Voting

The subject of voting has been coming up a lot recently as we inch closer to the general election. I have recently been having a long back and forth conversation with a self described libertarian, who sports a "Fuck the Republicrats: Vote independent" banner on his myspace page, who has been desparately urging me to vote for McCain.

His primary reason seems to be that I am underestimating the damage that a Clinton or Obama administration might inflict on us, so he has reasoned that we would be best to vote against them. He is also a bit of a war hawk, and is attracted to McCain's "follow Bin-Laden to the gates of hell" mentality.

I have been appealing to the libertarian non-aggression principle as a reason not to support a mainstream party, but to no avail. In full disclosure, I should point out that our state is sort of an anomoly in that we have the most restrictive ballot access laws in the nation, so we usually do not get the opportunity to vote for L candidates. Given this local state of affairs, I usually go to the polls to vote against bond issues, occassionally for politicians in local elections, and I default to non-voting in the general presidential election as a means of voicing my lack of a viable choice for president.

I brought this up today because I have a question for my anti-statist allies in the blogosphere. Do you plan on voting in the general election, and if so who for?

Police Brutality

A police officer has been fired after an incident in which a female prisoner, who was taken into custody on suspicion of DWI, wound up lying on the police station floor in a pool of blood. Much of what happened was recorded on a videotape, but there is a gap of undetermined length. During that time, the woman was believed to have been injured. She said she was beaten up, the officer said she fell.

Warning. Both videos contain graphic images.


Raw video here:



ABC News version here:

John McCain

I recently received an email message with a link to a Wall Street Journal article concerning John McCain on taxes. Looks like the Republicans are trying to quiet the fears of many fiscal consevatives in the party, and convice them to hold their noses and vote for McCain. I have posted my response below.

Thanks for passing along the article on McCain. I must admit that I
feel slightly less agitated by him knowing that his vote against the 2003
microscopic tax cuts was in protest of the bill not going far enough to reign in
spending at the same time. I have also spent the last few minutes studying
his votes and positions over the past 10 years, and I must say he appears to be
slightly more friendly to the low tax, more social freedom, issues that I hold
dear. However, I still find him light years away from someone I could ever
consider giving my stamp of approval via voting booth.

Although she is even further away from me on most issues,
I would probably feel more comfortable with Clinton in office than McCain for
the next four years. This would undoudtedly cause the Republicans to rally
once again and sweep congress to oppose her and we would return to that sweet
gridlock whereby the two parties spend all of their energies fighting eachother
and very little gets done in the way of tinkering with our economic and social
liberties. I look back on the 1990's and see that while Clinton was in
office, the Republicans as the opposition party were much more helpful in
fighting runaway government spending than they have been as the majority party
over the past 8 or so years. Honestly, the possibility of them regaining a
majority scares me. George Bush's compassionate conservatism has infected
the Republican party. It is like a disease that allows Republicans to grow
the size and scope of the government under another name, but it sure looks a lot
like modern day big government, bleeding heart liberalism to
me.

I don't like the direction our government has gone over the past 50
years, and I can't consciously, or morally support the controlling forces that
have been responsible for growing the state to its present form.

I can not as many on the right have said they would do, and hold their
nose and vote for McCain.

Speeding Ticket Tonight

I was pulled over by a police officer on my way home from work tonight on the turnpike around 7:15 PM. The officer clocked my speed at 76 in a 65 mile per hour zone. I got out of my car and instinctively put my keys into my pocket while walking back to his car. He asked me why I "went to my pocket" as I was walking toward his car, and said that he had told me not to "go to my pockets." I told him that I must have been more concerned about making sure my license and insurance were secured in my hands on the windy highway road when I instinctively put my keys in my pocket. I must not have clearly understood him as he was speaking to me from practically inside his own car while my window was still only half way rolled down.

After I had been sitting in his car for a few minutes while he was writing the ticket, he asked me if I'd been drinking tonight. I figured that was probably a typical question. I told him that I had just gotten off work and that I had not been drinking. Then I started thinking about what I had just said when I realized that whether or not I had just gotten off work had nothing to do with my current sobriety at that moment. So I then followed up my last few words by telling him, "I don't drink."

After a few more seconds transpired the officer told me that I was going to receive a $220 ticket. He also asked me if I knew that $220 was the penalty for going 11 over. I told him I did not know and that it would hurt. Of-course I meant it would hurt figuratively speaking. A few seconds later he informed me that he was only giving me a warning. I could not believe I had gotten that lucky. I have only been pulled over for speeding half a dozen times in the past 10 years, and never, not once been lucky enough to have an officer deliver the mercy of only a warning. I had always heard of people getting off with only a warning, but never had I experienced such luck myself.

That is all it is, luck. The other human being sitting on the side of the road with flashing lights atop his vehicle who happens to be holding the badge and gun can decide whether or not to require me to drain my bank account by some arbitrary amount based on his own mood or whim of the moment on that particular night. I was driving on a lonely highway road 11 miles per hour above the arbitrary speed limit set by some government bureaucrat or panel of bureaucrats in some government office. Never mind that I was in no way endangering any other human being whatsoever. Never mind that even while traveling the roads closer to peak times, there is actual empirical evidence that driving slightly faster than the speed limit is safer than driving slightly slower than the set speed limit. The reason for this is simple. There is a natural flow of traffic so to speak. This natural flow can be quantified as the mean speed by all travelers of the road. The normal protocol for city engineers is to set the speed limit 1 standard deviation above the mean speed of the road. This is known as the 85th percentile rule. In reality this rule is often ignored though mainly for political reasons. Speed limits have very little to do with public safety, and a whole lot more to do with raising city revenues. If you believe otherwise then you haven't been paying attention.

To make a long story even longer here is how it ended. I thanked the officer for letting me off with the "warning" before exiting his vehicle, and he looked at me and he actually said, "remember that the next time you give me a pay raise." I just looked at him until a few seconds passed and he broke into laughter and said, "just kidding."