::::: : the wood : davidrobins.net

My name is David Robins: Christian, lead developer (resume), writer, photographer, runner, libertarian (voluntaryist), and student.

This is also my son David Geoffrey Robins' site.

Pollocks, zoo, Mars Hill

News ·Sunday August 7, 2011 @ 20:45 EDT (link)

Honey's uncle and aunt and cousins from Pullman arrived Saturday afternoon (they stopped at a hotel half-way); we went to the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle for the rest of the afternoon and evening. We were going to drive there but were saved the trouble by taking the free shuttle from the South Kirkland Park and Ride (@ 1415) across Lake Washington.

Unfortunately I didn't have my Microsoft Prime Card, which would have gotten us a substantial discount, so we ended up paying something like $35 for two tickets (even with a coupon that Aunt Lynn gave us). Oh well.

It was a beautiful day; the zoo was fun, lot of walking, glad I brought a water bottle for us. We took the second to last bus out, the 1745, heading back to Redmond. We stopped for teriyaki (I had chicken katsu) at Niko Teriyaki on Redmond Way; the Pollocks kindly treated us. That evening we played Scotland Yard—they caught me—and watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 1, which was quite good.

In the morning we got up early (for us) and went to the 0900 service at Mars Hill Bellevue. We had sandwiches here for lunch (toasted banana!) and I talked to uncle Dave about doctoral programs, admissions, the process, etc. They left a little after 1330.

Books finished: A Patriot's History of the United States.

Cirith-ungol: new case fan

News, Technical ·Friday July 29, 2011 @ 17:34 EDT (link)

Cirith-ungol, the media box, got a new case fan from Hard Drives Northwest today. The old one had apparently died a while back, leading to the machine shutting down under high CPU load (uncompressing large RAR files, usually, while running MythTV), and also likely causing a blown capacitor on the motherboard, which may or may not lead to eventual death. I picked up a Stealth fan which is doing pretty well so far; runs quiet, and seems to be keeping the CPU fan quiet too.

Sliders: California Reich: stupid question

Political, Media ·Saturday July 23, 2011 @ 21:28 EDT (link)

Watching Sliders, episode California Reich: the "Racial Police" are rounding up all of the "impure" (nonwhites) into camps, calling them "migrants", chanting "America for Americans", etc. At one point Remy (Rembrandt Brown) is talking to another black man in the camp after they have been sent to work on processing piles clothing confiscated from other prisoners and their families. The other man, an older man, while he had resisted when they turned the firehoses on him at Selma, had given up in this present time; it's politics, he said, and it would cycle around back and they would eventually be free. "They took a vote," he shrugs—making the excellent point that majoritanism ("democracy") does not morally justify harming people; and from that we can see that neither is law necessarily moral (and by observation we can see that it rarely is, but I digress).

However, they ruin it a great deal with Remy's next question: "Did you get to vote?" It is unanswered and presumably the answer is meant to be "No" (although since the vote was necessarily before people were rounded up and their rights infringed in every way, "Yes" would be more reasonable). However, the question is irrelevant, and the writers seem not to understand that. Consider the two possibilities:
  1. "Minorities" (not so much in California now, really) didn't get to vote. Violence was done against them simply by the choice of the rest of the populace, presumably because those others controlled the biggest gang around—the state.
  2. They did get to vote, but were outvoted. This is more interesting, because the writers seem to have missed that this still doesn't justify violence or threat of violence—coercion—against peaceful people.
That is, in neither case is it right that violence was done against peaceful individuals: not when a majority including the victims wants it, or a majority excluding the victims, nor if the "representatives" chosen by either majority want it (a republic isn't any better than a democracy when you get down to it). Violence of this blatant sort against innocent people is not justified, nor any other, such as the extortion of "taxes" or the "laws" (opinions with a gun) against peaceful pursuits (drug use being a big one in the US, but consider the gigantic scam of licensure for a moment too; and there are many other categories of such harm done against peaceful individuals).

Books finished: Confessor.

2A day, Tinkham pit

News, Guns ·Saturday July 16, 2011 @ 17:15 EDT (link)

Another Microsoft gun group "Second Amendment" (2A) day was held at Tinkham pit (off I-90 exit 42) today, and this is the way of it. The meetup was scheduled from 1100-1600, but that seemed a tad early for a weekend so I didn't leave until a little after 1100, arriving at the pit at around 1230? perhaps. On the last stretch of road, where I was wondering if I had gone the right way (right at the fork), the driver of a green Nissan, Adam, hailed me, coming the other way; he too was looking for the pit and despaired of finding it, having turned after going about another quarter mile in my direction. I said I thought this was the right road, and so he followed me and indeed, about a half mile there was the pit and 4-5 vehicles. Some people had put up square tents to keep the rain off; it rained intermittently while we were there and the sun shone brilliantly as we prepared to leave. Such is the Pacific northwest.

