(Scott Meyer’s website)
Behold the bold glibertarian Free Staters, harrassing those who can’t fight back and demonstrating their unique sense of humor:
… Keene’s two parking officers, both women, are often videotaped by young adults known as “Robin Hooders.” They track the whereabouts of the officers by two-way radio, feed expired meters before $5 tickets can be written, and leave a business card saying that “we saved you from the king’s tariff.”
Welcome to Sherwood Forest, N.H., where these acts of charity have led to some donations and gratitude, but also to sidewalk tensions, harassment allegations and litigation. They are part of a broader effort by about two-dozen activists, most of them from someplace else, to unshackle Keene from the “violent monopoly” of government and its enforcers, including these parking officers who work in weather fair and foul…
But some local residents are speaking out in their stead by challenging the activists through a Facebook page with the unwieldy name of “Stop Free Keene!!!” One of its organizers, Andrea Parkhurst Whitcomb, is asking the relative newcomers a fundamental question: “Who asked you to come free us?”…
Back in 2003, a libertarian-leaning group called the Free State Project decided that this small state could be a liberty lover’s paradise if enough like-minded people settled here. (The movement, by the way, tends to attract white males, according to Carla Gericke, the group’s president, a white South African who has lived for many years in this country. “I’m the token African-American,” she joked.)
A dozen years in, the Free State Project is about three-quarters of the way toward achieving its goal of having 20,000 people commit to relocating to the state, after which it will “trigger the move.”…
Yeah, after a dozen years of bold talk on the internet, they admit they haven’t been able to persuade enough people to sign a pledge. The ‘Deport Justin Beiber’ WH-petition crowd beat that tally within days. If the Free State programmers had any forethought (insert your own joke here) the resolution counter is set not to register above 19,999, because if that trigger ever gets pulled it’s gonna be even more embarrassing trying to explain when NH’s population somehow fails to expand beyond the usual outflow of Masshole tax dodgers.
***********
Apart from easy targets, what’s on the agenda for the start of another week?
ulee
Good Lord, Anne, you’re alive. I was ready to barricade the door and arm myself with a kitchen utensil for the impending zombie apocalypse.
NotMax
Live Free and Park.
@Ulee
Can’t speak to this particular thread, but she often writes them up beforehand and schedules them for auto-publication at a later time, so she may not be present at all.
Mustang Bobby
Yeah, those Free Staters are happy to let you live your life free of the “violent enforcers” as long as you do it their way… or else.
Funny how that works.
raven
@NotMax: Don’t encourage it.
NotMax
@raven
Ah, there you are.
Feliz Cinco de Mayo.
ulee
@NotMax: Thanks. That helps. Maybe everyone does this–picks up wooden spoon and scans the dooryard—.
NotMax
@ulee
Send ’em to Texas. They’ll starve to death there.
ulee
@raven: Well, aren’t you a nice person, sunshine.
raven
@NotMax:Ha! Another made up reason for people to drink! Went to a CincoD’Derby part Saturday and some dip shit made bourbon and bacon brownies. I should have known better after the first bit but I thought they were just bad, not lethal. 21 years without booze or pig and it all crashes and burns in one minute.
NotMax
Off to waste time on WoW for maybe an hour, in hopes of it making me relaxed enough to maybe attempting getting some of that elusive sleep.
Baud
Who knew parking meters took bitcoins?
ulee
@raven: We don’t make up reasons. We just like to drink.
NotMax
@raven
Oy.
Well, the Mexicans did trounce the French in 1862 on May 5…
Weird. My bookmark to the TCM monthly schedule keeps coming up with the right page, except it’s in German. Presume a little glitch with the English page.
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: Hey, nobody said sobriety would be easy.
BillinGlendaleCA
@OzarkHillbilly: Especially since raven watches Morning Joe.
satby
Man, raven, that sux! Sorry that happened to you.
The Ancient Randonneur
Free Staters could pick a more logical target like the state run liquor stores. Yes, real socia1ism exists in NH and and these cowards run around feeding parking meters? But, hey, high school-like shenanigans are more fun than doing the heavy lifting of getting actual laws changed.
ulee
Followed coffee with a beer chaser. I’ve got the day off and watching true crime tv. I’m happy now.
BillinGlendaleCA
I’m going to try to see if Kingo will root this camera. I used it on my Note, even though I think it’s a bit questionable. If the software on the cam blows up I’ve got the stock firmware and I could take it back to Costco worst case. I’ll sleep on it.
Schlemizel
@raven:
WAIT A MINUTE!! You watch Morning Schmoe SOBER?!?!? May god man, you are super human.
EDIT: DAMN! I see @BillinGlendaleCA: beat me to it.
Every time I have an original idea I discover someone else thought of it first!
Edit again: raven, I hope you were speaking metaphorically about crashing down. Coming from a family of problem drinkers I know how hard it can be to fall off & get back on the wagon.
