Quote of the day—Mike Elgan

An increasing number of societal “privileges” related to transportation, accommodations, communications, and the rates we pay for services (like insurance) are either controlled by technology companies or affected by how we use technology services. And Silicon Valley’s rules for being allowed to use their services are getting stricter.

If current trends hold, it’s possible that in the future a majority of misdemeanors and even some felonies will be punished not by Washington, D.C., but by Silicon Valley. It’s a slippery slope away from democracy and toward corporatocracy.

In other words, in the future, law enforcement may be determined less by the Constitution and legal code, and more by end-user license agreements.

Mike Elgan
August 6, 2019
Uh-oh: Silicon Valley is building a Chinese-style social credit system
[Via email from Chet.

I had a incident with the Boomershoot website and Google that lasted weeks (they claimed it was a phishing website) before I finally got them to stop showing a red screen when people visited using Chrome. The security certificate (https) is still suspended because of this and I need to get that fixed soon. It cost them virtually nothing to do that and it cost me many hours and who knows how much loss of traffic and reputation.

As further evidence of this line of thinking, people have made suggestions that banks should cut off credit card processing and other financial services from stores that sell certain types (as a prelude to all types) of firearms:

…assault weapons would be eliminated from virtually every firearms store in America because otherwise the sellers would be cut off from the credit card system.

Of course PayPal, Square, Stripe and Apple Pay already completely ban the sale of firearms via their services.

I’m not sure what the proper response to this sort of thing is. In principle, I’m against government telling how to run their businesses. Let the free market decide. But sometimes the outcome doesn’t seem just. Restaurants, apartment owners, and hotels refusing to do business with people with black skin is one such example. The free market response seemed inadequate to remedy the problem.

I’m in the process of moving to a different credit card processor for Boomershoot even though PayPal was much easier and cheaper. But even with many people reducing or ceasing their use of PayPal because of their anti-gun policies it doesn’t appear to be suffering any.

It’s wasn’t exactly a legal restrictions so it’s tempting to say this type of thing is an appropriate response:

Top Louisiana officials have blocked two large bank corporations from participating in a road financing plan due to their gun control regulations.

Perhaps. But it hasn’t seemed to been effective, it is a form of government telling a business how they should operate, and the banks could probably easily retaliate with greater effect against those states.

What would seem to me to be the best approach is for the corporate officers to be prosecuted via 18 UCS 241. It’s not telling them how to do business. It’s prosecution for attempting to deny people their specific enumerated rights. Yes, it’s walking a very narrow, perhaps imaginary, line. It wouldn’t take very long for banks to revise their business practices if a few banks lost all of their upper management to life sentences in prison.

That’s not going to happen in the next few years so what should be done in the mean time? Is there anything more we can do than attempt boycotts and document their crimes?—Joe]

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15 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Mike Elgan

  1. In other words: we are heading towards a ‘modern’ dark ages and we don’t have the will nor knowledge as to how to stop it.

  2. Joe, for the certificate issue, look into “Let’s encrypt’. It is run by EFF. The system is totally automated and should work well for any of your needs. Many hosting platforms already support it.

    price is $0.00. As in Free.
    https://letsencrypt.org/

    • I don’t know how to thank you enough. I just installed the certificate for Boomershoot.com. It was a little rough at first because I’m running IIS on Azure instead of a Linux system or some other hosting provider but it’s all working now with automatic renewals. That is so awesome. Thank you, thank you!

  3. Not Corporatocracy, although there is an element of that, but the real evil here is Corporatism, “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” That the statists who create technology by which the Leviathan state controls the individual and use the laws so that the control which would be unconstitutional are de Jure outside the state does not change the truth of Mussolini’s corporatist mantra.

  4. First, let’s be perfectly clear on this point; there is no “free market” in America. Government tells every business what to do. The large corporations, and especially the tech corporations, are de facto partners with our federal government and other governments besides. That’s about as a far as you can get from the concept of a free market.

