National Security (part 2)

I don’t like political posts, but this question has really been bugging me:
Why do we have unqualified respect for members of the military, but not for police officers? Aren’t they similarly dedicated to protecting our rights and freedoms? Why do cops get such a bad rap, while service members get a national holiday, priority airline boarding, and a 10% discount on Apple products?

Easy. Our troops only fight Bad Guys: Terrorists, who hate us for our Freedom. Commies, who hate us for our Values. Fascists, who hate us for our Diversity. There’s no reasoning with these savages, so of course they should be bombed back into the Stone Age.

Police officers, on the other hand, beat up on Good Guys. Especially helpless minorities. Maybe those minorities were caught doing not-so-legal things, but that’s a natural response to systemic oppression. An armed robbery should make you stop and think about why the robber felt that was their only choice, and how the system failed them.

Maybe the media has something to do with prevailing attitudes. Here in the US, an arsonist who throws explosives at a police station is a “mostly peaceful protester.” In Iraq, a civilian who opposes foreign occupation is a dangerous extremist. One nation’s political dissident is another country’s terrorist, the only difference is marketing.

Foreign aggressions benefit a coterie of special interest groups: Defense contractors, Bankers who finance defense contracts, corporations ready to exploit the resources of an overthrown regime.

Sane people don’t risk their lives to line the pockets of oligarchs, so we have to manufacture a mortal enemy. In the leadup to World War I, newspapers ran stories of German soldiers cutting the hands off of children and skewering babies on bayonets. Then there were North Korean soldiers feeding babies to dogs, Iraqi soldiers pulling newborns out of incubators, Saddam Hussein stuffing babies into wood chippers, Libyans taking Viagra to rape children en masse, and other unverifiable tales. No matter how ridiculous, if the media repeats it often enough it becomes Fact, and anyone who questions the propaganda is a traitor. You’re not a genocide denier, are you?

Why is it always babies?

A free and independent press might challenge state propaganda, but no one would ever mistake ours for one.

Embedded journalists accompany military units and filter appropriate information to the public. Release of unauthorized content is a violation of the Espionage Act, which prohibits the communication of classified information for reasons of “national security”. Hence the persecution of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange. Pretty much anything can be classified for reasons of “national security”, especially information that might shift public opinion about our troops.

Police officers mostly do protect and serve their communities, but oligarchs gain nothing from that, so there’s no need to promote respect for local law enforcement. In fact, let’s encourage infighting amongst the locals so no one notices all the stuff happening abroad.

The Soviet Union collapsed after decades of expensive proxy wars drained their resources and demoralized the population. Is that where we are now?

See Also:
Death of the Unfettered Press
War is a Racket by Smedley Butler

Here’s a video clip of a North Korean citizen discussing Human Rights issues in the US:

American citizens are afraid of their own police, because American cops look like they’re going to pull a gun out any second. American cops shoot their own people when they look suspicious. Whenever someone goes near their pockets, they get shot and killed. Little children are arrested if they don’t obey the police, even little girls. Huge cops who look like pigs beat people to a pulp and handcuff them.

Is that human rights?

I think we sent them the wrong propaganda.

TikTok and National Security

There’s a popular notion that National Security exists to protect our rights. A government is in the business of protection, and National Security initiatives are necessary to secure their ability to provide such protection. That’s why the NSA backdoors encryption algorithms, performs warrantless wiretaps, and gives surveillance data to the FBI to share with private companies. Because sometimes we have to trample your rights to protect them.

The Trump administration wants to ban WeChat and TikTok over “National Security” concerns, and my initial reading was that government agencies want to maintain exclusive access over mass surveillance. Our benevolent leaders need this data to protect our Freedom and Democracy, whereas the Chinese government might use the data to do evil Commie things. TikTok is far better off in the hands of Microsoft — incidentally, the first major tech company to participate in the NSA’s PRISM program.

Then there’s censorship. Not in the sense that TikTok might censor Winnie the Pooh memes or whatever, but that TikTok won’t censor enough. Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, and other upstanding corporations have teamed up with the FBI and National Intelligence agencies to remove anything that might interfere with upcoming elections. In this case, “interference” includes information obtained in a hack, because we all remember that time Russia hacked Hillary’s emails and assaulted innocent Americans with evidence of DNC corruption. Putin propagandists used this appropriated information to brainwash the country into electing Trump in what was basically an act of terrorism. That’s why National Security requires coordinated social media censorship. Because you can’t handle the truth!

