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.
In a free society, it's very difficult to prevent some offenses without making the society less free, and that cost must always be weighed.The contradiction was exactly the point; of course I don't want to lock either of you up, and nor can you execute or jail this depraved specimen of humanity because of what he may do. Furthermore, this freedom must be afforded not only to people you like, but even, nay, especially when you are emotionally involved.
What law would you create that would target him, but could not be abused to wrongly convict the innocent? It's not a trivial question. One extreme is to make it illegal to publish photographs of any child, but I don't believe society wants that. Would you make it illegal to publish photographs of any child of which you are not the guardian? How do you verify it? Or do you tie the illegality to how the image is presented (e.g. in a sexual context), also a fine line to judge (does publishing the results of a teen beauty contest cross it?) Would people have to cut other children out of pictures of their child playing team sports? Is great-aunt Bertha allowed to publish photos of her grandniece?
How does society enforce preventative measures without government? If you mean taking the law into your own hands, the bottom of that slope is anarchy. This man is not physically harming children as far as we know, so there is no "cost of a child" to wave around, and again, we do not punish people for what they might do (cf. Minority Report).
The libertarian refuses to give the State the moral sanction to commit actions that almost everyone agrees would be immoral, illegal, and criminal if committed by any person or group in society. The libertarian, in short, insists on applying the general moral law to everyone, and makes no special exemptions for any person or group. ... The libertarian insists that whether or not such practices are supported by the majority of the population is not germane to their nature: that, regardless of popular sanction, War is Mass Murder, Conscription is Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery. The libertarian, in short, is almost completely the child in the fable, pointing out insistently that the emperor has no clothes.Libertarian philosophy has a lot going for it; libertarians are fiscally conservative (you pay as you go), and socially liberal (which is where we disagree; they're usually for gay rights, unrestricted abortion, etc., but not always). They have very radical ideas about privatizing, well, pretty much everything (including emergency services and courts), but rational explanations for how things would work. Naysayers say these ideas have never been tried, but nor had many aspects of the republic that would become the United States of America before it was founded.
Paul's desire to secure U.S. borders remains a key topic in his 2008 presidential campaign. He opposes the North American Union proposition and its proposed integration of Mexico, the United States of America, and Canada. Paul voted "yes" on the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which authorizes the construction of an additional 700 miles of double-layered fencing between the U.S and Mexico. Paul opposes illegal immigration as well as amnesty for illegal immigrants. He also introduced legislation that would amend the Constitution to stop giving automatic citizenship to babies who are born in the United States to non-citizen parents, which has been in effect since the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868.Perhaps not quite so staunchly as Congressman Tom Tancredo, who has made illegal immigration a key component of his platform. As Tom himself says, regarding his candidacy,
It's delusional to suggest that this would not be anything but a David and Goliath situation, but after all, David won.Which brings us to the amnesty bill, which, although shot down once, is rising like some gross zombie at the urgings of our pandering President Bush and Senator Harry Reid. If this amnesty passed it would be a tragedy for so many reasons: massive influx of a culture that's so wretched that, after destroying its own country, has to destroy ours; further deflation of the wages of the poorest Americans; increased taxation to support increased welfare and other services; more crime and drugs; eventual elimination of the two-party system; etc. etc.
Get married, but don't have kids. According to Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick in England and something of an expert on the intersection of money and happiness, getting married adds a happiness factor that's equivalent to having $100,000 added to your household income. This is not true of having children, Oswald says. His surveys have found that adding kids to your life (or not having them at all) didn't seem to change people's happiness one way or the other. Which is good. Kids are expensive, and since most rich people just send theirs away to boarding school anyway, you could argue that the best thing for your Live Cheap, Look Rich lifestyle is not to have the little darlings in the first place.And then a commentary on the Duggars, who at least can afford it: God does not want 16 kids: Arkansas mom gives birth to a whole freakin' baseball team. How deeply should you cringe? by Mark Morford.
To defend Wal-Mart for its low prices is to claim that the most perfect form of economic organization more closely resembles the Soviet Union in 1950 than twentieth-century America. It is to celebrate rationalization to the point of complete irrationality.from Breaking the Chain: The anti-trust case against Wal-Mart. We already have a new McDonald's down the road, and a Jiffy Lube even closer; of course, our twit of a Mayor (Will Ibershof) is elated; strip malls are popping up all over, can a Wal-Mart of our own be far behind? (fortunately the closest one right now is in Lynnwood). (Why don't I like Wal-Mart? Kills the smaller businesses, attracts a skanky crowd, they underpay and mistreat their workers, and they import most of their crap from China and it breaks shortly after you buy it.) Discussion.
I'm annoyed at the state of Linux NES emulators: most are about 5 years abandoned and horribly documented. (I suppose the closed source crowd will crow something about free lunches.) FCE Ultra is supposed to be one of the best, but it looks like it died and then an attempted revival in 2006 also died. In its current state, very few games work; most fail with a gray screen. I'll try one of the better-supported Windows versions (perhaps Nesticle), but that of course means I can't play using the TV, just my laptop, my only Windows box (actually dual).
Windows is an intolerably lousy piece of software for requiring a reboot after changing the domain/workgroup. True, it has gotten much better in that it requires a reboot for far fewer things than, say, NT 3.51, but that's faint praise. Changing the domain should be a minor change to the system. It's personally annoying since I have to switch between my work domain to work remotely and my local workgroup to share files over my internal network.
Speaking of working remotely, IT Connection Manager, the software I use to connect to my work VPN, is also intolerably lousy: it frequently gets "wedged" into a state where it can't connect any more (even after being restarted), and (this I've mentioned before) the "smart" access card needs to be removed somewhere between 2 and 4 seconds into the "checking password" phase, or the password check will count to infinity.
Recently a woman called me and said she had no idea who I was but she had been told by someone—she couldn't remember who—that I give money to people like her. The woman said that she and her husband had nine kids and had moved to a desert in the Middle East. Now they were having difficulty supporting themselves because, well, they had nine kids and had moved to a desert. She figured the best solution was to call me and ask if I would support the entire family indefinitely. If you have nine children and think it's a good idea to move to the desert it is fair to say that you are not a good decision maker. So the question I had to ask myself was this: If I gave her money, would she be more likely to a) use it to feed and educate her children, or b) grunt out nine more children and move to a dislodged glacier floating in the Arctic Ocean?(Yes, of course it's probably a scam, but if it is it's a particularly stupid one.)
The interesting part of the conversation came after I politely declined her invitation to fund the nonstop production of doomed babies. She got mad at me. Apparently she analyzed her situation and came to the conclusion that the root cause of her problem was the unwillingness of total strangers in other countries to give her money. And her solution to that problem was to get angry.
Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes;
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies.
HeavenÂs morning breaks, and earthÂs vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.