Fuck Sin Taxes

Normally I am more eloquent in my expression of my dislike for big government, but profanity is pretty much the only way I can concisely describe my dislike for what statists refer to as "sin taxes."  To all of you fundie yokels who want to tax alcohol out of existence: fuck you.  To all of you latte liberals who want to tax tobacco out of existence: fuck you.  To all of you middle American moderates who want to put "common sense" taxes on everything that offends your low moral standards: fuck you.

Sin taxes are an embodiment of everything wrong with American politics: the idea that if 51% of people personally dislike something, they have every right to use the state to force the other 49% to stop doing that something.

They are the scion of an unholy alliance between two enemies of freedom: the red state fascist Christian theocrats and the SWPL/Jewish liberal totalitarians.  In other words, they are the natural product of centrism and bipartisanship and the combination of both forms of statism that are fucking up America.

In particular, support for alcohol taxes always gets me.  In most non-Islamic cultures, alcohol plays an important role.  Alcohol was independently developed by by countless cultures.  Even the Indians of the Amazon rainforest make drinks from fermented manioc.  Yet, in both the "liberty-loving" red states and the "personal freedom-supporting" blue states of America no one bats an eye if a state doubles the tax on alcohol.

The fact that Christian fundamentalists/evangelicals/conservatives are so vocal in their support for sin taxes, especially on alcohol is surprising considering that Jesus was the ultimate bartender.  Do any of them remember the part in the Book of John where he transmuted water to wine?  If God is against alcohol consumption, as megachurch preachers blather whenever petty tyrants state legislators consider raising taxes on alcohol, why was his own Son was a miraculous vintner?

Liberals also put their hypocrisy on full display with regard to sin taxes.  Any libertarians who are stupid enough to believe liberals when they say they are in favor of "personal freedoms" and "pro-choice" should take a look at the liberal record when it comes to sin taxes.  For example, while they support marijuana legalization, they want to heavily tax it.

They have no problem with putting enough taxes on cigarettes to the point where the taxes cost more than the tobacco, ostensibly because of the public health hazard of tobacco.  The claimed public health hazards of smoking have always struck me as overblown.  I remember when my great-aunt died, her death certificate listed smoking as the cause of death even though she was in her 80s and in poor health all around.  I wonder how many other "smoking-related deaths" were like hers.  In 21st century America, doctors apparently don't think that people can die of old age anymore.

They even support putting special taxes on the use of indoor tanning.  As with tobacco, they claim this is due to the health hazards of their use.  (An alternate explanation is that feminists hate tanning salons because they make women more attractive and, as Rush says, "feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society." Thus, anything that makes women more attractive to men, including tanning, breast implants, and make-up is verboten according to feminists and manginas.)

The mental disorder called liberalism, with its support for socialism, abortion, illegal immigrants, and coddling criminals, is certainly a public health hazard that has led to far more human deaths than smoking ever will.  A tax on liberals would probably do more to save lives than a tax on cigarettes.

What sin tax proponents, both left and right, fail to realize is that it is not merely the use of tobacco, alcohol, and/or tanning that causes health problems, it is the excessive use.  If you socially smoke you probably won't get lung cancer, but if you smoke three packs a day from age 18 to 60 you probably will.  If you drink alcohol at a bar every Friday night, you probably won't develop health problems (instead your health will probably benefit), but if you chug a 12-pack of beer every night you will probably develop them.  If you use a tanning bed prior to your vacation to Hawaii you probably won't develop skin cancer, but if you use them weekly for fifty years, you might.

Proponents of sin taxes do not understand the concept of moderation.  They don't understand that many people who partake in "sinful" things such as alcohol are not compulsive or habitual users.  True, some people abuse alchol, tobacco, etc., but why should the vast majority of people capable of self-control be punished for the high time preference of a few people?  Those people will be punished for their lack of personal responsibility in due time.  There's no need to tax everyone else for it.

White Men Are Responsible For America's Gun Problems

Predictably, liberal bloggers have reacted to McDonald v. Chicago with an array of ignorant, poorly written screeds. There are good reasons to be skeptical of McDonald, but the liberal reaction generally involves bashing white men and gun culture. The article below is a good example. It was written by Mark Karlin, the editor of BuzzFlash, a socialist progressive website.

