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from the a-marriage-is-formed-between-one-man-and-one-electronic-computing-device dept.
More than a dozen state legislatures are considering a bill called the "Human Trafficking Prevention Act," which has nothing to do with human trafficking and all to do with one man's crusade against pornography at the expense of free speech.
At its heart, the model bill would require device manufacturers to pre-install "obscenity" filters on devices like cell phones, tablets, and computers. Consumers would be forced to pony up $20 per device in order to surf the Internet without state censorship. The legislation is not only technologically unworkable, it violates the First Amendment and significantly burdens consumers and businesses.
Perhaps more shocking is the bill's provenance. The driving force behind the legislation is a man named Mark Sevier, who has been using the alias "Chris Severe" to contact legislators. According to the Daily Beast, Sevier is a disbarred attorney who has sued major tech companies, blaming them for his pornography addiction, and sued states for the right to marry his laptop. Reporters Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny uncovered a lengthy legal history for Sevier, including an open arrest warrant and stalking convictions, as well as evidence that Sevier misrepresented his own experience working with anti-trafficking non-profits.
The bill has been introduced in some form [in] Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming (list here). We recommend that any legislator who has to consider this bill read the Daily Beast's investigation.
[...] It’s unfortunate that the Human Trafficking Prevention Act has gained traction in so many states, but we're pleased to see that some, such as Wyoming and North Dakota, have already rejected it. Legislators should do the right thing: uphold the Constitution, protect consumers, and not use the problem of human trafficking as an excuse to promote this individual’s agenda against pornography.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/04/states-introduce-dubious-legislation-ransom-internet
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Wednesday April 26 2017, @12:12PM (33 children)
> Sevier is a disbarred attorney who has sued major tech companies, blaming them for his pornography addiction, and sued states for the right to marry his laptop. Reporters Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny uncovered a lengthy legal history for Sevier, including an open arrest warrant and stalking convictions, as well as evidence that Sevier misrepresented his own experience working with anti-trafficking non-profits.
still better than the average men behind the scenes of lawmaking.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @12:34PM (3 children)
Nah, not really. But it is par for the course for the party that is consistently interested in regulating sexuality.
(Score: 4, Funny) by DannyB on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:11PM
Isn't this also the party that says something like: "they can take my pr0n when they pry it from my warm sticky fingers!"
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(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday April 26 2017, @06:20PM (1 child)
Nah, not really. But it is par for the course for the party that is consistently interested in regulating sexuality.
But Buzzard and Runaway assure me that the right is the pro freedom-of-expression party!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @07:38PM
We meet again. If you are keeping track of my promises, as we roll along together on the internet, I said in the Introduction that we would figure out why authoritarian followers think in the bizarre and perplexing way they so often do. The key to the puzzle springs from Chapter 2's observation that, first and foremost, followers have mainly copied the beliefs of the authorities in their lives. They have not developed and thought through their ideas as much as most people have. Thus almost anything can be found in their heads if their authorities put it there, even stuff that contradicts other stuff. A filing cabinet or a computer can store quite inconsistent notions and never lose a minute of sleep over their contradiction. Similarly a high RWA can have all sorts of illogical, self-contradictory, and widely refuted ideas rattling around in various boxes in his brain, and never notice it.
So can everybody, of course, and my wife loves to catch inconsistencies in my reasoning when we’re having a friendly discussion about one of my personal failures. But research reveals that authoritarian followers drive through life under the influence of impaired thinking a lot more than most people do, exhibiting sloppy reasoning, highly compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness, a profound ethnocentrism, and--to top it all off--a ferocious dogmatism that makes it unlikely anyone could ever change their minds with evidence or logic. These seven deadly shortfalls of authoritarian thinking eminently qualify them to follow a wouldbe dictator.