BillinGlendaleCA
@ulee: I quit the coffee 20 years ago, the beer 3 1/2 years ago. I still have my cigs and diet coke though.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Schlemizel: I’ve watched Morning Shmoe sober for the last 3 1/2 years as well. I figured that if watching that doesn’t drive me back to drink, nothing will.
Kay
I love this story. I went to the Stop Free Keene Facebook page (which also takes you to the Free Keene page) and it’s fun to read.
There’s a split forming in the Free Keene-ers, because some are afraid that harassing the locals will alienate people (no shit). One of them says he’s leaving because he thought this whole thing would be better, or more noble, or something.
There’s also purists even in the Free Keene-ers. The leader is trying to have his home declared a minister’s residence and make it tax exempt so he can then pay only the amount of property taxes he wants to pay (he wants to pay 45%, for roads).
The purist objects to his applying to the state for permission to not pay taxes. She sees a contradiction there. She’s got a point! The leader responds that he’s not paying the taxes no matter the result of his petition to have the residence declared tax exempt, so I guess he’s still pure.
They’ll put a tax lien on his home. They always. always get property taxes here, one way or another. I have never seen an exception. If they know how to do anything, the jack-booted statists, it’s collect property taxes :)
My sense is the locals really started to hate them when they went after the school crossing guard. That seems like it was the tipping point, IMO. They’re wondering if they can sue because the Free Keene-ers filmed minors (middle schoolers) in the course of harassing the crossing guard and put the video up.
OzarkHillbilly
@BillinGlendaleCA: You’re right. Raven? How in the H-E-LL do you do it? Listening to those sycophants for more than 5 mins would have me downing a bottle of scotch in 10.
ulee
@BillinGlendaleCA: I stopped the coffee when my anxiety made me shake so bad I couln’t write at work, but that went away. Now, I smoke and drink it all. It’ll kill me in the end but I’ll live it up while I can.
WereBear
@Kay: This is truly is why we can’t have nice things. Assholes don’t want to pay for them.
Though I am cheered that, once again, idiots can’t bring a plan to fruition. Sometimes I think it’s the only thing that saves us.
BillinGlendaleCA
@ulee: Coffee upset my stomach so I gave that up.
OzarkHillbilly
@Schlemizel: There’s no such thing as “originality”. It’s all just undiscovered plagiarism.
ulee
@BillinGlendaleCA: Coffee will do that. I like tea with honey. I drink it every night.
JPL
@raven: Good luck!
ulee
Is this really an auto-post? Is Anne sleeping in? My view of the world is crushed. I always pictured Anne as an early bird, ready to kill.
A Humble Lurker
@OzarkHillbilly:
Ain’t that the truth.
Kay
@WereBear:
100 years from now, if he still owns that property, his grandchildren will pay those property taxes, with interest :)
People are actually too nice, too patient. There’s the Stop Free Keene contingent who post things like “while they have a point on some things, I object to their methods”. You’re the Stop Free Keene people! Stop apologizing!
There’s always the Reasonable Centrists, right? In every group.
Marc
…by paying off the violent monopoly before it has to enforce anything! Good thinking, libertarians.
OzarkHillbilly
@WereBear:
Who you calling an asshole? I want other people to pay for them. I thought that made me a liberal.
WereBear
@OzarkHillbilly: I want everybody to pay for them. Assholes don’t want to pay, but they do want to play.
Patricia Kayden
@Kay: Harassed the crossing guard for what reason?
Baud
@Marc:
Too bad they didn’t try that approach with Bundy. Problem solved. .
Lurking Canadian
@Marc: seriously. They’re charitably gig their fellow citizens free parking, and this act of spontaneous communism is going to lead to the libertarian future because…PROFIT I guess.
Kay
@WereBear:
I love how the government guy patiently explains to the reporter that they have the meters so people will move their cars from parking in front of businesses when they’re done with their visit so the next customer can park there. They don’t consider anything past their own noses.
Libertarians always crash up against someone else and their interests yet it never “sticks” it never sinks in. 150 years and they’re not putting these things they learn together. Every day is a new day, a clean slate. There’s no building in this philosophy, no accumulated lessons.
danielx
@Kay:
Those miserable bastards in the Judean People’s Front strike again! Will no one rid us of these meddlesome splitters?
Baud
@Kay:
Exactly the type of thing I’d expect the foot soldiers of a violent monopoly to say.
ulee
Anne, are you even awake? I heard a rumour that you are auto-posting. That’s just a lie, isn’t it?
sharl
@Kay: Heh, hoocoodanode things would go that way.