If you think the 5-4 partisan hack decision denying the City of Chicago the right to ban handguns is about guns, you're wrong.

Governments do not have rights. They exist to protect rights that people have.

(It's the same 5-4 GOP block -- with some face changes -- that put Bush in the White House and bestowed Corporate Personhood in the Citizens United Case, in short a radical right activist majority of judges.)

True, there have been a few decisions such as Bush v. Gore that appear to be conservative judicial activism, but the number of liberal judicial activist cases dwarfs the number of conservative ones by a couple orders of magnitude.

It's about white males in America feeling threatened by becoming a minority and the gun is their last psychological reassurance of entitlement power against an encroaching demographic change in our democracy.

Two paragraphs in, Mark Karlin reveals himself to be a self-hating mangina. That's pretty awful, considering that most liberal white men are capable of doing so in the first paragraph.

Liberals love to psychoanalyze everything and accuse conservatives of being mentally ill. Has it ever occurred to them that maybe they are the ones who are mentally ill?

Also, why would white males be threatened by becoming a minority? We already are only about 33% of the population of the United States.

After all, the City of Chicago allows citizens to own rifles, so there never was a ban on guns in Chicago; there was a ban on a certain type of gun, which didn't even exist at the time the Constitution was written.

Chicago banned handguns, which were invented long before any of the Founding Fathers were even born. Pistols were used by cavalry since at least the 1500s. Gun grabbers are generally ignorant of guns and Ms. Karlin proves herself to be no exception.

But it is the handgun that makes so many white males feel impregnable, as if they were riding around with a turret gun in a Hummer.

I don't think she knows what the word "impregnable" means. Guns don't make you impregnable, body armor does (not against all rounds, though).

It's a vestige of the Confederacy; "I'm a white man and that allows me to do whatever I want and get away with it, so don't mess with me."

In addition to being ignorant of firearm history, she is also ignorant of American history. Gun ownership is not a vestige of the Confederacy. The Confederacy existed roughly seventy years after the Second Amendment was put into effect.

It's not about the Constitution; it's about a hormonal psychology under siege.

No, "hormonal psychology under siege" is when a forty-year old woman decides to stop chasing alphas and get married, only to discover that the men her age who would make good husbands are sleeping with 20-year olds. Gun ownership is about self-defense, freedom from tyranny, and just having fun.

Meanwhile, the presence of handguns in America causes more deaths than our wars -- and few politicians or corporate media will do anything but giving passing note to the carnage.

The reason why American cities are violent is not due to guns, it is due to the fact that they are filled with blacks and Mexicans, who commit disproportionate amounts of crime compared to whites and Asians.

Why? Because the white male is still too big of a voter block to psychologically "mess with." Even Harry Reid, the Democractic Majority Leader in the Senate, sent out a news release applauding the Supreme Court for overturning the ban on handguns in Chicago and "upholding the 2nd Amendment."

In 1993, the Democratic-controlled Congress passed the Brady Bill. In September 1994, the Democrats passed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. The next month, in part due to their enthusiastic support for gun control, the Republicans took control of the House, the Senate, and a majority of state legislatures. Harry Reid, despite his flaws, is not stupid. He realizes that if the Democrats go on the offensive against guns in an election year, they will suffer losses at the ballot box as a result. And it's not just white men who would vote against the Democrats. While unmarried women vote Democratic, married white women tend to vote Republican.

As America becomes more diverse in race and religion, the white male psyche becomes more frantic in need of "firearms reassurance."

Despite her anti-white misandry, Ms. Karlin does have a point. As America becomes blacker and browner, crime will increase and there is the real possibility that eventually some blacks and mestizos might decide to "cut down the tall trees." Widespread gun ownership among whites would deter that.

And the death toll mounts as a result.

She is correct again. As America diversifies, the death toll will indeed mount. "Diversity + proximity = war." Not to mention the fact that the people who are diversifying America have a higher propensity for crime and violence than the people of pre-diverse America.

BuzzFlash doesn't think Jesus would walk around shoulder holstered and locked and loaded. The Supreme Court has just changed one of our nation's mottos from "In God We Trust" to "In Guns We Trust."