Altemeyer, The Authoritarians [umanitoba.ca], p. 75
(Snipped the final sentence in the 2nd paragraph to avoid Godwinning the thread.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @01:26PM (24 children)
If you build your society around the principle of imposition, then that is what you'll get: Imposition.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:15PM (23 children)
If we don't have a government with laws, and the power of imposition to enforce those laws, then we'll instead have anarchy with other people imposing their own unregulated will upon us. I would rather have a sane, non-corrupt government.
Lead in the drinking water? We'll just classify lead as an important mineral and get the FDA to come up with a daily RDA figure for lead. Problem solved. Pollution in the air? We'll just come up with a way to explain how good for you that it is. Toxic waste in your soil? Shut up and live with it. We can't have government imposing regulations!
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(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:47PM (22 children)
If we don't have a government with laws, and the power of imposition to enforce those laws, then we'll instead have anarchy with other people imposing their own unregulated will upon us. I would rather have a sane, non-corrupt government.
Well, that's the precise problem GP seeks to remedy as I understand it. If men were angels, there would be well-defined, voluntary contracts between property owners about emissions, the party creating the emissions and all parties that might be effected by the emissions. That would seem to be the ideal way to handle it.
As an angel with enlightened self-interest, of course I would enter an agreement with a party that seeks to create toxic emissions that will affect my property, and since he is an angel as well, he would not pollute my property without such an agreement in place. With angels at the negotiating table, I'm certain that a mutually beneficial arrangement could be met. Certainly, thousands of property owners and I want the widgets the factory will be producing, so we may be amenable to a certain level of substances such as lead, with an understanding as part of the contract that we would regularly convene to evaluate the state of the art in emissions controls and renegotiate.
Being angels, if there were one affected property owner who did not wish to take the risk, the factory would not be built, and that would be ok. Everybody would be respectful of the dissenter.
Aye, it's a shame that men act nothing like angels.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday April 26 2017, @03:47PM (1 child)
> it's a shame that men act nothing like angels.
You state exactly the proof of why laws are necessary, with the power to impose and enforce those laws.
> . . . there would be voluntary contracts . . .
Imaginary contracts are worth even less than verbal agreements.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @04:00PM
I think the idea is that these angels would have written contracts, but I certainly agree on the basis that men are not angels. That was the point of how I framed my post.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday April 26 2017, @04:50PM (19 children)
And not just angels, angels with infinite free time to negotiate contracts and a big fat wallet to afford lawyers.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday April 26 2017, @04:56PM (18 children)
You don't need lawyers if there is no law.
That contract is all you got, and our resident libertrollian thinks having those contracts means people will obey their letter and spirit, or get some non-violently-imposed non-monopolistic entity to shame them for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @05:29PM (15 children)
My understanding is that enforcement is still voluntary, because the parties agreed to such enforcement—no angels required.
Government requires angels: After all, it's one organization that has been blessed and ordained with a monopoly on enforcement; putting that kind of power into men's hands requires a great deal of trust.
In contrast, a true separation of powers is competition within a market of voluntary trade, whereby "voluntary" is defined as "by agreement in advance" (see the first bullet point).
Get it yet?
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday April 26 2017, @05:39PM (9 children)
> enforcement is still voluntary, because the parties agreed to such enforcement—no angels required
Subsequently, the party collecting the most money agreed with the enforcement party, to share the raw profit from not holding up its part of the contract. The party being fucked in the process agreed that it had not acted wisely.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @06:03PM (8 children)
I mean, what could your point possibly be?
In your scenario, the contract is poorly defined.
The fact that you have come up with this scenario off the top of your head proves that it would be something deeply considered by both sides of any considerable agreement.
Indeed, such a scenario would be instructive to the market with regard to further contract negotiations among others, etc.
And guess what? This law-by-contract affects only those who have agreed to be party to it; contrast this with your one-size-fits-all law-by-legislation.
As always, your ilk seems incapable of keeping all the moving parts in mind.
Your government does not solve that issue; it's a monopoly enforcer—one that is explicitly founded around unilateral imposition of its own ideas.