I backed close to the firing line and set up my camping chair and brought my AR-15 and boxes and target cardboard over, as well as some bowling pins and pop cans, and waited for a ceasefire to set up. While waiting, I loaded some Glock and XDM magazines (AR-15 mags were already loaded, as was my one, lonesome SCAR 17 magazine). I set up a shooting gallery of pop cans for pistol, then further back the target cardboard (piece of cardboard with 3x2 printed bull's-eye targets on it), also stapling the 1040 guidebook to it (since it's illegal to shoot politicians and IRS bureaucrats). I also set up a row of bowling pins further back. When the range went hot, I preceded to demolish them all with abandon. The AR-15 sight needed a little adjustment, so I used the paper targets for that. Next ceasefire, I set up the pins again and another box of (cheap, diet—less sticky) pop cans; and that was about it. I shot my Glock 34 and XDM9, and AR-15, but not the SCAR 17S, although I did get it out for the picture and for some people to take a look at. Josh came out; apparently Tony was there earlier; Ken was there, and a few people I knew from the group but hasn't met previously; perhaps 10 in all. Not like some of the bigger gatherings at Sultan in times past, but a good-sized group for this pit.

That took us to just after 1500, which is when cleanup began, drinking was done (it is not snobbery to drink bottled beer!), and people started to leave. Got home about 1700—time to clean up, dry everything out, and clean guns.

Books finished: Phantom, Who.

Finding fireworks

News ·Monday July 4, 2011 @ 11:51 EDT (link)

We had almost decided to skip the fireworks this year. After all, it wasn't like there was much to celebrate; the state is bigger and more controlling than ever. We didn't relish the idea of going to any of the theft-funded displays ("watching our tax money go up in smoke"), especially the Bellevue Park one that was always packed, or having to find and pay for parking anywhere. However, when they started going off around 2200 we walked down the hill to the gates of our apartment complex, to the street, to see what we could; then after about ten minutes we decided to walk back and drive to a nearby (small) park off 116th to see if anything was going on. We parked in a mess of cars and set on the trunk to see a few fireworks, but nothing amazing; and as it seemed to be winding down we left so as not to block anyone in the parking lot.

On the way back, though, we decided to cruise to see what we could, so continued north on Avondale toward Woodinville-Duvall road; we saw some explosions from a side street, so stopped briefly to see a small showing—we drove past during a break then turned around and parked to watch; but that didn't last long. A few streets over, though (opposite the Woodinville Library, near Cottage Lake) there was a really excellent show; two, really; two groups of neighbors (two families?). We got to it about 1030 and turned around in that street and parked on the side of the road.

They had some really excellent fireworks. Just did my heart good to know it wasn't my tax money they were lighting on fire. I would have paid for admission; it was a great show! It went on for an hour or more; we left as it was winding down. It was the equal of any fireworks show I've ever seen.

Books finished: Chainfire.

SCAR and ACOG

News, Guns ·Friday July 1, 2011 @ 19:30 EDT (link)

Scope finally arrived. TA11H-308G (3.5x, green horseshoe reticle, .308 BDC).

Went and shot after work . Really great. Scope is very clear, good eye relief—nicer than the EOTech, and doesn't require batteries and is both reticle and magnifier in one. Talked to a guy there (only other person), Buzzy, for a while afterward, too; from Mississippi, does rifle accurizing and taxidermy.

Books finished: Official Lies.

Shared libraries and symbol versions

News, Technical ·Saturday June 18, 2011 @ 15:20 EDT (link)

I was doing some more work on XBMC recently; I set it up to build in two parts: as a shared library, libxbmc.so, and a small binary, xbmc.bin (same as now, but built only from xbmc/xbmc.cpp). (This is similar to how Word is structured, with winword.exe and wwlib.dll, except Word loads wwlib.dll dynamically at runtime.) The plan is to be able to use XBMC functionality from other programs and utilities, without having to boot the GUI (so the various interfaces such as HTTP are unsatisfactory here).