It's perfectly sensible to trust in guns more than God. As Napoleon noted, "God fights on the side with the best artillery."

Also, I think it's hilarious that liberals disdainfully bash Christianity and refer to Christian conservatives as "Christofascists," yet they have no problem using Jesus to promote liberalism.

When Liberals Say They Support Freedom of Speech, They Are Lying

It's a common view that liberals support freedom of speech (or expression) more so than conservatives. The problem is, liberals care more about discrimination and egalitarianism more than they do freedom of speech, so if someone's speech offends a protected group - racial minorities, women, gays - then they do not support freedom of speech and the offending speech must be suppressed. (I realize that there are people with some left-wing views who are free speech purists, but these people are often left-libertarians rather than liberals.)

Here's yet another example. I found this via a link on Feministing, which led to a site named Sociological Images (as an aside, I took an intro to sociology class four years ago and it would have more accurately been termed "intro to socialism). In New Mogadishu Minneapolis, Minnesota, an ISP named USI Wireless put up billboards saying "Fast, cheap and satisfaction guaranteed." A woman named Stacey Burns of Minneapolis (who has an online trail as a feminist activist and Obama campaigner, and is married to this guy) saw one of them, took a picture, posted it on her Facebook. The caption she put is:

"USI Wireless is a pimp. This is how they're selling their wireless service in Minneapolis. Give them a call at 952.253.3262 (Option 1) or email: info@usiwireless.com. When I called, they assured me that they did some test marketing and everybody loved it, but the 100,000 American girls sexually trafficked in the US with an initial recruitment age of 11-14 might not guffaw quite as loudly as the focus group did."

So there you have it. If you put up a billboard that makes a joking reference to cheap hookers, you're a pimp and inconsiderate towards child sexual abuse victims!

Thanks to Burns, the billboards eventually gained the attention of City Council member Gary Schiff (e-mail), a women's studies major (no, I'm not joking), who was unsurprisingly offended and "then talked to city staff, who told him they had been talking to USI's founders for three days but had gotten nowhere. Schiff also called USI, but said his calls were never returned."

Another councilwoman, Elizabeth Glidden (e-mail), joined in: "My message to them was, 'I hope you're taking these down right now." As a result of the governmental pressure, Clear Channel (the billboard owners) and USI caved and removed the billboards.

Predictably, a few scattered "progressive" websites are heralding this as a victory. After all, if they find something offensive, it must be shut down. American Renaissance discovered this a few months ago and Pam Geller is learning this right now.

Can you imagine the reaction if conservative politicians leaned on advertisers to not put up billboards they considered to be blasphemous? It would be a national story in the liberal media, with commentators rushing to condemn the conservatives for their assault on freedom of speech. The conservative politicians would then apologize and withdraw their criticisms.

But when two liberal city government leaders pressure a private company to take down an ad they find offensive, it only garners a few local news articles and posts on liberal websites. This is how liberals work - they slowly take away our freedom and the media ignores it. When whites start getting arrested for "hate speech," the liberal media will probably ignore it, too.

The next time a Republican is in power, libertarians should remember stories like this before allying with liberals against conservatism statism. Despite what they claim, liberals do not support freedom of speech. They are its enemy.

To Any Criminals in the Portland, Oregon, Area

If you're looking for an easy robbery, stop by the Red and Black Cafe. This left-wing anarchist-owned establishment, located at 400 Southeast 12th Avenue, Portland, Oregon, does not serve police officers, so you won't have to worry about a police officer being present when you rob it. Once you rob it, since the owners hate the police they wouldn't call them and you won't go to jail since they support "community forums" and "restorative justice" instead of punishment. Also, since it's a radical leftist hangout, the feminists and emasculated "men" who work and eat there probably don't carry concealed, so you won't have to worry about getting shot by an employee or customer.

From OregonLive.com:

Showing a policeman the door turned out -- inadvertently -- to be a good business decision for the Red and Black Cafe in Southeast Portland.

The vegan establishment was deluged with customers in the two days after news came out last week that one of the co-owners had served coffee to a Portland police officer, then kicked him out.

"We had a couple of really busy days over the weekend," said John Langley, the co-owner who served Officer James Crooker and asked him to leave. "We had two $1,100 days, which is maybe double a typical day."

