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differentnutpeace · 4 years ago

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Vaccine Passports: 'Scarlet Letter' Or Just The Ticket?

It's happening millions of times a day. Pharmacists jab an arm with the COVID-19 vaccine and hand over a paper card certifying that the shot was administered, and when. หวย บอล เกมส์ คาสิโนออนไลน์

"This is your ticket to freedom soon," smiles pharmacist intern Ojashwi Giri, as she hand-writes the name and birth date of another newly vaccinated customer on one of the coveted cards at Union Pharmacy in Newton, Mass. "I'm sure you're going to want to treasure this."

It's the low-tech version of the "vaccine passports" that have become the latest pandemic wedge issue. As states and businesses are debating and using them, Americans are deeply divided on whether businesses should require them to prove a person is immunized before boarding a plane, or entering a bar or a baseball game. What some see as a commonsense safety measure, others denounce as a violation of privacy and civil liberties.

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To many, it's no-brainer — a ticket back to normal life. Linda Simansky clutched her vaccination card, and beamed at the prospect of being able to venture out again with greater confidence. She says she's all for the idea of vaccine passports, and would definitely be more likely to patronize places that ask for them at the door, ensuring everyone else inside is also low-risk.

"I know its awkward," she says, "but they're not asking for [anyone's] life story, they're just trying to keep people safe, and trying to also keep their business. So, I think it's a win-win."

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"If we're going to end this nightmare, what we need is information," agrees Peter Wilson, a musician from Pheonix. "Some people pose less risk than others [...] and if people are making unsafe choices, the rest of us deserve to know. There's no sense in blindfolding ourselves."

Wilson sees it as no different than requiring students to get vaccines in order to attend school or camp. "We're just extending that to adults to keep everyone safe."

That's the idea behind New York state's "Excelsior Pass" that allows residents to flash a code from their phones which would earn them entry into anything from a Broadway show to a gym or even a private wedding. The nation's first such state-wide system, the Excelsior Pass has already been used at Madison Square Garden, Yankee stadium as well as smaller venues around the state, and while privacy features make it hard to pinpoint, state officials say hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers downloaded or at least started checking out the system in the two weeks since it launched.

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Judy Lisi, president and CEO of the Straz Center for the Performing Arts in Tampa, says a tool like that would be "essential" to reopening mass gathering venues like theaters that depend on a full house to survive.

"Why do you think these seats are so close to each other together behind me?" she says, pointing to the empty 2,640 theater seats on the image she uses as her Zoom backdrop. "Theaters [need] to put as many people in a space [as possible, in order to] pay for what's on stage."

Lisi says she was in the process of drawing up plans to use vaccine passports to screen patrons, when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis preemptively banned businesses from requiring them.

"He's a pro-business proponent," Lisi says. "Why doesn't he allow businesses to do what we need to do then? The whole industry is relying on this. It's so frustrating."

But DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbot, who's also banned vaccine passports, as well as others argue they're a violation of privacy and civil liberties.

"It's completely unacceptable for either the government or the private sector to impose upon you the requirement that you show proof of vaccine to just simply be able to participate in normal society," DeSantis said.

Audra Young, from Haverill, Mass., who says she's not vaccinating because she doesn't trust it, agrees the passports are a bad idea.

"Just like it's your choice to own a gun, I mean, this is America, where we should have choice to pick what we want to do with our life," Young says. Vaccine passports "feel like it's going to be like a restricted society. It's like wearing the scarlet letter. It's crazy."

While much of the opposition to vaccine passports comes from those on the right who see it as a kind of Orwellian nightmare, there is concern on the left as well.

Judy Greenberg, of San Antonio, describes herself as "very liberal." She says she got the vaccine and hopes everyone else will too, but she's uncomfortable making people prove it for the privilege of dining out, for example.

"Being Jewish, I've always had this apprehension about [anyone saying] 'Show us your papers!'" Greenberg says, because it harkens back to the horrors Jews experienced in Nazi Germany. She's quick to acknowledge a vaccine passport is hardly the same thing, but she worries it would be prone to abuse. "It'll create two classes of human beings, almost like a caste system of vaccinated and unvaccinated. So then, what's next? It just makes me a little bit uneasy."

John Calvin Byrd III, has similar qualms. The self-described "far-left militant black man" lives in Los Angeles, and says he cringes at the thought of being seen as sharing the same concerns as "Trumpers," but he believes vaccine passports would impinge on his civil liberties. He says he and his family are not vaccinating, because they don't trust how fast the COVID-19 vaccines were rushed through the emergency authorization process, and because he doesn't trust Big Pharma.