Thus, there must be a separation of powers; the most robust kind of separation is competition within a market of voluntary trade, thereby making the whole law-by-contract system an iterative process that co-evolves with everything else, rather than being some magical, religious aspect of society.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday April 26 2017, @06:35PM (7 children)
My "ilk", LOL...
My history books remember what happens when contract enforcers don't have a monopoly over the enforcement of the contracts between trading entities: They wage War.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe experienced centuries where people were still trading, but there was no unified "government", king, or even gods, to make them abide by their contracts, the most important of which pertained to where my land/property ends and yours starts.
Those were called the dark ages for a reason.
Little fiefdoms constantly fighting each other at the expense of the weakest, that's your ideal?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @06:57PM (6 children)
Straw man, much? (see subject)
How do contemporary representative democracies tackle the fundamental problem of society being built around one local organization that has been blessed and ordained with a monopoly on imposition? You are the one who requires men to be angels; I am the one who acknowledges that they are not, and must therefore prove their worth to society via competition.
Are you arguing that there needs to be One World Government?
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday April 26 2017, @07:24PM (5 children)
So... how fairly do people compete, when their livelihood and family is at stake?
> How do contemporary representative democracies tackle the fundamental problem of society being built around
> one local organization that has been blessed and ordained with a monopoly on imposition?
Explain how it is a "fundamental problem", since that's the basis of your whole argument.
The problem is not that there is only one, since history tells us that's pretty much the way it's always worked, and we're pretty successful as a species (duopoly with a religious organization has been a regular thing, too). The problem is to keep the guys at the top from abusing that power, by keeping them under the spotlight, scared, and providing regular reminders of the limited ability of necks to sustain sharp blows.
I ain't requiring no angels. You need to learn to read. I'm aware of the fucked-up selfish nature of the bastards who typically rise to the top. Those would rise to the top in your contract-based society too, and get it quickly back to a good old fashionable dictatorship, with optionally a civil war until that happens.
How on Earth can you look at human nature and believe that competition in contract enforcement can be anything but a bloody disaster? Have you looked at the gang wars from Central America to Chicago?
Your premise ignores both History and facts observation. Go find a few hundreds of thousands of believers and surprisingly prove us all wrong, but I ain't holding my breath, and neither would be all but a few SN visitors.
/out
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @07:47PM (4 children)
The contemporary, "western" societies are so wealthy, because there is already a great deal of contract culture in place.
That is, the ideas have already been tried and proved wildly successful, but for one problem: There is a giant, ancient cultural parasite sucking up and then squandering the resources that have been unleashed by a nascent contract culture: This cultural parasite is a quasi-religious reverence for this one particular organization in society, one that is ordained and blessed and celebrated with hymns, and pledges of allegiance, and holidays, and origin myths, and sacred symbols.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday April 26 2017, @09:05PM (3 children)
You need to travel and read History books, a whole lot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @09:54PM (2 children)
s/t
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday April 26 2017, @11:54PM (1 child)
Yup, most SN readers will now go travel and learn about a world which fits your delusions, encouraged in this endeavor by the vast numbers of people who fail to voice support every, single, time, you come back to parrot the same BS and ignore our feedback.
Did that sentence make sense? As much as this thread.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 27 2017, @02:16AM
If you don't want me to repeat myself, then stop repeating the same silly, contradictory non-criticisms.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday April 26 2017, @05:56PM (4 children)
And who upholds the agreement with the enforcer, and who upholds THAT agreement? Turtles all the way down!
Then there's that minor matter of infinite time to negotiate all those contracts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @06:33PM (3 children)
Competition within a market of voluntary trade is an evolutionary process—it's an iterative process; there's no dependence on an infinite regression of turtles—you just have to start somewhere, a starting point that is usually primitive and ugly and woefully incomplete. Given enough time, variation (possibly random) and selection (possibly mindless) can turn hydrogen atoms into the ordered human mind.