That Free Keene bunch should physically separate themselves entirely from the Nanny State, by going off-shore – Seasteading! It’ll be nothing but sunshine and rainbow-farting unicorns once those pioneers are safely aboard the S.S. Lord of the Flies. Don’t forget your firearms folks!
raven
@Schlemizel: Oh, I’, cool. In 21 years there have been a couple of accidental cases of a taste. The worst thing one could do would be to make a big deal out of it. I should have known given the crowd at this set.
raven
@BillinGlendaleCA: ding
ulee
No, I don’t request deletion or editing. Thanks, though.
Kay
@Patricia Kayden:
I don’t know. I didn’t have the patience to sit thru the hour-long lead-up in the video – the leader, talking, and clips of Hitler and things, it goes on and on, it’s boring as hell. I think the crossing guard appears later. The libertarians leaflet outside the school, so maybe they object to the fact of a public school, I don’t know.
Anyway, it’s a small town, so they all seem to know her on the Stop Free Keene page and they seem most offended by “the crossing guard”. The leader has huge issues with directing traffic. There’s a shorter clip where he’s walking on some street in a crowd and he won’t go one way instead of the other when the police officer orders him to.
gene108
@Baud:
City should replace the coin meters with kiosks. The advantage of kiosks is you can pay by bills or credit cards, so you do not need to lug around quarters to “feed the meter”. Also there’s no way for these folks to bother the parking ticket police, by putting in quarters into expired meters, if the city had kiosks.
NotMax
@raven
Sitting here about to go pour a second triple vodka.
WereBear
@Kay: Reminds me of people who think “revolution” is the answer to every problem.
I’m all: Hey, it took us about ten thousand years to get this far. You really want to start over from scratch?
raven
@NotMax: Spark up while you are at it. There was a dude at this party that had been to Colorado and had some oil. People really liked it.
Patricia Kayden
@Kay: Okay. Thanks.
After reading the full article on NY Times, it appears that one of the leaders hasn’t paid Federal taxes in 10 years. I don’t understand how he isn’t in jail.
ulee
@NotMax: I don’t like vodka. Gin and tonic, now you’re singing my song.
Steeplejack
Okay, I’ll light up the geek signal in case anyone here can help me.
My
hot-roddedenhanced cable TV box is on the fritz. About five years ago I was able to hook up an external hard disk to it via eSATA cable; after initialization and formatting, the cable box sees the internal and external drives as one big virtual drive with DVR capacity expanded tenfold (to about 300 hours). Score! But lately I have been getting error messages and problems indicating that either the external drive or the cable box’s internal drive is going south. The box refuses to play some (but not all) saved programs—but it will often play them after I have rebooted the system—and this weekend it stopped buffering the real-time TV feed.My question is whether anyone knows of or could recommend some disk-backup, disk-repair or disk-fiddling software that might help me back up or salvage the data before I have to (a) replace the external drive or (b) exchange the cable box for a new one. Bonus points if I can repair the virtual drive in situ.
Thanks in advance.
ulee
Or whiskey. I’ve always liked whiskey, though it makes me kind of psychotic.
JPL
In Nevada the militia is harassing Government workers and in NH the free NH folk are harassing crossing guards. When do they work? As far as I know, you don’t earn money harassing other people.
Baud
@Patricia Kayden:
My money is on “he’s lying.” Or he doesn’t make enough to pay federal taxes.
ulee
Now it’s just beer and wine. I stay away from the harder stuff, only to keep my sanity.
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: I didn’t think you made a big deal out of it. Just that you opened a door and said, “C’mon in.” and we did.
raven
@OzarkHillbilly: Oh I wasn’t saying ya’ll did, my reaction was what counts for me and I choose to make it funny.
I bought a bunch of bricks to finish a garden sidewalk and I don’t think I knew what I was getting into with the mortar removal.
Betty Cracker
Did anyone see Rick Perry on Meet the Press? I caught a snippet of it while I was frantically searching through my sofa cushions for the remote. He thinks he’s solved the “dumber than a bag of hammers” issue with a pair of spectacles. Also, “we kill ’em better in Texas.”
WereBear
@Betty Cracker: Dear god.
lou
@Kay: This struck me too.The town is trying to help the free market. Wonder what the businesses have to say.
Also, they harassed a former soldier about “droning brown babies.” Shades of Vietnam War, only from the right?
NotMax
@raven
Gave that up in 1974. Never did anything for or to me.
@ulee
For many, many years, kept to a strict regimen of gin and tonic from Memorial Day to Labor Day and scotch and water the rest of the year. As have gotten older, have gravitated to vodka (price of decent gin has skyrocketed). But still enjoy a tall glass* of straight gin over ice from time to time, which was my drink of choice in college.
*Pet peeve is bars and restaurants which serve all drinks in dinky little glasses. I like a tall glass. One place which our group used to frequent (long since closed) got so used to my asking for a tall glass that, once, the bartender and waitress colluded to serve my drink to me in a large flower vase. Just about perfect.
ulee
@NotMax: Now I’m tempted to go buy some gin. It’s so good. But if I do, I’ll wake up with an injury and a vague idea of how I got it. I need to stay with beer and wine.
raven
@raven: Geeze, reading fail. See what sobriety does, I can’t make sense of the simplest sentence!
