Tag Archives: Dictatorship

N. Korea students transferred to manual labor after graffiti

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Diplomats in Pyongyang confirmed that students were being drafted into manual labor on the outskirts of the city until April next year to prepare for major celebrations to commemorate the centenary of the late leader Kim Il Sung’s birthday. But they said this did not mean the closure of universities.

But part of the motivation may come from fears of student revolution. Last week someone put a piece of graffito on the wall of a Pyongyang College which called the Dear Leader “a dictator who starved people to death.”

For North Korea, this is more or less the equivalent of setting the White House on fire with a Molotov. Pyongyang was locked down (more than usual) for three days in a vain search for the culprit. Hopefully he or she is well-hidden, or followed the seven folks who triggered a border security crackdown when when they defected to the South a few weeks ago, joining the 21,000 other former North Koreans who have had that same great idea since 1953.close quote (Read more from reason.com)

A Story About a Slave — from Robert Nozick

From Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick’s “Anarchy, State and Utopia.”

Imagine you are a slave.

Stage one: You are the slave at the mercy of a brutal master, who forces you to work for his purposes and beats you arbitrarily.

Stage two: The master decides to beat you only for breaking the rules, and even grants you some free time.

Stage three: You are part of a group of slaves subject to this master. He decides, on grounds generally acceptable, how goods should be allocated among you all.

Stage four: The master requires his slaves to work only three days per week, granting them the other four days off. They can do as they wish during their free time.

Stage five: The master now allows the slaves to work wherever they wish. His main caveat is that they must send him three-sevenths of their wages, corresponding o the three days’ worth of work they once had to do on his land every week. In an emergency he can force them to do his bidding once again, and he retains the power to alter the fraction of their wages to which he lays claim.

Stage six: The master grants all 10,000 of his slaves, except you, the right to vote. They can decide among themselves how much of their (and your) earnings to take and what outlets to fund with the money. They can decide what you are and are not allowed to do. We can suppose for the sake of argument that the master irrevocably grants this right to the slaves. You now have 10,000 masters, or a single 10,000-headed master.

Stage seven: You are granted the freedom to try to persuade the 10,000 to ecercise their vast powers in a particular way. You still do not have the right to vote, but you can try to influence those who do.

Stage eight: The 10,000 grant you the right to vote, but only to break a tie. You write down your vote, and if a tie should occur, they open it and record it. No tie has ever occurred.

Stage nine: You are granted the right to vote. But functionally, it simply means, as in the eighth stage, that in the case of a tie, which has never occurred, your vote carries the issue.

Question: at which point did this become something other than the tale of a slave?

Canadian security geek jailed for taunting G20 security theatre; who lost everything – his marriage, his home, his livelihood – because he couldn’t figure out how to contain or express his disgust with the state’s increasing encroachment on personal liberty

open quoteThe current issue of Toronto Life’s cover story is the sad and perverse tale of Byron Sonne, a Toronto security researcher, hackspace stalwart, and anarcho-libertarian who decided to show up the security theatre at play in last year’s billion-dollar-plus G20 preparations. Sonne published extensive accounts of the vulnerabilities in the preparations, taunting the police and officials who were putting on a kind of repressive, city-wide puppet show about security, rather than securing much of anything. Sonne was arrested and spent more than just under a year in jail, being held without bail on a variety of charges, almost all of which have been dropped (his bail conditions are nothing short of Kafkaesque). Sonne’s actions seem, on their face, to be over-the-top and ill-considered (though we haven’t heard his side of things yet), but the Canadian judicial system’s response is so insanely paranoid that it makes Sonne look extremely reasonable by comparison.

Sonne’s story is the sad tale of a geek who lost everything — his marriage, his home, his livelihood — because he couldn’t figure out how to contain or express his disgust with the state’s increasing encroachment on personal liberty.close quote (Read more from boingboing.net)

Psychopathic Congressional leaders agree to continue violating freedom and the Constitution via Patriot Act

open quoteTop lawmakers in the House and Senate reached a deal to extend the Patriot Act for four years, a week before key provisions were set to expire.

The pieces of the law that allow the federal government to compel businesses to release records, issue roving wiretaps, and monitor so-called “lone wolf” terror suspects were set to run out on May 27. The outline of the deal between Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) still needs to pass both chambers in the next seven days to avoid a lapse in the law.close quote (Read more from politico.com)