    WE ARE NOT TALKING ABOUT PRIVATE BUSINESS HERE. Not by any stretch of the imagination. And yet, after things go to hell we’ll be enjoined to blame “capitalism” for these problems. And we will.

    We’ve been living in a fascist system in America for several generations. Blame fascism then. But we won’t. This on-going ruse of corrupting and disfiguring a formerly free market and transforming it into tyranny, then blaming liberty for it, will be successful. Nearly everyone will fall for it. We’re already seeing that.

    The ruse will work, and it will work well;
    “…and all the world wondered after the beast.” Rev. 13:3 KJV

    Also we spend too much time talking about “democracy” as though it were something desirable. Maybe it is desirable in a small group of people deciding what kind of pizza to order, but even that simple task is going to be corrupted by the majority who prefer unhealthy foods.

    Jesus tells us, “Narrow is the path and few are those that find it”, meaning of course that the majority can be relied upon to get it wrong most if not all of the time. Therefore if you’re popular there is almost certainly something wrong with you.

    Democracy then is possibly the surest and best way to guarantee that a society will fall into corruption, chaos and ruin. It’s the best way to accomplish the total removal of standards from a society, for if the majority is always right, then any other standard is but a hindrance or contradiction to what is “right”. Thus an on-going corruption is achieved, while calling it “fairness”. It’s brilliantly evil.

    So yeah, most people will gobble it up eagerly. When FDR referred to the U.S. as the “Arsenal of Democracy” then, instead of, for example, the Arsenal of Liberty, everyone cheered, pretending not to notice the shift in paradigm.

    We still pretend not to notice. So why are we complaining about the loss of liberty? It seems hypocritical.

    The U.S. constitution, with its many anti-democratic provisions, and the Declaration of Independence with its deference to the Creator as the source of immutable standards, are an irritation to the corrupt in government, and so they call the constitution a “Charter of Negative Rights”. Those who uphold the constitution are called “Deplorables”.

    Likewise in the world of religion, Jesus is an irritation, and the Decalogue is a hindrance, and they both must be demoted if the religious ecumenical movement is to succeed. Therefore a Biblical Christian is a Deplorable as well, and a fundamentalist separatist besides, and we all know how dangerous THOSE PEOPLE can be, amiright?

    So we see the same things happening in the religious world as in the secular world. They are coming together to fight the “Bitter Clingers” and the Deplorables.

    The principles of liberty, and all who uphold them, must therefore be attacked as much by the false “Christian community”, the “religious conservatives” and the “evangelicals” as by the the hard core fascists, communists, Marxists, “labor parties” and Democrats.

    Biblical standards, like the Bill of Rights, must be erased for the beast to rule the world. That’s exactly what you’re talking about here, and that’s exactly what’s going to happen. The job at hand will be completed.

    What can you do about it? Really? Nothing. I’ve told the second amendment groups that they’re not getting another penny from me until I see successful prosecutions under 18 USC 241 and 242. That might carry some weight if millions of former supporters did the same thing, but a) it’ll never happen, and b) even if it did I don’t believe they’d change their tune significantly. It’s not why they’re there. Anyway, we’re more likely to pay them when they fail. Thus they get more money the worse things get, and so, logically, they’d get nothing if things were ideal.

    The only “civil rights organization” we would need in an ideal situation would be the Ten Commandments and possibly the constitution, for if they were generally observed everything would be OK. The whole nation would be one giant civil rights organization. Anyone not on board would be put out, for if you’re opposed to the law of liberty then you are, by definition, an existential threat to the rights of others and to the general welfare (a criminal).

    Even if our pipe dream of 18 USC prosecutions did happen they would amount to nothing in the end. The murderous, fascist world system will be fully implemented and have its hour of rampage. The momentum has been in its favor since before any of us were born and there’s no Earthly force that’s going to change that.

