. . . muttered the ogre

pseudosecurity watch

Posted on Monday, 2005 December 05 by Anton

papersplease.org has info on Deborah Davis (busted for refusing to show her papers when a city bus crossed Fed turf), Dudley Hiibel (busted under Nevada law for failing to comply with an arbitrary demand for his papers) and John Gilmore (suing for restoration of our right to travel).

Hiibel’s case was lost at the Supreme Court. Gilmore’s is to be heard shortly by the Ninth Circuit. Davis is to be arraigned this week in federal court (District of Colorado).

Wednesday: Feds evidently decided not to risk making Davis a test case.

Posted in security theater | 1 Comment

a buggy spammer?

Posted on Sunday, 2005 December 04 by Anton

In the past few days I’ve received dozens of robot comments whose only plausible purpose is to see what will get through the filters. Most of them contained exactly three links to well-known entities, most of them in entertainment or news; this could be to test how many links my filter allows before treating a comment as spam.

Thursday: That’s stopped, but now I’m getting some consisting only of links to nonexistent domains.

Posted in blogdom, spam | Leave a comment

vile bile

Posted on Saturday, 2005 December 03 by Anton

Progressives don’t allow us white males many privileges as such, but a great one is that no matter what political opinions we may hold we don’t get slimed in racist language for them.

Posted in race | Leave a comment

Liberty Car

Posted on Friday, 2005 December 02 by Anton

Steven Hilton wants to cover his car with Libertarian campaign stickers. Got any?

Posted in politics | Leave a comment

I do not understand young women, film at eleven

Posted on Friday, 2005 December 02 by Anton

I don’t know how many times this has happened. I’m on the phone with some chirpy Career Gal, she says something to which I say “Yes, fine,” and then she warbles “Okay??”, leaving me somewhat bewildered and impatient.

It has been observed (alas that I failed to blog it, else I could tell you by whom) that “language is a code used only by code-breakers.” So perhaps I have imperfectly cracked the tacit protocol of such exchanges. Am I expected to refrain from giving my consent until it’s explicitly asked, or has the “No Means No” campaign resulted in a presumption that Yes also means no unless repeated?

Posted in language | 1 Comment

this website supports integration

Posted on Thursday, 2005 December 01 by Anton

The Answer Desimplified, on a t-shirt.

Ligatures for our times

Many translations of a conceivably useful phrase (possibly inspired by a similar project)

(all cited by the muted horn)

when grammarians go bad

Posted in arts, fandom | Leave a comment

uncertainty and moral absolutes

Posted on Wednesday, 2005 November 30 by Anton

Mark Kleiman unwittingly expresses a case for limiting government in general:

This is a special case of an underappreciated general principle: the difficulty of judging consequences in advance means that we should pay more attention to means, relative to ends, than would appear at first blush. Since it’s easy to know that torture is horribly wrong in itself, and very hard to guess the circumstances in which it would prevent something even more horrible, a flat “no-torture” rule may well have better consequences (putting the moral absolutes aside) than some nuanced rule.

In that way, refusing to consider the use of torture is like respecting the results of legal processes or not cheating to win elections. It reflects not only a decent respect for the humanity of other humans but a sensible evaluation of one’s own ignorance.