Originally I was going to break XBMC into several shared libraries, but it's so intertwingled—GUI calls are everywhere, for example—that that swiftly became infeasible, although I hope further splits are possible later. I learned a few things while I was separating out this new library and other tasks; I learned how to use git better, and GitHub for the first time; when incorporating some other patches into a pull request, I taught myself a little about autoconf. When making Makefile changes, I had to change Makefile.in, or create one if one didn't exist (as for my new test harness). I also noticed that GCC generates two copies of constructors and three of destructors, which I thought was some problem with my build until I saw it was a rather old bug nobody cared to fix yet.

The first problem I ran into was that the link complained about missing symbols from the FreeType library. It turned out that mysql_config --libs emitted a -Wl,--as-needed as part of its library specification, but never terminated it with -Wl,--no-as-needed to restore the default behavior: so that was fixed in configure.in, using awk to check for the condition (since bash's string matching isn't guaranteed to be available but awk was already being used). This poor practice had always been there but only became a problem with the shared library refactor.

After that everything seemed to work well but there was a strange error: no sound; failed to enable audio device popup, etc.—just for video sound; the sound effects in the menus worked. I tracked this down (with a debug reinstall of ALSA) to an innocuous-looking call to snd_pcm_hw_params_set_rate_near from CALSADirectSound::Initialize. Oddly enough, it was coming back with -EINVAL, invalid argument. Apparently the ALSA 0.9 version of this function took an intenger value, and then was later upgraded to take a pointer to an integer (so the actual set value could be passed back). And, incomprehensibly, we were calling the old compatibility version, slicing all over the place and passing in a large number (32 bits of the address that was passed in) which was naturally rejected. I don't know why the loader defaulted to use that version of the function, since the default symbol, marked with @@, was the newer one.

You can believe I played around a lot with readelf, objdump, nm, etc.; and everything looked fine. I even enabled loader debugging (LD_DEBUG=all). One of my searches, however, found an online version of the ldd manpage that mentioned that --verbose would show library symbol versions—the ones following @ or @@ in symbol names, not the version of the library itself. And it showed that libxbmc.so had very few library dependencies (the loader, pthreads, C library) while xbmc.bin had the usual suspects (a stack of video, audio, decoder, display, and other libraries). This is how I though it was meant to work: and apparently it almost does but not quite. Documentation on the runtime linker is scarce, but presumably since libxbmc.so didn't specify its dependencies explicitly, it picked the oldest (lexicographically?) version for versioned symbols. Fix: move the $(LIBS) specification from the Makefile line for xbmc.bin to libxmbc.so. And now audio works.

Books finished: Naked Empire, The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right.

Curling morale event

News, Work ·Monday June 6, 2011 @ 16:23 EDT (link)

Left work via carpool around 1030; was at Granite Curling Club of Seattle; done around 1500. Won our game. Rather getting the hang of it toward the end. Got a ride with Derek R.

Books finished: The Pillars of Creation.

Compensating for fear: is forced Russian roulette just?

Political ·Tuesday May 24, 2011 @ 00:25 EDT (link)

Dr. Walter Block in a number of papers (e.g., Radical Libertarianism: Applying Libertarian Principles to Dealing with the Unjust Government, or Taking the Assets of Criminals to Compensate Victims of Violence: A Legal and Philosophical Approach) advocates, with Rothbard (The Ethics of Liberty), that criminals owe their victims:
  1. reparations, to make them whole (e.g., medical bills, compensation for lost work, past and future);
  2. retribution, that is, having their crime visited back on them, including death for murderers: this is fully negotiable by the victim and his agent, who may instead demand monetary compensation, incarceration, or rehabilitation (at the criminal's expense, of course).
Dr. Block also argues that the criminal must be made to suffer the same level of fear as their victim as part of the retributive justice the victim is owed. The first problem arises here: "fear" and other emotions are subjective: we cannot tell to what degree the victim was scared, and nor how to equally scare the criminal. While some may be satisfied with a reasonable approximation, that does not make it objectively valid in the same way that reparations and retribution can be (visiting the same physical invasion upon the criminal). Nor, too, does the fact that the victim and criminal may negotiate alternates hurt that objectivity: because it is the agreement that makes for equivalence, not arbitrary selection. In fact, a victim could entirely forgive a criminal and demand no retribution (or reparations, for that matter); just as Andy cannot forgive Bob for punching Chris, (absent any agency contract to the contrary) Dennis has no claim against Bob if Chris refuses to pursue it.