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But he thinks it's unfair to penalize people like him, by restricting his ability to go out for dinner, travel, or visit a park, museum, or grocery store.

"It's not like we committed a crime," he says. "We should be able to go and play and do whatever we want." He's also feeling pressure from his boss to vaccinate, and fears his decision not to, may cost him his job.

More broadly, Byrd worries that vaccine passports will exacerbate inequities for Black and Brown people, who are still less likely to be vaccinated — either by choice or because of lack of access.

"It puts people into separate groups, and one group has privileges and the other group does not [...] That keeps myself, my family and people like us in the margins," Byrd says.

Another concern is privacy. New York State Assembly member Ron Kim, says his state's "Excelsior Pass" is especially troublesome, given that it was developed in collaboration with a corporate giant, IBM.

"We're already dealing with big tech companies like Facebook and Google exploiting and extracting data without regular people even knowing that it's happening every day," Kim says. "Now we're allowing another path for companies to extract data and profit without our knowledge."

Both IBM and New York state officials, however, insist no personal data can be accessed or used for any such purpose. And no individual information is stored, or tracked. They say the Excelsior Pass only reads data that states already collect, to offer users the QR code that bouncers can scan to get a quick, clear green checkmark or a red "X." The same code can also indicate whether a user has recently tested negative for COVID-19, which many establishments screening customers may accept in lieu of a vaccination. For those without smart phones, results can be accessed on a computer and printed out instead.

Contrary to what many may think, given all the controversy, no state is mandating use of a vaccine passport; the Biden administration is also against any federal mandate, though officials say they're helping to develop guidance on privacy and equity issues. States can and do require large venues to screen customers for the coronavirus, but whether to do that with vaccine passports is still up to individual establishments.

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Some venues see the apps as an easier, more reliable way to verify that patrons are low-risk for spreading the coronavirus. Digital apps may well be more difficult to hack than vaccination cards are to forge, and they'd likely be more effective and efficient than what many are doing now, which is taking everyone's temperature and reviewing health surveys that patrons answer on the honor system.

But other businesses, especially in the hospitality industry, are proceeding with caution. A "no shirt, no vaccine, no service" policy may come across as inhospitable, many say, and may turn of customers who restaurants need now more than ever. Also, many bars and restaurants are loath to take on the burden of vaccine enforcement, on top of what they already do, checking ID's to make sure everyone's legal to drink, and constantly policing customers who may have had too much to drink.

That said, establishments that are still struggling to survive a year into the pandemic are not ruling it out. Doug Bacon, president of Red Paint Hospitality Group, owns eight bars and restaurants in Boston; four remain closed, and four are open, but still unable to make money because of pandemic restrictions limiting capacity. If requiring vaccine passports would mean he could fully reopen, he says, "I might have to give in to that. "

Bacon says he's more open to requiring vaccine passport checks for staff. In the past year, all four of his open places had to shut down for a week or more, because an employee tested positive.

"We had to sanitize the whole restaurant and have everyone tested," he says. "Perishable food had to be thrown away, and I had no income, and I paid my staff and all my suppliers and my landlords while were closed, so it's been a tremendous additional financial burden on top of everything else."

Ultimately, some are hoping vaccine passports, will prove one last bitter pill to swallow to help hasten a return to normal. It may be the carrot that induces more people to vaccinate. Or, as with so much else that's been politicized during this pandemic, it may be seen as more of a stick, that only deepens divisions, stokes resentment and leads those who've been vaccine-hesitant to dig in their heels even more.

"This is just one more thing to throw in the mix that's going to divide our country even more," Young says.

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coin-news-blog · 5 years ago

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The Jim Bell System

New Post has been published on https://coinmakers.tech/news/the-jim-bell-system

The Jim Bell System

As I write this article on July 3, 2002, I am already hearing out my window the occasional pops of micro-explosives enthusiasts getting a head start on their annual excuse to play with things that go bang and supposedly celebrate their freedom. Tomorrow, libertarians across the country will use the holiday as an opportunity to grouse to disinterested relatives around the barbecue grill about how little freedom we actually have left, or really ever had. LP lifers often say there is no magic bullet to get the kind of society we want, and it will take decades of hard work in the political trenches, and of course, many many donations to the party, before we ever see progress. Conversely, I propose that a nutty guy named Jim Bell has already designed the magic bullet; it just needs to be forged and we will start seeing dramatic positive change immediately.

Since this is a fairly controversial topic, I will start with a psychological self-analysis as a disclaimer.