But maybe National Security isn’t about protecting you, it’s about protecting them.

Last week, I asked why certain tech companies were deemed “American” when they all have multinational operations with profits shifted to tax-friendly jurisdictions. For example, Microsoft assigns its IP to a small factory in Puerto Rico, where it enjoys a 0% tax rate before passing the proceeds to a holding company in Bermuda. Microsoft also has R&D centers in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, and operates censored Chinese versions of Bing and LinkedIn. Why does the US government consider Microsoft more righteous than TikTok?

I was genuinely puzzled, until I realized we have no government. America isn’t really a country, it’s a free-trade zone. The government isn’t a government, it’s a team of mercenaries hired by lobbyists and paid for by taxpayers. Those wholesome all-American tech companies just so happen to be major defense contractors. That’s the dividing line — Whether they’re part of the military-industrial complex, or not.

Trump, for all his flaws, is ruthlessly honest. I mean, he lies about dumb stuff like his wealth and crowd sizes, but can’t seem to hide the truth when it comes to foreign policy. We’ll leave our troops in Syria so that Exxon Mobil can take the oil, he says. Not to stop terrorism, not for nation-building, we just want American companies to have cheap oil. As for China, we’ll seize and sell their apps for a finder’s fee. The media still pretends this is all about national security, just like they pretended the Iraq War was about WMDs and not the $40 billion in federal contracts going to Halliburton.

Looks like TikTok needs to step up its cronyism game. The company is picking up lobbyists and has a Trump donor as a major investor, but it may be too little too late. Trump will build a Big, Beautiful Firewall, and make China pay for it.

Cancel Caltech

There’s a petition circulating around Caltech to remove Robert Millikan’s name and image from campus buildings and fixtures. Millikan won a Nobel Prize in Physics for his oil drop experiment and was the founding president of Caltech. But, it turns out he was also a proponent of eugenics, and that is Unacceptable.

I’m reminded of an incident a couple years ago, when one very woke Stanford student urged the university to rename Terman Library. You see, Lewis Terman was a eugenics supporter, and that kind of hate has no place on a diverse and inclusive campus like Stanford University.

That was all well received, until someone informed the kid that Terman was in fact named after Frederick Terman, the former Dean of Engineering and cofounder of Stanford Research Park. That’s why Terman is the name of the Engineering library and not the Race Science library. Lewis Terman, the eugenicist, was Frederick’s dad.

This mistake has happened multiple times.

I’m also reminded of that time the Palo Alto school board decided to rename Terman Middle School (this time they got the right Terman). A board committee chose the name Yamamoto Middle School, in honor of Fred Yamamoto, a Japanese-American who was sent to FDR’s concentration camps during WWII. Staunchly loyal to the country (or inordinately optimistic), Yamamoto later enlisted in the Army and died in battle.

A hero and inspiration to us all. BUT —

The school board somehow overlooked the fact that Fred shares a surname with another famous Yamamoto — Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who led the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Parents complained, and the school board swapped in the name of a Holocaust survivor, Ellen Fletcher. Fletcher Middle School it is.

Maybe the lesson here is that building names are stupid. It’s not an honor to have a namesake if names change with the latest Radical Chic. And if names are so impermanent, it’s stupid to affix one to a building. Just put a Victim-of-the-Month placard on the front entrance, if that’s what you’re trying to do.

I’m not surprised to see this kind of bullshit go down at Stanford, where they have multiple departments dedicated to Grievance Studies. But I always had higher expectations for Caltech. No athletic recruits, no diversity quotas, no humanities department. That’s what a real university should look like.

Many years ago, when Quora was still a thing, I answered a query: “Does Caltech have the hardest undergraduate experience in the world?”

It’s all a matter of perspective: To a Caltech student, the Feynman Lectures might be a little bit hard. To a Stanford student, 8th grade algebra might be hard.

Hard as in demanding, time-consuming, you-must-surrender-your-soul. You’re not left with spare bandwidth to notice microaggressions, and it doesn’t matter because Demoralization is a Feature, not a Bug — That overwhelming sense of inadequacy is exactly how you’re supposed to feel when contemplating the Poincaré conjecture! There’s an old Caltech webcomic called Crippling Depression, which basically sums up the nature of scientific research and life at Caltech.

