief from that tyranny" and demands compensating welfare handouts that recursively destroy the system. Deportations also undermine the consistency of the message of individual freedom in elections (The very first anti-Ron-Paul website mocked his stance on illegal immigration, and turned away scores of leftists and purist libertarian independents who were otherwise open to his message). Deportations also weaken the economy by removing the source of low-cost entry-level labor that operates at closer to its true value. And, of course, cheap "black market" labor indicates that the minimum wage does, in fact, create joblessness.
Every ill ascribed to "illegals" is actually an ill caused by two standards of documentation: one for "documented citizens" and another for "illegals". The incremental cure is simple: unite everyone under one standard, voluntarily offered and voluntarily accepted by all. Those who exist totally outside the system have no access to the system's protections, as "outlaws". (As desribed in the famous youtube video by Schaeffer Cox, "The Plan".) This way, collectivism is shown as being the curse it is, for everyone.
Of course, the standard of justice and private property rights that America is based on cannot support collectivism. Collectivism cannot support influxes of incentivized collectivists (tax eaters). ...But collectivization destroys ANY system! The answer is to eliminate the collectivism, not the influx of new individuals (individuals who will operate as incentivized individualists in an individualist system, and incentivized collectivists in a collectivist system). No welfare state can survive. If illegals pouring into our welfare state hasten its destruction, they actually do us a favor: ask: "Do we want a prolongued depression, or a speedy crash?" In the "prolongued failure" scenario, the police state might survive into an era when it gains powerful computational tools of absolute control over the individual: at that time, the welfare state results in democide ---a terrifying reality! Might it not be better to reap what we've sown --a destroyed socialist state-- sooner? A complete failure's ashes can be built upon, but a burgeoning "big brother" cannot. To that end, I welcome illegal immigrants to our current system, and I preach the message that they are not at any fault, so long as they do not support welfare statism.
...I have created many new libertarians in conversations that way, as have libertarians like Marc Stevens, with his youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrwXYhCU9pQ
The illegals didn't vote for collectivism, year after year, since 1913. But they can and will end it, ...catastrophically. I say, "more power to them!" Let's stop pretending we have a constitutional government, and solely consider strategies toward creating a government that protects individual rights. "Rewinding the clock" cannot work: America was sold to a central bank in 1913. Perhaps we cannot go back to Jefferson's constitution. But we can reinstate free speech, jury trials, and property rights, in their fundamental form.
We can blame illegal immigrants for the fact that the clock cannot be turned back, or we can put the blame squarely where it belongs: on US voters who ignored the birth of the Libertarian political alternative in 1971.
Let's teach illegal immigrants about the ideas of Harry Browne, Samuel Konkin, Marc Stevens, G Edward Griffin, and other libertarian philosophers. After all, they crossed a river, government checkpoints and barricades, drug dogs, and border police, and they have seen the worst of the American police state. (They are our most natural demographic!)
Illegal immigrants are a growth market for libertarian and individualist ideas. By supporting ideological opposition to immigration, we undermine our own message, and set ourselves up for imminent failure by conceding moral libertarian highground to the Democrat and Republican Parties that have caved in (kind of) to allowing (some) illegal immigration.
A supremely intelligent supercomputer would predict that opposing illegal immigration is doomed to failure. If there is a market pressure that rewards immigration, it will happen. Moreover, the purist libertarian position favors free immigration. (Only a narrow market of contrarian quasi-libertarians oppose immigration, because they are marketing to a tiny but vocal market of contrarians.) The purist libertarian position here is winning, but instead of saying "I told you so!" and welcoming thousands of new libertarians into our midst, we allow "La Raza" (a ragtag bunch of collectivists!) to take the moral high ground (and the potential political victory!) that has belonged --unused-- to libertarians for the prior 30 years!
Rather than marching against "La Raza", we should be marching with them, and opposing only the portions of their message that are collectivist. The "the path is over here!" method of political competition is the best. Go to where the crowds are, and show the crowds the message of truth!
Opposition to immigration is another example of the libertarian/individualist movement snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. We should be smarter than that.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Papers Please! All Aboard! ...Last Stop, Auschwitz...
This latest essay of mine asks what will happen if
we do not begin stopping the violations of our rights,
as they are happening. ...If we do not begin to defend
ourselves with force, when we are met with force.
They have overwhelming force, but they do not have
planning or intelligence. They bully us with brute force
and expect us to submit. We should learn to disappoint
them, as did a small group of "citizen-subjects" in Warsaw,
Poland, in 1941.
Do you want to hear what became of America?
It died a long, long time ago. It died when Americans
refused to rebel the first time they were told that
they couldn't own whatever private property they
wanted to own, and when they lost the product
of their labor to the Federal Reserve. And now, we
have mongoloids in airports demanding that we
waive our rights, without cause, provocation, or
reason:
http://www.papersplease.org/wp/
I'm sorry to use such harsh language, but listening
to the following recording made my blood boil. I
understand that socialists like Ashcroft and
Gonzalez and Holder have all turned America's
eagles into vultures, but sometimes I can't view it
dispassionately. I spent all day at the range,
shooting paper plates at 25 yards with my handguns.
