2/26/2018

Sociopaths in public life

What if there was a way to identify the bad apples before they go postal?  

If only we had a test!

Then we might be able to identify psychopathic, sociopathic,  histrionicnarcissisticborderlineparanoid  personalities before they do their damage. 

A land of liberty must always balance the extremely high value of individual self-determination against the extremely low possibility that the average sociopath might go full pissed off postal jihadi.  Err on the side of freedom and accept some collateral damage is wisest.

Still... 

A note in the file might help law enforcement triage their welfare-check stops when they have complaint after complaint about some individual

Every time I receive a voter information pamphlet I think how much more informative than personal statements would be to have in addition each aspiring public servant's score on the PCL-R.  It might serve to weed out some of the worst before they are able to do their worst, anyway.

Public policy kills more people (1788 per day in USA in 2014) than guns or knives or any other thing. That killing goes on every day on a massive scale.  And that's just one kind of murderous public policy.  (Consult your average Venezuelan for other examples.)

Test all candidates for public office. Publish the results. Let's start there.  It's time we enacted common sense measures to help stop the violence.  Once we get the politicians sorted out, we can talk about testing some of the discipline-problem kids in schools; by then we should have more reasonable policy makers to carry the torch of liberty as well as "safety."

2/21/2018

The Internet: Designed for War

Next time someone declares that your modern modular rifle system is a "weapon of war" that has no place in civilian hands, remind them of this:  the internet as we know it is the evolutionary offspring of the "web" that connected national computer centers to improve survivability in the event of a nuclear event taking out some of the nodes.  "The US Department of Defense awarded contracts as early as the 1960s, including for the development of the ARPANET project." (cite)

The web itself -- the INTERNET! -- was designed for war. What possible use could it serve in uncontrolled civilian hands? 

Besides, the old dead white guys that wrote the U. S.  Constitution never foresaw telegraphs and ARPANETs and internets and computers and tablets and iPhones... any more than they foresaw lever action carbines and turnbolt rifles and AR-15s.

(Yeah, but those guys were rich racists or whatever.  Or something.  Good night.)