For the 3 people who follow my posts (that's just a guess, there may not actually be that many): you'll be interested to learn that my online brain dump is moving to a new location.
My new web site includes all the posts that were made on this site, and comes with categories - just in case you want to keep up to date on my political opinions, but not my geekier posts. Or something.
You'll need to add the new feed to your reader - I will not be posting any more content to this particular slice of the internet. Don't worry - I made a handy page with the feed links for you.
I will be leaving my old content at this location, though I have disabled comments.
If you have an opinion on all this, feel free to let me know!
2009-12-14
2009-07-01
Recent big news: cops beat up gay people
The short story: a group of Fort Worth police officers went into a local gay bar, and started "restraining" and arresting people for being too intoxicated (side note: being too intoxicated inside a bar is illegal? aieeeeee...)
Anyways, the cops got pretty rough, and by all accounts were really getting into throwing people around (focusing entirely on the males), and now one of the patrons is in a coma after some nasty head trauma.
The justification for their over-the-top violence is that they claim one of the officers was felt up by a male patron. As if any rational man would risk offending an authority figure backed by friends with guns. The owner of the bar noted: "We're gay, not stupid."
Many people are getting really angry about this, assuming that the police officers were prejudiced against homosexual males and took pleasure in harassing them. And you know what, it's probably true.
But that's not why we should all be indignant - we should be angry because there are places in our country where "peace officers" believe they have the right to use violence against citizens with little or no provocation. And, for all intents and purposes, they do.
We've given all the responsibility for upholding the law to a group of armed, uniformed human beings. Human beings are not perfect.
Imagine officers bursting into the home of a homeschooling family, throwing parents to the ground, and taking children away.
Imagine police breaking up a prayer meeting and dragging people off to jail for zoning issues.
Handcuffing a group of inoffensive hippies on their way to pick up some munchies.
Detaining a group of Mexicans without reason on their way home from work.
We all have our prejudices and stereotypes of other groups of people - it's just that some of us have the power to punish other people with little or no repercussions.
How do you feel about it?
Anyways, the cops got pretty rough, and by all accounts were really getting into throwing people around (focusing entirely on the males), and now one of the patrons is in a coma after some nasty head trauma.
The justification for their over-the-top violence is that they claim one of the officers was felt up by a male patron. As if any rational man would risk offending an authority figure backed by friends with guns. The owner of the bar noted: "We're gay, not stupid."
Many people are getting really angry about this, assuming that the police officers were prejudiced against homosexual males and took pleasure in harassing them. And you know what, it's probably true.
But that's not why we should all be indignant - we should be angry because there are places in our country where "peace officers" believe they have the right to use violence against citizens with little or no provocation. And, for all intents and purposes, they do.
We've given all the responsibility for upholding the law to a group of armed, uniformed human beings. Human beings are not perfect.
Imagine officers bursting into the home of a homeschooling family, throwing parents to the ground, and taking children away.
Imagine police breaking up a prayer meeting and dragging people off to jail for zoning issues.
Handcuffing a group of inoffensive hippies on their way to pick up some munchies.
Detaining a group of Mexicans without reason on their way home from work.
We all have our prejudices and stereotypes of other groups of people - it's just that some of us have the power to punish other people with little or no repercussions.
How do you feel about it?
2009-01-12
If life isn't fair, should we make laws to fix it?
My views on Intellectual Property have undergone some pretty drastic changes recently. Just a few years ago I was downloading MP3s because I wanted to listen to music, and I had a vague idea that the laws that made the downloading illegal were somehow flawed.
At this date, my ideas have a bit more form, though I can't promise that they won't be changing in the future. I invite those with opinions on the subject to help me form mine.
There seems to be a lot of argument going on over copyrights (giving an author exclusive rights to their work), trademarks (giving someone exclusive rights to a name or distinguishing feature), and patents (giving someone exclusive rights to an invention or process) recently.
This is important to me in part because I deal in intellectual property fairly often. I'm a programmer by day, and a musician by night (and often a programmer by night, as well).
I get paid to take ideas (often thought up by me) and implement them as software. For entertainment, I often take ideas (thought up by someone who is a better composer than me) and implement them as tasty drum beats in a song.