My primary long-term goal is to live forever. I’m convinced that the exponential improvements in medical technology will curve upwards to infinity within the next century. This means surviving the relatively primitive period between then and now is the major stumbling block. As an atheist, I am faced with the conclusion that this is the only life I have. Therefore I have an enormous incentive to minimize risks to my health and well being, just as a Christian has incentive not to sin; we both would be gambling our presumed eternal life, an unacceptable wager. One such risk I will choose to decline is taking up arms against the United States government. Thus the powers that be who may read this article can rest assured that I will be exhibiting more or less cowardly behavior for the next 75 years or so, and present no security threat whatsoever.

I am simply predicting what will happen and am no more responsible for the outcome than an astronomer who reveals that an asteroid is on course to wipe out DC. Hopefully, the destruction of this particular doomsday rock will be localized around the tyrants.

With that said, I present the following dangerous idea.

My secondary long-term goal is to live free. By that I mean living in a stable, secure, anarcho-capitalist society. The obvious obstacle to this goal is the existence of the State. The problems I face generally in eradicating this persistent pest are that:

The State is actively retarding the progress of science, thus making my immortality timetable more and more dicey.

There aren’t a whole lot of capital resources or individuals enlightened enough to be on my side.

If I die in the process, either from fighting a revolution or from allowing the state to last too long, stalling out science, it will all be for naught (from my perspective anyway)

The challenge then is to devise a plan to remove this obstacle, balancing the considerations of speed, cost, and safety.

In a recent article John T. Kennedy made the excellent point, using the example of a porcupine, that in order to avoid being eaten, one need not necessarily be anywhere near as powerful as the predator, only become an overpriced meal. The historical example of Switzerland in WWII comes to mind. Clearly, with a concentrated effort, the Nazi war machine could have decimated the small neutral country. In fact, Hitler boasted early on in the war that he would “be the butcher of the Swiss.” However, the Swiss militia system was able to mobilize a half million trained riflemen within 48 hours of that pronouncement. Once entrenched in foreboding Alpine terrain, they were ordered to defend the border “to the last cartridge.” The Fuhrer decided to pass on that challenge and instead waltzed through Denmark and France, countries with little to no civilian gun culture.

For our purposes, the State is the predator, and we are the prey. Kennedy mentioned (with appropriate caveats) that Assassination Politics would be one possible method to grow some quills, and raise our price beyond the power monger’s ability to pay. Briefly, the AP system, as I envision its probable implementation, would operate something like this. You come across, say, “www.jimbellsystem.com” and see a long list of names next to dollar amounts. You are then invited to select a name and then submit a guess as to the exact date this person will expire, in exchange for some standard betting fee, like $1, via some as yet undeveloped digital cash scheme. Your dollar is then added to the total on the master list. You can repeat this process as many times, on as many names as you like, or even submit a new name. Strong cryptography protects your anonymity in all cases.

Then when someone on the list inevitably is reaped, the site operator examines all the winning bets (if any) and divides the prize evenly among them, after taking a small percentage as commission. The prize money is then forwarded to anonymous digital cash accounts that the winning bettors indicated when they submitted their entries. In other words, it’s just a standard betting pool system except with paranoid security, and a rather macabre theme. However, the catch is that once a particular name gets some serious cash associated with it, say $1M+, there will be a strong motivation for an unscrupulous bettor to tip the odds dramatically in his favor via direct intervention in the subject’s death. The further catch is that many of the average, non-homicidal bettors will be aware that such unscrupulous opportunists exist and will play the game without any real ambition to randomly pick a correct date, but instead place bets to drive up the prize on persons they despise. The theory goes that politicians will be high on everyone’s shit list, and be the first to rack up attention-getting prize pools. To be wildly optimistic, it is proposed that there will be so many people with a pet peeve against a specific politician, whether they are consciously anarchist or not, that the system will foster a niche industry in assassination, and the collective actions of the market will thereafter make it incredibly dangerous for anyone to seek positions of power. Thus, the people who currently constitute the entity known as government will either die or fearfully resign en masse, and the State will disintegrate.

The fully idealistic conclusion is that this will result in permanent, defensible anarchism, since AP can be just as easily applied to any neo-statists who show up afterward, or any foreign aggressors, assuming there are any states left lacking sufficient internet connectivity to have previously ousted their own rulers.

That’s the summary, I will now debunk the many criticisms of the system, which fall into three broad categories:

Practical failures

Moral failures

Strategic failures

In the first category are objections along practical lines for its basic operation. First of all, is it technically feasible? I am not a programmer, nor even done much homework in the area of encryption/digital cash, however, there are people out there who are certainly experts who seem to think that both of those concepts have a very strong future. For further information on relevant technical matters, I direct you to J. Orlin Grabbe, who does not to my knowledge endorse any form of AP, but does treat the reader to some creative selections of soft porn.