The story sparked a fiery response, with national coverage and about 600 comments posted on oregonlive.com. Along with a boost in customers, the cafe has received five threats of arson and other violence.

Many people also expressed outrage at Langley's treatment of Crooker, who's received an outpouring of support on the streets.

All that after buying a quick coffee on May 18. Crooker was walking out of the cafe when he was approached by a customer, Cornelia Seigneur, who said she appreciated the work of Portland police. Langley, who was watching, said seeing a uniformed officer in the cafe made him uncomfortable. So he went up and asked Crooker to leave, which he did.

And that was that, until Seigneur blogged about it, and the story went viral.

Langley said that most of the criticism has come from people threatening never to eat at the cafe. "I think most of those folks are people who had never or would never come to the restaurant," he said.

The cafe hasn't suffered any vandalism or any other attacks, and Langley doesn't expect any, either. "It would be highly ironic if there were because the folks who are the most upset about this are presumably those who are in support of the police," he said, "so it would be weird for them to commit crimes."

Although business has picked up, some customers voiced support for police. "I wouldn't even think twice about it if a police officer came in here for a bite, maybe to make sure things are running OK," said Stacey Tran, who lives in the neighborhood and was at the cafe Monday. "That's part of their job. It's what our tax dollars go toward."

Online commenters have asked what the cafe's seven co-owners would do if they were attacked. Call the police?

"I don't think we are trying to be purists about it," Langley said. "We would prefer that there be some practical alternative to police like community forums for restorative justice, for example."

At a news conference Monday, Langley rejected criticism that he had discriminated against the officer. "In no way does this compare to racial profiling or racism," he said. "A person can choose to be a police officer but a person of color cannot."

Langley said earlier that many of the customers in the cafe, which draws vegans and environmental and animal rights activists, have been victims of harsh police tactics and were worried about police shootings.

A member of Rose City Copwatch, a police monitoring group, backed up that sentiment at the news conference, saying in a statement that Portland police are focused on arresting people "to maintain a status quo that is built along race, class and gender lines."

Still, Langley said police officers are welcome in the cafe out of uniform. "It's not personal," he said.

Nor did Crooker take the incident to heart. In fact, the reaction has been heartening, he said.

He's received calls from police officers from New York and Washington state offering to buy him, even the entire bureau, coffee. Portlanders have approached him on the street offering to treat him to coffee as well.

"Every single police officer in the area has been receiving the same love from the citizens and that's heartwarming," Crooker said.

None of his colleagues is angry about the incident, he said.

"I don't know of any police officers who have any ill will towards the cafe owner or anyone who's involved in this," Crooker said. "Hopefully everyone walks away from this graciously with the lessons that life has taught us and nobody has any bad feelings about anything."

-- Lynne Terry

-- Kate Mather and Shane Dixon Kavanaugh contributed to this story.

I'm a libertarian, so I am sometimes critical of the police, but it is just stupid for a business owner to refuse service to police officers. First, every society, even an all-white libertarian one, would require someone to enforce the law. Also, the presence of police deters crime. This is why many restaurants will give discounts to police officers and why QuikTrip provides them with free donuts. Criminals are less likely to rob a place when there could be a police officer present.

Left-wing anarchofags (it's not so much of a slur as it is an accurate description - I bet most of the workers and customers are lesbian, bisexual, gay, transexual, pansexual, or something else) like these are particularly hypocritical. They hate the police, yet they whine about how horrible the Tea Party movement is for wanting to cut taxes and "social services."

I thought the comment on abolishing the police and supporting "practical alternative to police like community forums for restorative justice" was particularly naive. These anarchofags should be careful what they wish for. If the police were abolished, in Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle, community forums (and high crime rates) would probably result, but in other parts of the country, the police would be replaced with shotgun blasts, beatings, tarring-and-featherings, and nooses. Undoubtably, the anarchofags would complain about this, just as they do whenever a citizen shoots an armed robber.

Instead of hiding behind a facade of anarchism and anti-authoritarianism, the anarchofags should just be honest and admit that they don't hate the police, but instead they love criminals.