It is also worth noting that I am of the opinion that if a law or government function is not biblically supportable (based on Biblical case laws), it does not need to exist.
My statements here are based in the idea (which, to the best of my knowledge, is biblically based) that the best type of market is a free market, of the laissez-faire variety. The biblical basis for this statement is subject for other posts and books (and I'm open to more reading material!).
A free market means a general lack of government regulation of products and services. This would include products and services based on "intellectual property," or ideas and information.
Intellectual property laws are a government giving exclusive rights on a concept or piece of data to an individual or business. The traditional argument in favor of these laws is that without them, inventors and creators would be afraid to create anything for fear that their works might be plagiarized.
I do not think that this would be the case in a world where the government did not fight for some sort of special rights for creators or inventors. However, more relevantly, I do not know of any biblical basis for these sorts of laws.
The closest thing to biblical support for IP laws that I have seen is people making a shaky connection from the eighth commandment (do not steal) to the concept of "stealing ideas."
So if intellectual property laws are not biblically supportable, what are they doing? They are doing the same thing that every other man-conceived law is doing: enforcing someone's idea of fairness on others.
We all benefit from the creative works of others - we enjoy useful technology and entertaining media every day. We appreciate the advances that have come at the price of hard work from talented individuals. Our blood boils when we hear of some smart man getting cheated out of the fruits of his labors by others who use his ideas.
Why do we feel this way? Because we believe that somebody is getting less than they deserve, and that makes us righteously indignant. We believe that inventors deserve, at the very least, a comfortable life and the ability to keep inventing if they wish to. And we're willing to write laws that infringe on the rights of others (the right to create what you can with what you own) to try to make it happen.
God is the decider of what man deserves. At most, man should concern itself with enforcing the civil law given to us by God. When it comes to enforcing fairness, we tend to muck it up.
At this date, my ideas have a bit more form, though I can't promise that they won't be changing in the future. I invite those with opinions on the subject to help me form mine.
There seems to be a lot of argument going on over copyrights (giving an author exclusive rights to their work), trademarks (giving someone exclusive rights to a name or distinguishing feature), and patents (giving someone exclusive rights to an invention or process) recently.
This is important to me in part because I deal in intellectual property fairly often. I'm a programmer by day, and a musician by night (and often a programmer by night, as well).
I get paid to take ideas (often thought up by me) and implement them as software. For entertainment, I often take ideas (thought up by someone who is a better composer than me) and implement them as tasty drum beats in a song.
It is also worth noting that I am of the opinion that if a law or government function is not biblically supportable (based on Biblical case laws), it does not need to exist.
My statements here are based in the idea (which, to the best of my knowledge, is biblically based) that the best type of market is a free market, of the laissez-faire variety. The biblical basis for this statement is subject for other posts and books (and I'm open to more reading material!).
A free market means a general lack of government regulation of products and services. This would include products and services based on "intellectual property," or ideas and information.
Intellectual property laws are a government giving exclusive rights on a concept or piece of data to an individual or business. The traditional argument in favor of these laws is that without them, inventors and creators would be afraid to create anything for fear that their works might be plagiarized.
I do not think that this would be the case in a world where the government did not fight for some sort of special rights for creators or inventors. However, more relevantly, I do not know of any biblical basis for these sorts of laws.
The closest thing to biblical support for IP laws that I have seen is people making a shaky connection from the eighth commandment (do not steal) to the concept of "stealing ideas."
So if intellectual property laws are not biblically supportable, what are they doing? They are doing the same thing that every other man-conceived law is doing: enforcing someone's idea of fairness on others.
We all benefit from the creative works of others - we enjoy useful technology and entertaining media every day. We appreciate the advances that have come at the price of hard work from talented individuals. Our blood boils when we hear of some smart man getting cheated out of the fruits of his labors by others who use his ideas.
Why do we feel this way? Because we believe that somebody is getting less than they deserve, and that makes us righteously indignant. We believe that inventors deserve, at the very least, a comfortable life and the ability to keep inventing if they wish to. And we're willing to write laws that infringe on the rights of others (the right to create what you can with what you own) to try to make it happen.
God is the decider of what man deserves. At most, man should concern itself with enforcing the civil law given to us by God. When it comes to enforcing fairness, we tend to muck it up.
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