NotMax
@ulee
Promise that when I make my monthly trip to town for provisions on or around the 10th, will purchase some and think of you while sipping it.
ulee
@NotMax: No, wait! I’ll go with you!
mai naem
I’m impressed the tickets are only $5. The Phoenix fines for expired parking meters are $25. Actually, I’m not sure if it’s gone up since the last time I got a ticket. There was some other town where there was going to be a fast food restaurant and a lot of of the long term locals didn’t want it and the free staters,of course, did.
Fuzzy
@NotMax: For me a “yard ” of beer is about perfect but I like it cold so I order it in smaller glasses with a back-up of the same. In case they get busy.
ulee
Anne. Wake up. It’s your thread or at least I thought it was until I found out it was a robot post. Say it ain’t so.
Marc
@Lurking Canadian: It’s just like the legend of Robin Hood, who robbed from himself to give to the state.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@JPL: I was wondering that myself – then I notice on the Oathkeepers webpage they were going on about they raised $40,000 for the Bundy family and presented Bundy with $10,000 of it so I suspect these protests are more like fundraisers.
Kay
@lou:
It’s the same thing where I live. We don’t have meters, but they police the parking on the square because they want businesses to stay on the square and parking is why they go out to the edge of town. People park on the square and stay all day, because the courthouse and county offices are there. They would park all day, if they didn’t police the 2 hour limit.
It’s not complicated. It’s not a plot.
It’s tiring, because I hear these stories all the time. It’s always some rule that they’re portraying as ludicrous and useless. I’m sure you’ve heard these stories from conservatives, where they had to comply with some rule that according to them makes no sense and is just purely there because government workers are dumber than they are. You ask three questions and you find out they got themselves into some complex jam because they didn’t pay taxes or whatever, and that’s why they’re “spending all day filling out forms”. The outrage stories always fall apart.
I just couldn’t be further from libertarians on so many things. When we renovated this building we had to bring it into ADA compliance. All of those rules make perfect sense to me. People need to be able to turn a wheelchair around in the hallway, or whatever. Fine. Seems reasonable enough. This doesn’t outrage me. It’s not something I would consider so I’m glad someone else was thinking about it.
Randy P
@BillinGlendaleCA: My daughter once asked me if I had to give up coffee or meat, two very beloved indulgences, which would I give up? I answered “meat” right away. I love burgers and bbq, but there are a lot of good veggie foods out there and if you put a gun to my head I could live that life.
But I love my non-starbucks coffee houses too much to give up the black stuff.
ulee
No thank you. I don’t request deletion or editing.
NotMax
@Fuzzy
If you ever find yourself in Manhattan, stop in at McSorley’s Ale House (since 1854). They serve mugs in pairs. It is possikle to order a single, but it costs more than the going rate for two.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: I’m guessing the libertarian answer to that would be for the businesses to own the street parking spaces, and contract out for their own enforcement and towing and metering if they wanted to, like with private parking lots.
From the parker’s perspective it would be basically the same or worse, and it would be a bigger pain in the butt for the businesses, but because it would run on implied contracts it would be freedom rather than oppression. The difference can get rather abstract to these people.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Looking at the Free Keeners stuff; afro’s and masks,.. I get now; these are a bunch of Second Life griefers who’ve got so addicted to harassing people they are doing it in real life now.
Kay
@lou:
I think the difference is, I don’t want to do all these things. I don’t want to figure out my own personal fire code, or come up with the proper door sill height to get a wheelchair over it. I don’t want to police my own parking or worry about a 2nd grader getting hit on the way to school. What’s more, I don’t think anyone can do all these things, and also have their own job and their own life. It would be a full time job. Commerce would grind to a screeching halt :)
Mr Stagger Lee
It looks like Sen.Bernie Sanders’ petition to the FCC over their proposal to scrap Net Neutrality is going to hit 20,000, that ought to piss off those Free Staters, who hate Net Neutrality.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay: The more sensible (ha!) libertarians would argue that government should be pared back so that it is providing only the minimum number of essential services.The problem is that they can’t agree on the number and extent of those services. They also don’t realize that society has gotten more complex since the days of Jefferson’s independent farmer-citizen and that even then that agrarian vision of society was simplistic and inaccurate.
Jay C
@OzarkHillbilly:
No, it probably makes you a Communist!
@lou:
Yeah, droning brown babies are bad, but it’s the ones that whistle you really have to watch out for….
rikyrah
GOP candidate booted from editorial meeting after calling out ‘blah blah’ dis
Published May 04, 2014·
FoxNews.com
A Republican Senate candidate was kicked out of a local Oregon newspaper’s editorial board meeting after daring to challenge a reporter who dissed a fellow candidate by writing “blah blah blah” in his notes instead of her actual quotes.