I didn't miss once. I'm so glad I hadn't listened to
this before I left, or I would have been literally
trembling with rage.
Scroll down to the link marked:
"recorded all but the start of the incident"
at
http://www.papersplease.org/wp/
audio recording of the actual interrogation:
http://video1.washingtontimes.com/video/tsabierfeldt.mp3
You will hear mindless children in men's bodies
threatening and questioning an American citizen
about why and how he came into possession of
money. How dare he be free to travel, free
from harassment and questioning, and
inconvenience? How dare he assert his rights,
or even ask why they are being abridged?!
They repeatedly threaten him, and pressure him to
waive his 4th amendment rights: "We can avoid all
of this, if you'd just submit."
They proceed to insult his intelligence ("It's a
simple question"), and threaten him with unlawful
DEA searches, harassment, and further
interrogation. They return time and again to
the tired bromide of "If you don't have anything
to hide, then why won't you answer our questions?"
...Maybe because the 4th amendment says he doesn't
have to answer them!
It's "suspicious" if you don't waive your rights.
Just like Germany in the mid 1930s. Everyone
has something to hide! And if they don't, it
can be fabricated, since due process is gone.
Is this the last stop? ...America's final
destination?
Few Americans realize that this train ride has
a final destination, since we've allowed the
government unlimited power. The power to hold
the purse strings, the power to make us beg for
permission to own property.
...But the train is moving really slow, and
it's such wonderful scenery!
For temporary comfort and apathy, we've sold
our future down the river, to a slave trader
that makes those in Frederick Douglass's
"Narrative" look positively benign.
Hopefully, us freedom lovers can begin working
together, before the train slows to a halt, and
we find out where our cattle car has taken us.
The man being questioned in the recording? He
works for Ron Paul's "Campaign for Liberty".
As such, he is a suspected "terrorist"
...as is anyone capable of reason, and incapable
of "doublethink".
we do not begin stopping the violations of our rights,
as they are happening. ...If we do not begin to defend
ourselves with force, when we are met with force.
They have overwhelming force, but they do not have
planning or intelligence. They bully us with brute force
and expect us to submit. We should learn to disappoint
them, as did a small group of "citizen-subjects" in Warsaw,
Poland, in 1941.
Do you want to hear what became of America?
It died a long, long time ago. It died when Americans
refused to rebel the first time they were told that
they couldn't own whatever private property they
wanted to own, and when they lost the product
of their labor to the Federal Reserve. And now, we
have mongoloids in airports demanding that we
waive our rights, without cause, provocation, or
reason:
http://www.papersplease.org/wp/
I'm sorry to use such harsh language, but listening
to the following recording made my blood boil. I
understand that socialists like Ashcroft and
Gonzalez and Holder have all turned America's
eagles into vultures, but sometimes I can't view it
dispassionately. I spent all day at the range,
shooting paper plates at 25 yards with my handguns.
I didn't miss once. I'm so glad I hadn't listened to
this before I left, or I would have been literally
trembling with rage.
Scroll down to the link marked:
"recorded all but the start of the incident"
at
http://www.papersplease.org/wp/
audio recording of the actual interrogation:
http://video1.washingtontimes.com/video/tsabierfeldt.mp3
You will hear mindless children in men's bodies
threatening and questioning an American citizen
about why and how he came into possession of
money. How dare he be free to travel, free
from harassment and questioning, and
inconvenience? How dare he assert his rights,
or even ask why they are being abridged?!
They repeatedly threaten him, and pressure him to
waive his 4th amendment rights: "We can avoid all
of this, if you'd just submit."
They proceed to insult his intelligence ("It's a
simple question"), and threaten him with unlawful
DEA searches, harassment, and further
interrogation. They return time and again to
the tired bromide of "If you don't have anything
to hide, then why won't you answer our questions?"
...Maybe because the 4th amendment says he doesn't
have to answer them!
It's "suspicious" if you don't waive your rights.
Just like Germany in the mid 1930s. Everyone
has something to hide! And if they don't, it
can be fabricated, since due process is gone.
Is this the last stop? ...America's final
destination?
Few Americans realize that this train ride has
a final destination, since we've allowed the
government unlimited power. The power to hold
the purse strings, the power to make us beg for
permission to own property.
...But the train is moving really slow, and
it's such wonderful scenery!
For temporary comfort and apathy, we've sold
our future down the river, to a slave trader
that makes those in Frederick Douglass's
"Narrative" look positively benign.
Hopefully, us freedom lovers can begin working
together, before the train slows to a halt, and
we find out where our cattle car has taken us.
The man being questioned in the recording? He
works for Ron Paul's "Campaign for Liberty".
As such, he is a suspected "terrorist"
...as is anyone capable of reason, and incapable
of "doublethink".
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