Since I am under-educated in this field, I, unfortunately, will have to pass on any specific technical objections. Logically, though, it seems reasonable to compare the operation of this system to something like a drug cartel. South American drug lords are well known for having top-notch computer systems to keep track of their own affairs, as well as keep tabs on what competitors and Federales are up to. Such cartels are historically very good at surviving against ever increasing law enforcement budgets and political pressure. Since AP’s main business is in computers, and it will most likely be very profitable, it leads me to think that electronically evading cops by similar means may not be a hopeless task.

The second practical objection I will cover is a worst-case scenario, where, in its desperation, the state retaliates against AP by banning non-governmental digital cash entirely. Feds shuts down Paypal and anything like it, and only allow e-cash that’s connected to the magnetic stripe on your National ID, and every transaction monitored.

This unfortunate news bulletin can be handled several ways by AP’s patrons. To go back to our drug cartel analogy, keep in mind that many millions of people around the world flout the law daily to buy, sell and consume illegal pharmaceuticals. Distributors of drugs are everywhere if you know where to look. It is not so hard to imagine an identical network of underground suppliers could meet the demand for anonymous currency, for any number of purposes, not just AP. This could take the form of cash servers completely off the fed grid, or front companies that accept government e-cash and launder it for discreet uses. Depending on the exact nature of whatever new authoritarian legislation gets handed down, any number of solutions could present themselves, and those same millions of current lawbreakers will no doubt solicit them just as eagerly. And the added bonus is there is no physical evidence to be unconstitutionally searched and seized, as is the threat in the drug trade. A few kilobytes of data are probably easier to hide than a trunk full of plant extracts.

In the same vein, the State might get extremely paranoid, and attempt to ban all encryption lacking FBI backdoors. Assuming that civil libertarians are not sufficiently “concerned” to prevent this, more important is the basic impracticality of enforcement. Analogy: It is 2050 and in an understandable appeal to public safety, the Feds outlaw recently invented personal invisibility cloaks. Stormtroopers arrive at my apartment building and question my neighbors. “We have a warrant for the arrest of Robert Vroman for the alleged possession of an illegal invisibility cloak. Have you seen him? No? Hmm.”

Again my technical ignorance may get in the way, but if I can hide the content of my message, how hard is it to hide the source and destination? Internet-savvy outlaws will undoubtedly provide encryption services under the Gestapo’s nose, just like their outlaw digicash cousins, and their outlaw drug peddler ancestors.

But then what if the State, facing imminent destruction, lashes out blindly and tries to shut down the whole friggin internet? Or what if they establish martial law in the scariest uber-polizei-stadt since Adolf was dancing jigs? These and other Orwellian nightmares are possibilities. However, one must consider that any path to anarchism will eventually take us to a point to where the State is cornered and crazed, and thus this is not the fault of AP. On the bright side though, if it is AP that takes us to that juncture, any measures the State take will be short-lived and futile. While they may be able to hold off an armed rebellion or mass non-compliance and make our lives miserable for an indefinite period, AP will march along inexorably chowing down on their human resources and scaring them off, until there’s simply no one left to give orders or receive them.

The third practical objection wonders if anyone will actually put money into AP, above or below ground. Clearly, there will have to be a significant and constant cash flow to keep the wheels turning and the heads rolling. Finding customers is probably the least of our worries. First, on the list are the usual suspects of political extremists.

Hardcore lefties in all their myriad flavors: commies, left-anarchists, eco nuts, feminazis, etc.

Then your hardcore righties: militia psychos, pro-life zealots, Klansmen, dirty cops, uber-moralists, etc

Following with miscellaneous baddies: well heeled foreign terrorists, cultists, sleaze corporations, garden variety sociopaths, drug lords, etc

And that’s just the fringe. I propose that humans as a whole are not very good people. If they were, surely we would not be in the prevailing unacceptable state of affairs. Fortunately one of the main selling points of libertarianism is that it’s the superior system given any level of general morality. In the short term though, AP is well served by the relatively low level evidenced by reality. I predict that given a consequence free chance to hurt someone they despise at low monetary cost, a large percentage will sign up. American citizens donate many millions to political parties every year; clearly they take this stuff seriously. How bad do they want their guy to win? Remember, no one will ever know if you place that bet. You can protest the senselessness of it all in public, wring your hands over the latest poor public servant killed in the line of duty, and then go home and secretly sign the death warrant of that Congress asshole who wants to cut your kid’s daycare. Seriously, look at the kind of people around you, who wouldn’t jump at the chance at that kind of power?

Practically anyone with any political opinions at all can name some office holder they’d rather see gone. It should be no challenge to get enough people with the same name in mind to bet a few bucks and reach a tempting pot.