The entire argument was captured on video and posted online by the newspaper, Willamette Week.
The Republican candidate, Mark Callahan, told Fox News that the newspaper was on a “power trip.”
“It’s a fairly liberal paper. And they were basically trying to manhandle us Republicans,” Callahan said Sunday. “They were very condescending, very controlling.”
The video shows an editorial board meeting where the newspaper was interviewing Republican candidates for Senate. One of those candidates, Jo Rae Perkins, was responding to a question over the phone when Callahan noticed something was amiss.
“You want to talk about disrespect, I see what you’re writing down there,” he said, pointing at a reporter at the table. “You just wrote down ‘blah blah blah blah blah’ for everything that Jo Rae said. Jo Rae is a respectable woman. Why are you not respecting her by writing ‘blah blah blah blah blah’ on your notepad?”
foxnews.com/politics/2014/05/04/power-trip-gop-candidate-booted-from-editorial-meeting-after-calling…
ulee
Omnes is commenting. I’m shocked that she is sitting her ass in front of the computer like she does every single day of her life.
ulee
My mistake. It’s every single hour of her waking life that she sits her useless ass down.
Schlemizel
@Matt McIrvin:
I am sure it would be a great boon to the local businesses to have to pay for the maintenance of the road in front of their place too. Dirt roads would follow & the barrier to entry would still be mind-bogglingly high. We would have the antebellum south minus slavery (probably minus at least at the start). They really are all 14 year olds aren’t they?
ThresherK
First, it seems very Hamsha to have a $5 parking ticket. Underpricing street parking sounds like a faux free-marketlibery kind of government. “Park (nearly) Free or Die”, anyone?
Second, the more people who move to New Hampshire, the more it becomes like Massachusetts, except without MA’s comparably normal and efficient tax structure.
The NYT owns the Boston Globe, and yet can’t see any further northeast than Litchfield COunty, CT, or the Berkshires, where Yankee fans go on the weekends?
Ken
@lou:
Are libertarians on the right? I had the impression left-right and libertarianism were, um… well, sort of like good-evil and Cthulhu, off in some space where the axis doesn’t apply.
ThresherK
@Steeplejack: I don’t have one of those devices, but my default recommendation is “Consider whatever Lifehacker recommends.”
Ken
@Matt McIrvin: The funny thing is, every municipality already is a corporation, and the corporation that owns the spaces on the street has set their rates and rules for when they tow your car.
If you don’t like them, park in a lot or garage owned by a different corporation. Of course, they’ll also have their rates (“1 hour or less – $5 – no in-and-out”) and rules (“Walgreen’s customers only – All others will be towed”).
Gin & Tonic
@NotMax: strict regimen of gin and tonic from Memorial Day to Labor Day
Works the rest of the year, too. Just saying.
ulee
Drag yourself out of bed, Anne, you imposter. Your auto post is calling.
Gin & Tonic
@ulee: Give it a fucking rest.
evodevo
South African? Really? Wasn’t there an Orange Free State there at some time in the past? Hmmm ….
Citizen_X
@rikyrah:
Quoted for teh lulz.
Although this is an inaccurate quote. Shouldn’t it be “BENGHAZI!!! Blah blah blah”?
PurpleGirl
@ulee: Yes, this is an auto-post. AL likes to stay up all night and goes to bed around dawn; she sleeps in and late.
Yatsuno
@evodevo: Up until 1994. That racial purity thing isn’t dying hard there.
Barbara
These people are even stupider than they appear because IIRC, it’s not rally that hard to find free parking a few blocks away from the main block (it’s not really a square), having been to Keene multiple times, because it is very close to the camp my daughter attended for three years. Plus, again, if memory serves, the meters don’t kick in until 8:00 am, and the little diner opens at some ungodly hour, so a true libertarian could easily work his schedule so as to never pay for parking. I think most people are just paying to minimize the inconvenience of walking a few blocks or getting up earlier in the day.
Keene is a great little town, I really enjoyed the time I spent there.
ulee
@PurpleGirl: good for her. She should say so.
Steeplejack
@ThresherK:
Thanks for the response (and generally good advice). I have been trolling through the Google and my usual TV hacker sites for useful information, but no joy so far. Was just wondering whether some Juicer might have some relevant knowledge. Stranger things have happened.
The thought occurred to me that this might be the cable gods telling me it’s time for an upgrade. Five years ago you couldn’t get a cable box from my provider (Cox) with more than a ridiculously small DVR (20–30 hours), hence my trip to the dark side with the external drive—which has been great for five years. Now I see ads all the time for Cox Contour—record six programs simultaneously all over the house, replay anywhere, do this, do that, etc., etc. I don’t need all that. I have one TV, one cable box. All I really want is a gigantic DVR disk. There are rare occasions when it would be nice to record more than two programs simultaneously, but that’s getting into the farther reaches of First World problems. I need to see if there is some “bronze” Contour plan that gives me what I need without all the extra stuff. Or, hell, by now Cox might be outfitting their standard cable boxes with decent-sized DVR drives.