We always thought it was the challenging coursework that crushed our egos, but hey maybe it was actually the racist building names. The students should demand reparations.

Happy Juneteenth!

Happy Juneteenth everyone! Here is how NOT to celebrate:

Allow me to translate:

Juneteenth is a dumb contrived holiday that does nothing to end racism. It’s a pointless ritual on par with canceling Aunt Jemima and Mrs. Butterworth. The day has zero relevance to me or my family, aside from the fact that we really like fried chicken and watermelon.

Professor Hanson’s crime isn’t that he’s racist; it’s that he pointed out the hollowness of celebrating Juneteenth. Blasphemy! That’s almost as big a crime as noticing that George Floyd and Rayshard were not exactly model citizens.

On Juneteenth, every major corporation will engage in collective self-flagellation, host an office wide Eight-Minutes-46-Seconds Hate against toxic whiteness, and pay homage to Black Lives Matter™. Be sure to purge the noncompliant from positions of power before upcoming elections.

Large numbers of strangers can only cooperate by believing in common myths. You know, like religion. This ensures that everyone knows their place and follows the rules. Blessed are the meek. You don’t have to deep down believe every story, but at least pretend and signal that you’re willing to play along. Heathens must be rooted out, because anyone who doesn’t fear the same God can’t be trusted to cooperate and play by the rules.

An actual productive way of celebrating Juneteenth might be to refuse to pay taxes until the government ends its War on Drugs. But that would defeat the purpose of the exercise, which is not to empower but to subjugate. Diverse thinkers be damned.

—

On a side note, this would be a good time for China to scoop up some smart, but insufficiently woke, academics. It’s not like Professor Hanson will find gainful employment in the US after an outburst like that. On second thought, maybe faux-libertarian economists are just as useless in China as they are here.

How do you reconcile libertarianism with support of the police?

I’ll admit — my original question was not phrased so diplomatically. It went more along the lines of, OMG what is wrong with you? Do you have any idea how fascist you sound on Twitter?? Nick Szabo was a good sport about it, so here is a summary of his response.

Note: This is the third (and probably last) in a series of questions.

Libertarians believe in the right to life and property. Securing physical things requires the use of physical force. Self-defense and private arms are crucial, but realistically there’s only so much one person can do against a mob, much less an invading army. And not everyone can afford to have private security detail.

There are economies of scale when it comes to physical security. The state does not (and should not!) have a monopoly on violence. But police forces, at several different levels of government, are also crucial. Without a state defense force, you end up with a bunch of roving bandits fighting over the same territory, like the Mexican drug cartels or Somali warlords.

Bitcoin secures digital financial rights with cryptography; a police force secures the rights to physical life and property with violence. Security should be asymmetric – the cost of breaking the law is higher than the cost of enforcing the law, and the cost of attacking ones’ rights higher than the cost of defending them. In cryptography, we make the cipher as strong as possible. We don’t dumb it down with smaller key sizes to give the attacker a “fair fight.” Thinking that people defending their life and property, or police enforcing the law, should “fight fair” is both juvenile and dangerous.

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf” –George Orwell

Elaine:

Obviously if cops only ever busied themselves with defending life and property, no one would be protesting right now. Maybe the media selectively amplifies certain instances of police brutality, and maybe the wrongful acts of violence are actually few and far between, buuut… What ever happened to consent of the governed?

There’s an Ian Morris book that asks, War! What is it Good For? War is Good, because when a stronger state dominates a weaker state, it suppresses the internal violence that would have occurred between multiple weak states. The government is motivated to do this because the suppression of violence leads to greater economic output and tax revenue. The archetypal example is British colonialism in India, where the British unified multiple warring territories and brought forth democracy and railroads. Or the indigenous tribes in North America — instead of hunting and gathering and battling for turf, the Native Americans now live indulgent lives on reservations while running casinos. Or the Iraqis… oh wait.

So that’s what the cops are doing in Minneapolis and Missouri. They’re waging savage wars of peace. On the other hand, maybe there are populations that would rather not have the forced suppression of violence, and instead keep their own rules and culture and right to self-determination at the expense of gains in life expectancy. But nobody ever asks.

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