These people may not be betting against the worst statists in the order an Ancap might prioritize them, but the point is, it doesn’t matter who they bet on, as long as they hit any power holders, because most likely the success of AP will not come from systematically executing every politician, but instead drive them into hiding from fear of their name rising on the list. No matter what direction the fire is coming from, it will keep everyone in Washington’s head down.

But just to drive the point home, forget about Americans who might unexpectedly turn uniformly patriotic and override their petty partisan proclivities. For an easier challenge, let’s toss AP into the mix of some stormy banana republic below the equator. Giving AP to practically any 3rd world country would be like letting the rival faction leaders duel with grenades in a shower stall. Every wannabe El Presidente will openly encourage their followers to bet against the competition and undoubtedly receive the same in return. If you find Somalia encouraging, imagine the entire developing world forced to go the same route.

So I think I’ve established that there will be sufficient demand, the other side of the coin is of course supply. Again, we are well stocked. Last I read, the home of the brave here has some 2 million people imprisoned, 40% of which are deemed ‘violent’. Furthermore, approximately 1% of all violent crimes result in a prisoner. This says to me that there is an abundance of dumb mean folks in this country. One characteristic of the violence prone is they tend to be poor. I imagine that few such criminals actually enjoy risking their life and freedom day after day in robbing random people for watches and wallets. How many would gamble on that One Big Score, if payday were a sure thing?

To name a few, we’ve got the obvious examples, Mafiosos, Hell’s Angels, Islamo-fascists, McVeigh acolytes, etc, plus a virtually bottomless supply of standard small time thugs and starving junkies.

In other words lots and lots of people who wouldn’t think twice about killing anyone for the right price or cause, all being simultaneously offered heaping mounds of cash with no names being mentioned, no questions asked, and no one to have to trust. All guaranteed and anonymous. And the best part is, there’s no need for the ideologically pure to go fling ourselves against leviathan in some ill conceived revolution. I’m sometimes disturbed by the martyrdom complex some Ancaps seem to exhibit; holing up with their favorite rifle and apparently just waiting for the JBTs to show up someday and take down as many with them as possible. Much safer to just pay otherwise worthless people to do the dirty work instead.

To wax poetic, the great melting pot of human society has got scum floating on the top, and scum settled on the bottom. It sure would be great if we could let them thin each other’s ranks, with minimal bystanders getting plugged.

Then again, why count on the competence and boldness of American crooks? Watch the experiment unfold south of the border and see who takes the gamble. In parts of the world where life is cheap, AP might be a chief industry, and provide an excellent test pad for its 1st world conquest.

If there are other practical failures I have missed, I will have to address them in a follow up article. On to the alleged moral failures.

I do not think my audience will contest the notion that tax is theft, enforced regulation is aggression, and basically everything the government does, from bombing foreign kids, to propagandizing local kids, is wrong. Libertarian logic goes on to say that you have a basic right to defend your person and property from aggression, and that if a given level of force is insufficient to deter that aggression, you may justifiable escalate without bound until the aggression is so deterred. Furthermore, you are fully within your rights to contract out your defensive needs to other parties. If the aggressor you are facing is so overwhelming that you can neither personally defend yourself nor openly seek protection services, then it becomes necessary to devise clever systems like AP.

Still, some are concerned that indirectly paying someone to preemptively kill a politician is dangerously close to initiation of force, even if the institution he represents is admittedly oppressive.

First of all maybe you hate the state and have a T-shirt to prove it, but bear no ill will to the lowly 9-to-5er in the local bureaucracy with no real decision making power. Surely that misguided paper shuffler does not deserve to get axed along with the household name tyrants. Fear not, because AP only recognizes the power of the dollar, and unless someone, somewhere is willing to part with a small fortune in order to doom the government peon, he is probably just as safe as every other person listed in the phone book.

The stronger complaint is that no politicians deserve to die, and we should instead get the backing of legions of converts and politely present our leaders with one way tickets to somewhere far away and leave them be. If that were plausible, I’m all for it. Since its not, there’s no reason to protest the forceful alternative.

I am not obsessed with justice or vengeance. I would be perfectly happy to let every reigning politician resign without further punishment, even those that knowingly ordered or caused innocent deaths. For example, I have no desire to expend energy exhuming FDR’s corpse and dragging it around the town square, as my grandfather often insists should be done. In other words, out of sight, out of mind. The only thing that matters is that the rulers leave power, their offices dismantled. Going back to my earlier criteria, I will back whatever method of eviction is the quickest, cheapest, and safest (for me), regardless of the consequences said method brings down on the evictees. If AP is the Q, C, and S, then I shed no tears over however many leaders get snuffed before the rest discover their positions cannot protect them. If any of you have a soft spot for some politician who is “really an ok guy deep down, he just doesn’t get it yet” then hopefully he will be among the first to ‘get it’ and work his damnedest to disappear from public consciousness as fast as possible.