But if we assume that people are similar enough that what scares one person scares another, or at least that there is a retributive right to attempt to scare the criminal in the same manner that they assaulted the victim—equivalent surprise, equivalent threat of death—then we can proceed to examine what methods are just. First, one could attempt to combine the retributive harm and scaring into one and have the victim or their agent surprise the criminal with the same crime. There are problems here, though: third parties will not know that this is an act of retributive justice and not initiatory violence, and may intervene; the criminal is expecting the attack and may recognize it as such and not be scared as we hoped; or the criminal and victim may have agreed on monetary compensation for the injury (but not the fear, with the criminal claiming that it dealt no damage), so the "fear" attack will never be more than a paper tiger since the criminal knows no harm will be done to them. The criminal may be stronger and win the encounter, or may regularly travel with a bodyguard (which he scarce could be asked to forgo leaving him defenseless against other threats), or not be in a position to be attacked, robbed, etc. in the same situation (this does not prevent us from visiting the same harm upon him in a different locale, such as a security firm's office).

We might even consider that the "second tooth" ("two teeth for a tooth", being reparations and retribution) contains within it compensation for the manner of the attack and the fear inflicted upon the victim. The reparation makes the victim whole and (as best possible) makes it "as if the invasion never happened"; the retribution is the further discouragement of repetition (otherwise crime always has a positive expected value) and the just return to the criminal of his bad act, to take away what he took. But crimes differ in mode and it is different to rob someone at gunpoint in a dark alley versus anonymously slipping them a note demanding money with a vague threat for noncompliance. To ignore entirely the mode is to remove any risk premium from the first sort of attack: but how significant is that? There is a right to defend against imminent threat (gun pointed in one's direction) but what is the right to retribution after the fact in this case? The criminal will laugh if the victim points a gun back in their direction, knowing that he has no plan to pull the trigger in any case; even if a random person does it on behalf of the victim, it is such an uncommon event that the criminal would assume it was the retributive justice owed him and not be frightened by it.

Dr. Block handles the "scare" factor by requiring the criminal to play Russian roulette with himself, with the number of bullets and cylinders depending on the severity of the crime. (Presumably equivalents are fine, since one paper mentions a gun with one bullet in one of a thousand cylinders; I do not believe any such firearm exists, but it can easily be simulated with a random number generator.) The principle is that the criminal must, in retribution for the fear engendered in his victim, put himself in a situation where there is some probability p, depending on the severity of the threat, where he may be killed. Naturally this may be negotiated with the victim, either changing p or removing the requirement entirely in exchange for a consideration. As one paper mentions, a very wealthy person might laugh off the "two teeth" requirement, but be willing to part with significantly more to avoid any chance of their own death. It will be acknowledged that there is no right to inflict the death penalty on someone in return for a scare, it is presumably argued that the roulette game is not doing this because the odds of death are less than 100%.

However, I argue that this chance-of-death requirement is not a valid part of libertarian justice. I will stipulate that the correct level of fear, p, can be found, or a close enough approximation; but considering the Russian roulette claim in light of statistical mathematics, it is unjust. Statistically, we consider the expected value of the harm done, i.e., the sum of all probabilities multiplied by their values. In this case, we have a probability p (calculated by dividing the number of bullets by the number of chambers) of death and a probability (1-p) of no harm, yielding an expected value of "p death", i.e., perhaps for a robbery p is one-tenth, or 0.1 (one bullet, ten chambers), then the expected harm from the Russian roulette game the criminal will be forced to play is "one-tenth death". No amount of mere emotional trauma (i.e., excluding a scare that causes a heart attack) can be objectively translated into physical harm; the problem is much like Hume's guillotine in philosophy. While the victim may not have known if they were to live or die, the fact remains that they did not die, and so no (even partial) loss of life may be justly visited on the criminal in recompense. The best that could be done would be to ensure the criminal is on the hook for whatever psychiatric help the victim needs; but that is part of reparations, not retribution. Nor is it a defense if it is known that the criminal will always negotiate his way out of playing: the unjustified harm is still available to the victim as leverage to claim a similarly unjustified payout.

One might object that removing the Russian roulette aspect of retribution allows the very wealthy to in effect "buy" their way out of any crime. First, this is a consequentialist and not a deontological argument; and while it is in part true, allowing equivalent payment does require the consent of the victim, and as this wealthy criminal's reputation spreads, it may take more and more money for the victims to forgo equal physical retribution, depleting our wealthy criminal's fortune at a rapid rate. Enough depredations may bring our rich criminal face to face with someone who stands by the lex talionis and refuses to accept any compensation at all: and that risk (for violent crimes) is on the same order as the Russian roulette game. An extremely wealthy shoplifter (or similar nonviolent criminal), can indeed continually pay his way out, but this both enriches the merchants involved and causes very little if any fear in the first place.