That minor matter of time is a technical problem.
I mean, how can you not see this?
Representative democracy with voters comprised of the general public was logistically inconceivable until society had developed various technological advancements, such as the printing press, widespread literacy and worldliness, infrastructure for the dissemination of information, collating machines, etc.
Why are you vehemently opposed to even thinking about how society could be constructed so as to give greater autonomy to individuals? It's... bizarre.
I'm the peasant of yore musing about the possibility of casting my vote along with the nobleman, whereas you're one of the grunts wondering whether I should be burned at the stake for heresy.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday April 27 2017, @03:39AM (2 children)
Actually, I'm the guy saying your "solution" obviously has a gaping hole in it and is asking you kindly to suggest a way to close that hole before we jump headlong into new territory.
I would also ask that we not try to go there before we have dissolved all corporate charters.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 27 2017, @12:28PM (1 child)
I'm the one who has been advocating evolutionary processes, not revolutionary processes.
However, you've got to be open to new ideas before you can even begin thinking about developing new organizational structures in parallel with the existing order of things. That's all I'm suggesting: Be interested in thinking about ways that society can be organized so as to give more autonomy to the individual, and to give society a foundation for tapping into the universe's most robust process for forging a practical shape for complex phenomena: Evolution by Variation and Selection.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday April 27 2017, @09:07PM
You also need to read the signs that say dead end so you can pick a better way before you burn a bunch of time on a fruitless search.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday April 26 2017, @06:07PM (1 child)
Libertarians and contracts, it always makes me LOL. Libertarians have to be the most naive bunch I have ever seen, as not only do they ignore there are several groups of really nasty people that are only held in limited check by a government but they ignore the entire history of civilization going all the way back to the beginning. From the time man came down from the trees its been the same pattern repeated a bazillion times, 1.- Gather wealth by any means necessary, 2.- Hire goon squad, 3.- declare yourself ruler and impose your will upon those around you.
Nothing in their little Libertarian contract fantasy island is gonna change that and the only thing that stops that from happening in the west is the government has a bigger goon squad than the rich man can muster. Hell we even got to see this very pattern not 150 years ago in the USA, it was known as "the age of the robber barons" and what did the barons do? Hire goon squads in the form of private armies and used them to beat and murder all that opposed their will.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @06:45PM
Um... what? Robber Barons got to their position through Government's imposition; why would you expect them to behave in any way other than Governmental?
Contrast the Robber Barons with, say, James J. Hill. [mises.org]
Anyway, the history of civilization is clear: There is an increasing devolution of power from the God-on-Earth Pharaoh to the individual who may choose to exist under one set of contracts or another.
Democracy is as far as government can go: It's still one group dictating to another group; as you yourself point out, it is fundamentally no different from a warlord. The next step in Civilization will be dropping the reverence for the warlord in favor of reverence for contracts (and therefore in favor of a true separation of powers: Competition within a market—heck, just consider the virtue of the fact that in our current times, there are multiple governments under which one may kind of "choose" to exist).
If your system allows one particular organization in society to declare a 100-year-old pub to be "illegal", or to throw people into internment camps for having Japanese heritage, or to break into a person's home and shoot his dog and rough him up for growing a leafy plant in "privacy", then your system is not acceptable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @01:44PM (1 child)
Congress will never go for something that costs themselves money. They exempt themselves from the law.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:19PM
Congress critters need access to pr0n for legitimate "research" purposes. Therefore an exhaustive collection needs to be maintained, and the library of congress is hereby directed to do so.
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(Score: 2) by OrugTor on Wednesday April 26 2017, @03:49PM
Speaking as an AZ resident (I would never admit to being an Arizonan) I would say this guy has our legislature beaten for sheer looniness. That's quite an achievement.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 26 2017, @05:52PM
And I was thinking this would be Tipper Gore's later life pursuit....
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