Imagine this scenario: You just went to considerable cost to move into a nice new neighborhood. The day after you move in, you receive the following note in the mail:

Your options are A) pissing away your down payment and leaving, only to find Vroman’s relatives run similar scams in every other neighborhood B) coughing up the 2 grand every year, and futilely trying to convince your sheeple neighbors to petition Boss Vroman to leave you all alone C) killing a few thugs and eventually going down in a hail of lead, D) spend your 2 grand hiring someone to snipe Boss Vroman when he least expects it.

So which will it be, Ex-pat, LP, Waco, or…AP?

Whether you buy that as sufficient excuse or if instead, you buy into Bob Murphy’s pacifism plan, is actually quite irrelevant. Here is the clutch argument. Why Ancaps should not oppose AP is that the fate of anarchism and AP are inextricably entwined. It is obvious that if the system works at all, it will be very profitable to the operators. In Ancapland there will be no law enforcement per se to crack down on a proposed AP operation. Thus it is inevitable that some profit-seeking anarchists, with no fear of state reprisal, will eventually start one or more AP servers.

No matter what route is taken to anarchism, peaceful evangelism or other, the end result will be a society devoid of central authority, and with an AP system in existence, due to simple profit motive.

Furthermore, even if the consequences of AP are a hell on earth comparable with the worst examples of grotesque statism, that is also irrelevant, because AP is unstoppable. Even if we all converted to minarchism so that we could have the benefits of pseudo-libertarianism, while still having a violence monopolist to counteract AP, that changes nothing. AP can destroy any state, minimal or monstrous. No matter what the ultimate outcome wrought by AP, there are no steps we can take that will avoid it. Even embracing the current police state, if that were a serious option, would not provide significant long term resistance to the looming threat of AP. There is nothing short of 100% popular refusal to participate that will prevent AP from tearing down every political office in the world, and given human psychology, that 100% won’t materialize.

Thus the only question is whether AP is useful enough for transition purposes that someone develops it now, or uses other methods to destroy statism first, and wait for AP to show up on its own.

It’s like this. Person A is holding person B hostage at gunpoint. You, being a pacifist, would like to save person B, without killing bad guy A. Unfortunately for your humanitarian plans, person B is a part time ninja, and as soon as the immediate threat of the gun is gone, he is going to snap A’s neck instantly. You also have a gun. So whether you shoot A yourself, or somehow non-lethally disarm him and unleash B’s hands of death, A will die. Thus given the certainty of A’s death (and deserved at that) the primary concern should be the other two people in the equation. If you attempt to disarm A, you could get shot, leaving B still trapped and you dead. Or you could just easily shoot A, saving both yourself and B, but troubling your conscience.

That’s all I have to say about moral issues.

Lastly, there are the criticisms that claim that AP will successfully kill politicians, moral or not, but the real problem is that the system will result in something no better than the current regime. There are common cries that AP will get ‘out of control’. I see two ways this could happen. Foremost is that the operators of AP will somehow appoint themselves de facto rulers in the resulting power vacuum and twist the tool to assassinate their personal enemies at will. This is clearly impossible because if they were able to operate their servers despite the pressure of a state, clearly someone else can operate a competing server despite the pressure of the rogue AP-ists, and if said rogues build themselves a personality cult in a bid for world domination, they make themselves ridiculously easy targets for AP v2.0.

The better reason this is impossible is because ideally the AP system would be so well designed that it would run autonomously, so as to avoid there being any actual operators for the state to arrest. Thus there are no operators to go bad in the post-state world either.

The other possible unintended consequence, opposite that of crypto-dictatorship, is the Randian fear about war of all against all, i.e. ‘bad’ anarchism ala Mad Max. I see little reason to worry about this possibility. If society degenerates to the point that putting a $100 bet on someone dying tomorrow results in a very real possibility that you will be right, then this would imply that AP players are so widespread and killing so unremarkable, that you might as well just whack the person yourself and save the C-note. At this point, AP will fall into disuse for being an unnecessary middleman in the homicide business, except for those rare hard to find targets, as was its original purpose.

Therefore, AP has a feedback loop that prevents it from being practical as a means of facilitating petty murders.

In conclusion, AP is pragmatically sound, ethically justified, and strategically prudent. The only question is when. Watch out State, you’re on a collision course with an extinction level event. I have foreseen it.