Liberal Free-dumb

In the Bush II years, liberals often claimed to be defenders of the Constitution and supporters of freedom and liberty. Their actions during the Obama era have shown that they don't care about the Constitution, just certain parts of its penumbras.

In fact, liberal freedom (which I refer to as "free-dumb") is generally limited to the following freedoms, some of which conflict with others' rights to life and property:

1. The freedom to get an abortion and access to contraception (with taxpayer funding!).
2. The freedom to have anal sex.
3. The freedom to tresspass (see anti-discrimination laws).
4. The freedom to enter this county illegally.
5. The freedom to commit crimes more easily.
6. The freedom to use drugs (except nicotine).

Essentially, the only freedoms liberalism supports are those that attack the established, and now collapsing, social order.

Net Neutrality: A Noxious Combination of Liberal Ignorance and Radical Egalitarianism

About once a week, Alternet, Mother Jones, Feministing, and other major liberal websites publish an article or blog post promoting "net neutrality." The idea behind net neutrality is that it is unfair for Internet service providers to treat different uses for Internet access differently. This seemingly-benign concept has pushed by liberals for close to five years.

With net neutrality, liberals take egalitarianism to an extreme. Now, not only are all human beings equal, but all forms of Internet data transfer are as well. Advocates for net neutrality are ignorant of one of the modern principles of electronic communications: quality of service (QoS). This is essentially an idea that acknowledges that the various means of Internet communication have different needs and resources should be allocated accordingly.

There are several components to QoS, with these being among the most common:

Bandwidth: Essentially how much data and how fast it can be sent, often measured in bits per second (bps) or bytes per second (Bps; equal to bps/8).

Jitter: Over the Internet, large chunks of data are broken up into smaller blocks of data called packets and sent. Sometimes packets may arrive out of order, this is called jitter.

Delay: How long it takes for a packet to be delivered.

Reliability/Loss: How many packets are lost during transit.

Different applications have different QoS requirements. E-mail deals with relatively small amounts of data, so it does not need much bandwidth. But if a frame is lost, then part of the message is gone so it must be very reliable. Voice over IP needs more bandwidth than e-mail, but if a few packets are lost, it does not prevent the receivers from understanding what is being said, so its reliability requirement is low. Anything involving video would need more bandwidth than audio, and much more than e-mail. However, real-time communication such as video and audio would require low delay, as if it takes packets too long to reach their destination, it leads to lag and words might be difficult or impossible to understand. But when it comes to e-mail, a high delay is acceptable because if it takes an e-mail a few extra seconds to be delivered, it usually does not matter.

But according to liberals, this just isn't fair! Just as we have to pretend that blacks and whites commit the same amount of crime, we have to pretend like the 14-year old boy Torrenting porn and pirated games is entitled to the same amount of bandwidth as a corporate executive using VoIP. Network resources are not unlimited. Private companies who operate networks must efficiently manage all of the requests for their resources. If that means a Torrenter has to wait an extra half hour before he gets his pirated game so someone using VoIP can carry on an intelligible conversation, then so be it. If they have a problem with current networking principles, they should start their own telecommunications company with an entirely QoS-free network and see how many days it lasts before going bankrupt.

Naturally, most of the liberals who discuss net neutrality know absolutely nothing about computer networking. See, liberals love to think that they are experts in everything, which is why we get to read articles by sociology majors who don't know the difference between packet- and circuit-switching explaining why it's necessary to treat every packet the same.

Liberals do not understand scarcity. They think that everything is free. If they need money for a social program, they just tax the "wealthy" and don't think any further. They want to move from coal and nuclear power plants to solar power, because they view it as "free" (though I doubt any of the liberal arts graduates who call for the government to spend gigadollars on "green energy" could even describe how the photoelectric effect works). Likewise, when it comes to bandwidth, they don't understand that bandwidth is limited.

Liberalism is essentially an ideology that seeks to ignore the constraints of reality. Net neutrality is just another example of this.

"Street Harassment" and Freedom of Speech

Libertarians often make the statement that liberals are right on civil liberties and conservatives are right on economic liberties. The truth, of course, is that conservatives are awful on economic liberties and liberals are horrible on civil liberties. To liberals, racial and gender egalitarian trumps everything, including civil rights and liberties. This is why when a black thug murders people, they call for mercy, but when wealthy white college students are accused of raping a black stripper, they get out the pitchforks and torches.