A last problem is in the case where the Russian roulette game was played and the criminal died, let us say, for a holdup in a dark alley netting him $100. That is, the penalty for this robbery was death, clearly not a commensurate one; and so just as (according to Rothbard) a police officer that tortures a petty thief is guilty of the harm caused, and owes reparation and is owed retribution, those that forced the criminal to play Russian roulette and so caused his death are guilty of murder, and justice requires they die for it (as usual, depending on the expressed wishes of the criminal or his heirs)—something that should make any court very leery indeed of insisting that such a game be played.

Neoconservatism: unprincipled or fascist?

Political ·Monday May 23, 2011 @ 21:15 EDT (link)

Conservatism (where it differs from Goldwater's vision, or libertarianism) is not a political philosophy. It’s not really equipped (with principles) to play there. This isn’t even a shortcoming (a brick makes a poor automobile, but a fine building component). Keep it as a personal worldview and philosophy, a corner where it can shine. Hayek tells us:
The conservatives have already accepted a large part of the collectivist creed—a creed that has governed policy for so long that many of its institutions have come to be accepted as a matter of course and have become a source of pride to "conservative" parties who created them. Here the believer in freedom cannot but conflict with the conservative and take an essentially radical position, directed against popular prejudices, entrenched positions, and firmly established privileges. Follies and abuses are no better for having long been established principles of folly.

In general, it can probably be said that the conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes.

So unproductive has conservatism been in producing a general conception of how a social order is maintained that its modern votaries, in trying to construct a theoretical foundation, invariably find themselves appealing almost exclusively to authors who regarded themselves as liberal.

When I say that the conservative lacks principles, I do not mean to suggest that he lacks moral conviction. The typical conservative is indeed usually a man of very strong moral convictions. What I mean is that he has no political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions. It is the recognition of such principles that permits the coexistence of different sets of values that makes it possible to build a peaceful society with a minimum of force. The acceptance of such principles means that we agree to tolerate much that we dislike. There are many values of the conservative which appeal to me more than those of the socialists; yet for a liberal the importance he personally attaches to specific goals is no sufficient justification for forcing others to serve them.
If people are harming themselves—and even others indirectly by that—there is no right to use force to stop them. You can encourage them verbally to seek help; you can even voluntarily provide or pay for such help (but not force it on them or force others to pay for it). Adults have a right to do things that may or even certainly will harm them. And if you oppose people harming others, guess what, you support the Non-Aggression Principle.

However, even opposition to people harming other people—which libertarians share—does not justify a state. It justifies self-defense and defense of others (the right to life necessarily includes a right to protect your own life and others that want the help). It justifies explicitly delegating that right to others, such as a private protection agency. But nowhere do you get the right to enforce a monopoly on such protection, or to coerce others to pay for it, or to “protect” people from non-harm, or coerce them in any other way. Such a right simply doesn’t exist, so cannot be delegated; to enforce one is mere collectivist thuggery.

In seeming opposition to that analysis, however, Bradley Thompson's inspired piece Neconservatism Unmasked argues instead that neoconservatism is a sound (as in consistent) political philosophy, but don't whoop just yet, neocons: it's one very much like fascism, with these "principles" at the core:
  1. the collective "common good" is more important than the individual, and the "common good" is whatever those in power say it is (i.e., the usual collectivist thuggery we'd expect from socialists);
  2. it's fine for the "philosophers" (think Plato's ruling class) to deceive and control the "common man" with myth, jingoism, prejudice, and faith, and ultimately by force;
  3. as there are different truths for different people, there are different moral standards for different classes too; morality is redefined as sacrificing one's self for the "common good"—as dictated by the rulers, of course;
  4. politically, the elites know what is best for the "common people", while they do not, so it is appropriate for the elite to use government force to guide people to "true happiness".
Well; there you have it; principles, perhaps, but none any self-respecting or moral individual would want to admit to supporting. As the analysis goes further in the article, they are the "principles" of the fascist; the principles of, as I have often pointed out, individuals that want to rule by mere force and not right, and do not mind who they destroy to do it.

Thus a self-proclaimed conservative is thus stuck between two choices: a consistent political philosophy that would make Mussolini proud, or, rejecting this immoral unclothed neoconservativism, withdrawing back to a moral conservatism that is personal but can never be political, that is, be morally imposed by force on anyone else.

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