Source: news.bitcoin

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nancyedimick · 8 years ago

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Eleventh Circuit en banc strikes down restriction on doctors’ speech to patients about guns

A Colt Mark IV Government Model 45-caliber handgun, pictured with ammunition. (Paul Buck/European Pressphoto Agency)

Yesterday, judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit struck down much of the Florida law that restricted doctors’ speech to patients about guns. The vote in Wollschlaeger v. Governor was 10-1, with only Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat, the author of the contrary panel opinions, dissenting. I think this is the right result, for reasons I blogged about here; but for now, I just wanted to pass along Judge William Pryor’s concurrence, which I think is especially good.

First, my summary of the key things the law did:

A. It barred doctors from asking questions (in writing or orally) “concerning the ownership [or home possession] of a firearm or ammunition by the patient or by a family member,” unless the doctor “in good faith believes that this information is relevant to the patient’s medical care or safety, or the safety of others.” And, according to the panel majority, “relevant” here means relevant based on “some particularized information about the individual patient, for example, that the patient is suicidal or has violent tendencies.”

A doctor thus could not ask all patients, or all patients with children, whether they own guns, whether on an intake questionnaire or in person, even if the doctor believes that this information would indeed be useful in giving general advice about safe gun storage, the supposed dangers of any gun ownership and the like.

B. It barred doctors from “intentionally enter[ing] any disclosed information concerning firearm ownership into the patient’s medical record if the practitioner knows that such information is not relevant to the patient’s medical care or safety, or the safety of others,” with the same interpretation of “relevant.”

C. It barred doctors “from unnecessarily harassing a patient about firearm ownership during an examination.” This means, according to the panel majority, that a doctor “should not disparage firearm-owning patients, and should not persist in attempting to speak to the patient about firearm ownership when the subject is not relevant [based on the particularized circumstances of the patient’s case, such as the patient’s being suicidal] to medical care or safety.”

D. It provided that patients may “decline to answer or provide any information regarding ownership [or home possession] of a firearm,” though such a refusal “does not alter existing law regarding a physician’s authorization to choose his or her patients.” Nonetheless, it provided that doctors “may not discriminate against a patient based solely upon the patient’s exercise of the constitutional right to own and possess firearms or ammunition.” This suggests that doctors could turn away patients for refusing to answer questions about guns (so long as they are “relevant” based on “some particularized information about the individual patient”) but could not turn away patients for answering the questions with “yes, I own a gun.”

The court upheld the antidiscrimination provision (the last of these four) but struck down the first three, on the grounds that they were content-based speech restrictions. Here is Pryor’s concurrence, though if you’re interested you should also read the other opinions

I concur in the majority opinion, but I write separately to reiterate that our decision is about the First Amendment, not the Second. The Second Amendment “guarantee[s] the individual right to possess and carry weapons,” and enshrines a fundamental right “necessary to our system of ordered liberty” that applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. Our decision recognizes that protecting that fundamental right also serves a substantial government interest. And for that reason, Florida can protect its citizens from discrimination on the basis of their exercise of their right to bear arms. But the profound importance of the Second Amendment does not give the government license to violate the right to free speech under the First Amendment.

“[A]bove all else, the First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content.” Content-based regulations of speech “pose the inherent risk that the Government seeks not to advance a legitimate regulatory goal, but to suppress unpopular ideas or information or manipulate the public debate through coercion rather than persuasion.” The power of the state must not be used to “drive certain ideas or viewpoints from the marketplace,” even if a majority of the people might like to see a particular idea defeated.

The First Amendment is a counter-majoritarian bulwark against tyranny. “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech,” cannot mean “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech a majority likes.” No person is always in the majority, and our Constitution places out of reach of the tyranny of the majority the protections of the First Amendment. The promise of free speech is that even when one holds an unpopular point of view, the state cannot stifle it. The price Americans pay for this freedom is that the rule remains unchanged regardless of who is in the majority. “He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” Thomas Paine, Dissertation on First-Principles of Government 37 (1795).

We would resolve this appeal in exactly the same way if the facts were reversed. Suppose doctors were inspired to ask patients about gun ownership because the doctors believed that possession of firearms is an important means of ensuring health and safety…. A state legislature motivated by anti-gun sentiment might have passed the same inquiry, record-keeping, and anti-harassment provisions that are in the Firearm Owners’ Privacy Act to prevent doctors from encouraging their patients to own firearms, and those laws would be equally unconstitutional. The First Amendment does not discriminate on the basis of motivation or viewpoint — the principle that protects pro-gun speech protects anti-gun speech with equal vigor.