Despite the fact that liberals are reputed to support freedom of speech, they really support a warped version of it (I refer to it as liberal free-dumb). They believe that freedom of speech means students can disrupt a Tom Tancredo speech or shut down an interstate to whine about budget cuts, but it does not apply whenever someone says something that offends NAMs or feminists. The recent shutdown of the AmRen conference is one example. Now an article has been written by a Huffington Post feminist arguing for legal restrictions on street harassment. For those of you who are unfamiliar with feminist buzzwords, street harassment is when say things, sometimes offensive, to a woman who is dressed sexily in public.

Holly Kearl argues that since sexual harassment is illegal in the workplace, it should be illegal in public. Of course, she fails to explain the legal basis for the illegality of sexual harassment in the workplace. Essentially, the Supreme Court ruled in the 1980s (so much for Kearl's claim that workplace sexual harassment was illegal 19 years before she was born) that sexual harassment constitutes gender discrimination, which is prohibited by the Property Rights and Freedom of Association Destruction Act of 1964 (more commonly called the Civil Rights Act). I do not have a legal background so I do not know why the courts have not struck down the Civil Rights Act as infringing on freedom of speech, but I'm guessing it has to do with the facts that 1) as mentioned above, liberals have a different definition of free speech and 2) it involves businesses, which the courts have allowed the federal government virtually unlimited reign to meddle with since the 1930s.

Anyways, she goes on to praise the Egyptian Parliament's recent passing of a law banning street harassment and suggests that the same happen here. Considering that Egypt has been ruled by the same man since 1981 under a state of emergency, if Egypt passes a law, it's probably a bad idea to pass the same law here. The idea of the federal government banning street harassment reminds me of the South Park episode Cartman's Silly Hate Crime, where Cartman (a 4th grader) throws a rock at a black kid and ends up getting arrested by the FBI and sent to prison (before being pardoned when his friends explain to the governor how hate crime laws are a "savage hypocrisy").

A federal law that banned street harassment would certainly be unconstitutional even with a strict originalist interpretation - it literally bans speech in public places simply because someone finds it offensive (of course, it would also violate the 9th and 10th Amendments, but that's another topic). SCOTUS consistently ruled in favor of an expansive view of freedom of speech. For example, it ruled in the 1970s that it is not constitutional to arrest someone for wearing a jacket reading "Fuck the Draft" into a courthouse, so I really can't see them upholding a law like this. And to enforce this law would simply expand the police state that liberals are so fond of attacking and would undoubtedly lead to the arrest of thousands of young black men. It would be amusing to see liberals' reactions when black men are disproportionately arrested under a street harassment law.

If women want to end street harassment, there's a really good way: don't dress like a slut. The fact is, when a woman wears a short skirt, high heels, and a sleeveless or strapless shirt, she is asking for attention. True, some of these "victims" are professional women dressed for the office, but many of these "professional" women wear only slightly more clothing than women going to nightclubs. Ten or fifteen years ago, professional women wore knee-length skirt-suits or dresses, closed-toed shoes, and hosiery. Now, it seems to be acceptable for "professional" women to go bare legged and wear sandals, short(er) skirts, glorified T-shirts, and even sleeveless shirts.

Yes, I realize I am being politically incorrect and "blaming the victim," but I simply do not care. If women do not want attention, then they should not do their best to attract it.

I find a lot of things that people say offensive, but I don't go around calling for laws to make them shut up. Kearl and other feminists completely miss the point of freedom of speech. The idea of freedom of speech is that people have the right to say things that offend others. If you don't like the fact that a strange man said something about your short skirt, then either insult him back, don't dress like you are trying to attract men's attention if you don't want it, or ignore him and get on with your life like an adult. Feminists wanted wanted to be treated like equals so they should act like it, instead of acting like helpless little girls. Plenty of men have been insulted or harassed by strangers in public, yet you don't see men clamoring for street harassment laws.

However, I really can't blame Kearl for want to ban street harassment. Looking at her picture, it's clear she's never been "street harassed" in her life. She's probably jealous.

EDIT: Fixed a minor error.