Second problem is that I don’t want to lose all the stored programs on the current drive. Would love to be able to save/transfer all that data, if possible.
Sorry for the long rant. Just thinking out loud here.
J R in WV
@ulee:
I thought that was how you knew it was working!
Have I been wrong all these years?
Really, Gin and Tonic with a squeeze of lime is my fav, but anything will do. An Acquaintance sometimes has some good ‘shine, and I like that just fine.
I hope that Colorado and Washington (state) really mean that the war on marijuana is nearly over. There’s some tax money to clean up there, and at least in CO you can grow your own, presumably tax free.
But locking people up for weeds, it’s like making dandelions a felony! What a waste of money!
ulee
@Gin & Tonic: Must it always be a love fest? Don’t you like a good fight?
the dude
Meh. On the Gold Coast in Australia there are ‘meter maids’, a roving bunch of babes in bikinis who feed coins into expiring parking meters. Been going on for decades now.
ThresherK
@Steeplejack: Hey, no prob.
I’m still the master of the Toshiba DVR we got in ’08, and a CRT TV (because it has picture in picture), controlled by three separate remotes which I play like The Mighty Wurlitzer.
If there’s an award for “late adopter” of technology, among those who can still manage it, I’m applying. But I do like helping people further along than I.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@ulee: By the way, her name is Anne Laurie, not Anne. Just in case you’d like to address her politely while annoying the snot out of the rest of us.
ulee
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): sorry a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q). I don’t intend disrespect. Anne is a good writer. And I’ll always address you as a hip hop artist from…oh forget it, it’s a really lame name.
Randy P
@ulee: IIRC you were going through some rough times a few months back. I just want to say that I for one am glad you’re still here (or back here?) and apparently feeling energetic and cheerful, so I’m happy to see you annoying the snot out of many of us.
And, of course, annoyed.
Steeplejack
@ThresherK:
Picture-in-picture usually comes with cable now, if your cable box has a DVR built in. That’s the one function for which I have to reach for the Cox remote. (I use it only about 10 times a year, typically during the NFL season, and I didn’t want to waste a button for it on my low-end programmable remote.)
I just broke down and went to Cox’s (predictably awful) Web site for Contour. It appears at first glance that I might be able to get the record-six DVR with one-terabyte drive without the rest of the Contour experience, but at who knows what hideous cost? Will delay further investigation until I’ve exhausted rehab efforts on the current setup.
Elizabelle
K-Thug’s excellent column, High Plains Moochers.
Krugman later calls Bundy a Welfare Queen of the Purple Sage.
Very much the same issue Keene, NH is dealing with with their parking meter anarchists.
ulee
@Randy P: Thanks. I really do appreciate that.
Chris
I’ve heard of something like this happening in the eighties with Aryan/neo-Nazi groups… where they hatched this great plan to all move to the Northwest until there were enough of them in one place to secede, or at least to take over the local governments. Which fell through, because all the Aryan/neo-Nazi groups based somewhere other than the Northwest said… “what, us move there? No. YOU move HERE!”
mcjulie
@Matt McIrvin:
It’s their answer when you’re arguing with them in a bar and that’s not how it works now. If the businesses really did do it that way, they’d find some new objection.
ulee
And I do love you all, balloon juicers. You are why I come here. I’m just being difficult. Fighting is good for the body and mind.
Mnemosyne
@Elizabelle:
Notice that the libertarians’ goal is to take over New Hampshire, a state with over 300 years of infrastructure already in place, rather than going out to an uninhabited area and building their utopia from scratch.
That’s what made me realize that, for all of their lofty rhetoric, libertarians are moochers and parasites. They literally cannot exist without an infrastructure already in place.
Frankensteinbeck
@Ken:
Libertarians in the modern US are on the right, and strongly so. As a self-described group they vote overwhelmingly for Republicans, their policies transfer wealth to the rich, and their leaders tend to be heavily religious. The ones that aren’t consider enforcement of religious principles a minor problem compared to their tax money contributing to a social safety net. Note that Libertarians are almost entirely white males, and the safety net (or ‘welfare’) is a bugaboo of racists. There are probably a few Libertarians who are completely consistent and thus merely ideologues with no grasp of reality. As a group they’re Republicans who don’t want to be called Republicans.
@the dude:
Well, at least they’re entertaining rather than harassing people.
@Kay:
I wish I knew more about the crossing guard thing. It’s not likely the paying parking meters that people object to. I’m not going to sit through an hour of Libertarian ranting to find out.
ulee
@Mnemosyne: You’re back! How was life beyond the computer? Did you see trees and did your feet actually touch the earth?