    So anyone who thinks they can somehow tweak this thoroughly corrupt world-wide system into becoming a just system is actively fooling themselves. It might correctly be called a pathological disconnect from reality even. Worse yet, in their insistence on “fixing” it they’re being distracted from the only real solution before us, which is to come out from our fascination with Babylon and recognize the only power than can truly get rid of it once and for all.

    • Exactly. The SJW and their masters/proxies are effectively extortion mobs running much of corporate and deep state “culture”, driving the decision-making perspective towards not just “less free” but totalitarian with a thin veneer of “free market.”

      Part of the reason that so many young people today think socialism is OK is that they are continuously told that our current system is capitalism and free and look at all the problems it cases, when the truth is FAR different. See, they even have you saying ‘let the free market decide” reflexively, with the implicit assumption we have one.

      That’s why the “Conservatives,” Dems, the media, and the Deep State all hate Trump so much – he’s threatening to pull back the curtain and reveal the people behind it, the charade, the fraud, make the public consciously aware of it and how they have been duped for so long.

      Maybe what the world needs is a good old fashioned mass exorcism, starting with every church in the world and spreading out from there.

  5. And as soon as we drop into the next depression. You can bet your last dollar cash will disappear.
    Cash and firearms are the last pieces of the commie puzzle.
    It really amazes me no rich people have gone into setting up systems to replace the commie ones.( I’m illiterate so maybe some have?)
    We don’t have enough prison space to enforce 241. Don’t tell the libs about 241 either. They think its a right to not have your feelings hurt!

    • The rich have been co-opted/compromised, or are the puppet-masters who hope to rule after the collapse. They don’t want a replacement system because they want to rule unrestricted, as kings, with no alternatives to their autocratic rule.

      I’m not a religious man, but the difference between what’s going on a classical description of Satan’s minions trying to take over for the King of Lies is pretty small.

  6. +1 for criminal prosecutions. They are so rich and can afford any civil settlement. But life in prison gets around that.

  7. As long as big business wants to lay in bed with government, screw them with regulations we like such as fining them if they refuse to do business of a specifically enumerated right. My preference is that we would regulate not at all or only to the extent that something would be morally wrong and illegal (malum in se as the lawyers would call it) such as fraud or theft. If we had that world with a much smaller fed.gov restricted to it’s constitutionally enumerated duties then I would prefer that businesses conduct themselves as they please as long as they are not harming anyone.

    • It would all depend on what the legal definition of “harm” is, right? Corporations and government are writing the rules. And would feed you and your children to the pigs. And not consider it “harm”.
      As long as you have government and corporations of this magnitude. Theft and corruption are part of the landscape.

      • Malum in se is legal jargon for something that is self-evidently wrong. I other words, things like murder, fraud, theft, and negligent homicide among others. As far as determining those things in law, it would only work if the fed.gov were what it was intended to be and then I leave it as an exercise for each state to be a “laboratory of democracy”. Some have worked out quite well (e.g. my state) and some would be better handed over to a soviet state. Those states with fewer freedoms are feeling the pinch, especially since the tax reforms of 2017. They will reform or fail as long as we can keep the feds from bailing them out.

  8. Hey Joe, the issue is that private businesses are encroaching on people’s rights. Especially since facebook, twitter, and instagram are encouraging people to share their views, they are becoming the digital version of the public space/town hall. As such, they would have to allow people to voice any views they have.

    If they want to act as a publisher, and therefore have the ability to deny someone their publishing services, then they can do that. But at that point, they lose all the data they currently collect from us, which they re-package for sale to companies interested in demographic subjects.

    So, companies have to figure out what side they are on, in terms of business model; if they are platforms, then all constitutional rights apply. If they are publishers, they can choose what they are willing to publish, but they then have to find a way to make money like any other publisher, of books for example, has to do.

    Side note: I’ve heard of a definition of a free country as being a state in which is safe to be hated. I think that’s a very interesting view. What do you think?

    • I understand what you are saying and knew this before I made my post. I was referring to some non-existent Libertarian utopia where people are generally free to run their businesses however they please.

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