Another Dated Link Dump

The terrible thing is, often times I never go back to review the link dump....

• How to Build a Worm Tower
• Retractable PVC Hoop House
• How not to get caught in a mass-surveillance world
• 10 corporations control almost everything you buy
• Lifestyle garage screens
• Ocumetics Bionic Lens
• Building a Tin Can WiFi Waveguide Antenna
• Why Young Men Go to War
• FedBizOpps
• Vanity Fair interview with Ed Snowden

I just have too many tabs open....

The Internet Doesn't Need to Be Saved

Libertarianism.org, the Cato Institute's broad blog on libertarianism, had a piece on "Net Neutrality" earlier this month.

Lost Youth

Somehow I think most married men in this day and age, subject to all the implied lust in advertising and entertainment, have felt this at some point or another.  (Unless they've been through a lot of women prior to getting married, that is.)  It's like the single vs. married dilemma: when you're single you want a stable relationship like marriage, but then when you get married you find out it's not all about you anymore and long for your single days.  Link source: an article on the Casual Sex Project.

Link Dump, 2013.01.09

These have been sitting in my reader for a bit....

Roberts's Real Long Game?
The Permanent Militarization of America
The Power of Negative Thinking

And more recently:
Ten gun bills on Congress's first day

Paul Revere's Legacy

Via someone on the Appleseed forums (Transform), I learned of an interview of the author of Paul Revere's Ride, David Hackett Fischer, where he voices something that occurred to me when I read the book:

I think he had a message for us as well. To me, the interest of the story is partly that. I think we can see a kind of message, first of all, in what he was doing. For me it was mainly the kind of collective effort in that cause of freedom, and we forgot about that. We forgot about both sides of it, sometimes. I think people on the left today, some of my colleagues at academe, tend to forget about American ideas of freedom. People on the right tend to forget about collective action. Paul Revere and his friends brought those two things together, and I think that's a message for us.

Yeah.

Walter Williams

I recently saw an image on Facebook by the Bastiat Institute with a purported quote by Walter Williams.  I wanted to post it here but couldn't find a source for that specific quote.  The text of the image:

How does something immoral, when done privately, become moral when it is done collectively? Furthermore, does legality establish morality? Slavery was legal; Apartheid is legal; Stalinist, Nazi, and Maoist purges were legal. Clearly, the fact of legality does not justify these crimes. Legality, alone, cannot be the talisman of moral people.

The closest I could find is an article on creators.com from June 6 of this year.

In other words, does an act that's clearly immoral and illegal when done privately become moral when it is done legally and collectively? Put another way, does legality establish morality? Before you answer, keep in mind that slavery was legal; apartheid was legal; the Nazi's Nuremberg Laws were legal; and the Stalinist and Maoist purges were legal. Legality alone cannot be the guide for moral people.

Even better, a search turned up a piece called "When and Under What Circumstances Should Violent Force Be Used?" Williams makes many of the same points as in the prior article, but he also makes the same argument that I've been making against the ultimate threat of force from the government enforcing the law. I feel somewhat vindicated.

Charitable Conservatives

A long while ago, D.V. at work had mentioned a study he'd read about where conservatives donate much more in terms of percentage of income than liberals.  I had occasion to look that up, and found a couple references (NYT, RCP) to a 2008 study by Arthur Brooks.  No surprises there.

Maybe liberals think that spending tax dollars on entitlements is equivalent.  However, there's nothing charitable about spending someone else's money to assuage one's guilty conscience.

The Purpose of Armed Citizenry

Another post by Vanderboegh worth rereading.

"An Interracial Fix for Black Marriage"

WSJ featured an article—by a black man, one Ralph Richard Banks—on the difficulties black women face in finding a spouse, and proposed that rather than looking within their race exclusively to consider marrying outside their race to broaden the base of eligible males in the near-term, but to ease the difficulties of finding in-race mates in the long-term.

From the article:

If many black women remain unmarried because they think they have too few options, some black men stay single because they think they have so many. The same numbers imbalance that makes life difficult for black women may be a source of power for black men. Why cash in, they reason, when it is so easy to continue to play?

...which perhaps describes the situation of a guy I know.

Others prefer black men because they don't think a relationship with a non-black man would work. They worry about rejection by a would-be spouse's family or the awkwardness of having to explain oneself to a non-black partner.

As one 31-year-old schoolteacher in D.C. told me, "It's easy to date a black man because he knows about my hair. He knows I don't wash it every day. He knows I'm going to put the scarf on [to keep it in place at night]." Discussions about hair may seem trivial, but for many black women, just the thought of having the "hair talk" makes them tired. It's emblematic of so much else they'd have to teach.

Interracial relationships aren't easy, since the downside is certain things you can't take for granted. But the plus side is that you can avoid the miscommunications that result from taking for granted things that weren't safe to assume.

By opening themselves to relationships with men of other races, black women would also lessen the power disparity that depresses the African-American marriage rate. As more black women expanded their options, black women as a group would have more leverage with black men. Even black women who remained unwilling to love across the color line would benefit from other black women's willingness to do so.

Interesting thesis, one that I as a "minority", if not a vested one, think valid.

Adversity

"Scorn poverty: no one is as poor as he was at birth. Scorn pain: either it will go away or you will. Scorn death: either it finishes you or it transforms you." (Lucius Annaeus Seneca)

I saw the middle sentence somewhere and tracked down the quote.  Good stuff, and there's more on that site.

Political Ideology

From Kevin, the five worldviews, according to Michael Lind via Salon.com.

Contrast that with the list of political ideologies on Wikipedia. Of course a worldview isn't the same thing, but the two are intricately related.

The categories that Lind postulates are gross caricatures of each faction, e.g. "libertarian isolationism"—which is really just don't stick your nose where it doesn't belong. I suppose the point was to get everyone up in arms, but at least he gets it right that the world views of Bush, Clinton, and Obama are one and the same, which he terms "neoliberal globalism".

Still, it's abundantly clear that we "can't all just get along"—there will always be conflict where humans deal with one another.

為せば成る

昨日の朝、「にほんごであそぼ」を見ていたらこの詩をやっていた：

為せば成る
為さねば成らぬ
何事も
成らぬは人の
為さぬなりけり

調べたら上杉治憲が書いたことが分かった。大名の時から、名前を上杉鷹山に変えたらしい。しかし、他の人がそれより早く、似たような詩を書いたようだ：

為せば成る
為さねば成らぬ
成る業を
成らぬと捨つる
人の儚き

鷹山がぱくったか、別で同じ発想をもったか。調べようがないね。

Why the gun is civilization

I found a great pro-gun essay at random on the interwebz titled, "Why the gun is civilization".  Apparently it was used and mis-attributed in an email advertisement from Front Sight at some point.  Sheesh.  The author, Marko Kloos, has a few other essays as well.

Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun

While looking for information on sling use for the Appleseed Project shoot this weekend, I came across a brilliant piece, "Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun," by Eric Raymond, the Cathedral and the Bazaar guy.  Maybe I knew that he was a kindred geek with guns, but I don't think I'd read this particular piece before.

Indeed, consequence-avoidance has been the anathema of American society for the past 40 years at least.  Real choices, real actions, real responsibility.  For the flavor of this alone, I'd own a gun—never mind that it's fun to shoot!