D58826
SCOTUS just took another bite out of separation of church and state. They decided 5-4 that it’s ok for a government body in public session to start with a prayer. The fact that it is always a christen prayer doesn’t imply any disrespect to non-christens. In the words of Justice Kennedy
Is a ceremonial prayer anything like the non-sectarian prayer that was declared unconstitutional several decades ago. Maybe the prayer should start with a ‘to whom it may concern’ and end with ‘just kidding big guy’ since it is just for show according to the good Mr Kennedy.
karen marie
I was forced to listen to a couple hours of testimony in the Keene case. It’s hard to imagine more smug, entitled assholes than these defendants. They’re grifters.
Kevin Witha K
@Kay: Best answer, Kay. I think you summed up Libertarianism perfectly.
I think Libertarianism makes sense to a young person from a family making median income or above, but one hopes that additional wisdom will accrue over time that incorporates some sense of a commons or a community, which requires a real grasp of economics and empathy and humanism.
Otherwise, it becomes a human-eat-human world.
Ben Cisco
@Elizabelle: Will definitely check the link – just noticed that Friedman’s latest whinefest is called “It’s not just about Obama.” Somebody must’ve gotten a little too close to him with the truth of his writing…
Patricia Kayden
@D58826: Wow. That’s sad to hear. Another tearing down of the separation of the wall between church and state. Looking forward to some Muslim prayers during public sessions, although I doubt that will ever happen.
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack: Nothing to offer other than the fervent hope that you can keep/recover the shows on your current system. It would completely suck to lose all of that.
If you’re upgrading, have you considered Tivo? Record 4 shows at once, and you don’t need the cable box, and I believe folks have figured out how to expand their capacity with another drive. Love love love my Tivo.
D58826
@Patricia Kayden: If on a rotating basis all faith and non faith communities were allowed to open the meeting with a ‘prayer’ then MAYBE it would be ok. I can just see it now, one week a rabbi, then a priest, then a protestant minister, followed by a Wiccan, then a couple of Druids, after which come the atheists and the Muslims. Might actually be worth showing up just to watch the show.
It only gets worse, the three GOOPPERS in the Iowa US Senate primary have all gone on record that they will oppose any judge who doesn’t believe in natural law and its biblical interpretation
GregB
Hopefully the Free-Keeners will set up armed check-points and start demanding to see id’s like the Free Bundiers. That will really smell like freedom.
Also, if the Free States really want to prove their beliefs, there are some unnamed parts of Maine that don’t have a 300 year jump on infrastructure paid for by the citizens, I suggest they see how their ideology works when they start from scratch instead of becoming a whiny remora on the body of a long standing civilization.
MCA1
@gene108: Yes, but there still has to be a human out there checking the kiosk receipts in the windows and physically writing tickets. So the haranguing and videotaping would still be in play. I actually don’t really object as much to a stranger dropping a quarter in a meter – it’s childish and defeats the purpose of not allowing people to hog the parking spaces and stanch commercial turnover, but it’s not the end of the world and most people are probably unwitting beneficiaries of this “charity,” leaving within 5 minutes after their meter would have expired, anyway. It’s the following around innocent metermaids and harassing them that pisses me off, and I don’t think kiosks would solve that one.
GregB
@Mnemosyne:
Sorry, posted my post before reading all the posts. Great minds and all.
GregB
@ThresherK:
The NYT’s sold the Boston Globe to John Henry, the owner of the Red Sox.
Ruckus
@Kay:
Good to see you back.
Used to say a certain gentleman sees every sunrise as a brand new day. Not because it actually is but because he really didn’t think about anything older than about 8 hrs. We weren’t sure if he couldn’t or just didn’t. But he always had a smile on his face, never an unkind word and was ready to move forward so we never thought of him as a libertarian.
Chris
@Kevin Witha K:
Speaking as someone who was independent/libertarian as a middle class teen, I would agree with your profile. All the libertarians I’ve met are kn the same group.
With two additional qualifiers: all of them are male and all of them are white.
Roger Moore
@Ben Cisco:
So he’s admitting it’s just about Obama.
Kay
@Kevin Witha K:
I’m not even sure it does there. I spent a lot of time with them in law school. I get it. I get that I keep all my income but I don’t think it’s a good trade, a good deal, because then I have to contract for everything and that takes a lot of time and money. I don’t want to buy safety net insurance. I buy enough insurance. I think I would spend at least 2 hours a week creating my personal fiefdom, plus costs of the services, then there’s all the economies of scale considerations. I can’t make this my whole life :)
Can you imagine? There’d just be this new market in consultants. They’d just replace the government middleman with some sketchy new market I have to not get ripped off in. I don’t want to study “pollution credits” (they have these elaborate schemes for environmental issues, I took an environmental law class with them). I think I have to hire a broker then. How about I just keep the EPA? It’s so weird because a lot of their solutions would end up as coordinated or collective action, and then we’re back to them resenting other people!