That the Act focuses on doctors is irrelevant. The need to prevent the government from picking ideological winners and losers is as important in medicine as it is in any other context. The history of content-based restrictions on physicians’ speech provides a cautionary tale:

During certain historical periods, … governments have overtly politicized the practice of medicine, restricting access to medical information and directly manipulating the content of doctor-patient discourse. For example, during the Cultural Revolution, Chinese physicians were dispatched to the countryside to convince peasants to use contraception. In the 1930s, the Soviet government expedited completion of a construction project on the Siberian railroad by ordering doctors to both reject requests for medical leave from work and conceal this government order from their patients. In Nazi Germany, the Third Reich systematically violated the separation between state ideology and medical discourse. German physicians were taught that they owed a higher duty to the “health of the Volk” than to the health of individual patients. Recently, Nicolae Ceausescu’s strategy to increase the Romanian birth rate included prohibitions against giving advice to patients about the use of birth control devices and disseminating information about the use of condoms as a means of preventing the transmission of AIDS.

Health-related information is more important than most topics because it affects matters of life and death. Doctors help patients make deeply personal decisions, and their candor is crucial. If anything, the doctor-patient relationship provides more justification for free speech, not less.

If we upheld the Act, we could set a precedent for many other restrictions of potentially unpopular speech. Think of everything the government might seek to ban between doctor and patient as supposedly “irrelevant” to the practice of medicine. Without the protection of free speech, the government might seek to ban discussion of religion between doctor and patient. The state could stop a surgeon from praying with his patient before surgery or punish a Christian doctor for asking patients if they have accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior or punish an atheist for telling his patient that religious belief is delusional. Without the protection of free speech, the government might seek to censor political speech by doctors. The state might prevent doctors from encouraging their patients to vote in favor of universal health care or prohibit a physician from criticizing the Affordable Care Act. Some might argue that such topics are irrelevant to a particular patient’s immediate medical needs, but the First Amendment ensures that doctors cannot be threatened with state punishment for speech even if it goes beyond diagnosis and treatment.

These examples do not even begin to address the number of highly controversial topics that doctors discuss as a direct part of their medical responsibilities. Could a state prohibit a pro-life doctor from discouraging a patient from aborting her unborn child? Could a state prohibit a doctor from advising a patient about sex-reassignment surgery? Could a state prohibit a doctor from advising parents to vaccinate their children? Could a state prohibit a doctor from recommending abstinence or encouraging safe sexual behavior? What about organ donation or surrogacy or terminal care? What about drugs or alcohol or tobacco? Could a state legislature prevent a doctor from explaining the risks or benefits of a vegan diet? Or prevent a doctor from explaining the risks or benefits of playing football? This type of thought experiment should give us pause. If today the majority can censor so-called “heresy,” then tomorrow a new majority can censor what was yesterday so-called “orthodoxy.”

We should not be swayed by the argument that the First Amendment may be curtailed when other constitutional rights need “protection.” In this context, “protection” is a misnomer. The Constitution protects individual rights from government infringement, but freedom thrives on private persuasion. That the government may not establish a religion or ban handguns does not suggest that private individuals may not start a church or give away their guns. The Second Amendment is not infringed when private actors argue that guns are dangerous any more than when private actors support the positions of the National Rifle Association. The “theory of our Constitution” is that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” The Florida Legislature overstepped the boundaries of the First Amendment when it determined that the proper remedy for speech it considered “evil” was “enforced silence,” as opposed to “more speech.”

And we should keep in mind that the Second Amendment is not the only constitutional right that might receive such “protection” at the expense of the freedom of speech. If we say that we must “place the doctors’ right to question their patients on the scales against the State’s compelling interest in fully effecting the guarantees of the Second Amendment” [citing the panel below,] others can say that “[w]e must place students’ right to express” unpopular views about race, religion, or sex “against the State’s compelling interest in fully effecting the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause.” The precedent that would allow the government to restrict speech any time its officials can identify a different right they believe more important is dangerous indeed.

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion ….” Our decision applies this timeless principle to speech between doctors and patients, regardless of the content. The First Amendment requires the protection of ideas that some people might find distasteful because tomorrow the tables might be turned.

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/02/17/eleventh-circuit-en-banc-strikes-down-restriction-on-doctors-speech-to-patients-about-guns/

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wolfandpravato · 8 years ago

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Eleventh Circuit en banc strikes down restriction on doctors’ speech to patients about guns

A Colt Mark IV Government Model 45-caliber handgun, pictured with ammunition. (Paul Buck/European Pressphoto Agency)

First, my summary of the key things the law did:

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/02/17/eleventh-circuit-en-banc-strikes-down-restriction-on-doctors-speech-to-patients-about-guns/

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