Facebones
$5? That’s too much of an inconvenience for these guys? At least try this in Manhattan where parking tickets START at $45 and go up to $115. But $5?
Elizabelle
@Mnemosyne:
Amazing that. Somehow these libertarians and welfare ranchers and rugged individualists try to snag built environments (that tiny North Dakota town and the pitiful white supremacists who couldn’t even commandeer a depleted community without a stoplight).
They might be in Somalia or the Australian outback or on a tundra, but we don’t much hear about that.
They like medical care. They like stores. They like roads and courts they can fight the government in.
They just don’t like to pay for the services. Or the thought of who else might be using them. (Libtards. Illegals. Blahs …)
Matt McIrvin
@Ken: Libertarians heavily promote the idea that they’re beyond left and right, mostly so that they can attract support from the young and people who are disgusted with party politics.
When it comes down to actually advocating policies, they’re mostly right-wing; they may support some liberal notions in the abstract but they’re lower priorities. People think of them as economically conservative and socially liberal, but that’s an oversimplification. They may be pro-gay rights, though their position on same-sex marriage is usually go off on a tangent about how civil marriage shouldn’t exist anyway. Many are strikingly reactionary on women’s and reproductive rights, there are a lot of MRA types in the movement, and they’re usually opposed to any civil-rights laws that restrict private discriminatory behavior. They are extremely anti-gun-control.
The one really major exception, and it’s one worth mentioning, is drug policy, on which their position is the traditionally “left” one and they’re very passionate about it.
On foreign/war policy they’re all over the place; they tend to attack the administration from the left when it’s Democratic and become sharply divided when it’s Republican. They’re anti-conscription, but the people who you see advocating for a draft these days are mostly liberals.
Hungry Joe
@GregB: “A whiny remora on the body of a long-standing civilization” may be the consummate definition of “libertarian.” Somewhere, Ambrose Bierce gnashes his teeth with envy.
Oh, and consider it stolen.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
I think it depends on whether you use “makes sense to” from the perspective of intellectual attractiveness or effective policy. Libertarianism is intellectually attractive to anyone who wants to justify their selfishness and protect their wealth, since it provides a whole host of reasons why they shouldn’t have to spend their money on keeping society running. I don’t think it’s necessarily a sound policy for anyone, even rich people who think they’ll save enough money on taxes to pay for the service they no longer get. Those people depend on a smoothly functioning society more than they realize, and libertarian paradise would turn out to be bad both for business and their personal safety.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
It’s funny, because my son would be vulnerable to persuasion. He’s white, young, male, middle-high income and he’s in a field that’s packed with libertarians and he pays a lot of taxes, but he also values TIME along with money. He sees that connection. He was furious when Chicago changed their transit system payment method, because the other one worked and the new one was a pain in the ass and he was sure it was a privatization/crony deal and riders were getting ripped off. He’d rather MORE services went public, not fewer. He just doesn’t want to think about these things, and I don’t blame him. Don’t you feel like you do enough private contract hiring for services, personally? I do. It’s time consuming.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
God what a bunch of assholes. I bet they would want state intervention when someone decides to kick their asses.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore:
This is because these people have a pathological inability to think things through. It’s always short term with them…like the MBAs..
TerryC
@the dude: Bikini Babes, so funny. I have a yellowed newspaper clipping from 1962 about the then-14-year old me, and my habit of carrying around nickels to feed other people’s about-to-expire parking meters. The reporter got the altruistic part but not the anti-authoritarian part :)
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: In practice, though, I find that a lot of libertarians are actually people who are financially struggling, and believe that it’s because moochers and looters are taking their money away, or preventing them from getting what’s due to them.
The ideology also seems to have strong appeal to small-business owners who agonize more over their expenses and the difficulty of hiring good help than over weak demand, and mistrust anyone who’s “never had to make payroll.”
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
The zigzagging on social issues pretty much makes sense to me if, again, you’re looking at politics as the whims of people who are, in my experience, usually white, male and middle class.
Gay rights. Well, unless you’re in the 10% or so of the population that’s gay, gay rights don’t affect you directly… and sure enough, “I don’t care” seems to encapsulate their position om gay rights. They’re “liberal” to the extent that it’s not a hill they want to die on, but nor will they put much energy into supporting them… and when a specific bill gets on the table, they’re as likely to start splitting hairs about religious freedom as they are to support the gays.
Women’s rights. Well, most of them want to have sex with women. Whether women want to have sex with them isn’t quite as important. Hence the reactionary, anti-feminist attitude you often see there.
Drugs. Well, most of them want to be allowed to do drugs. Hence the “left wing” position on legalization.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: The libertarians did seem to be one of the stumbling blocks that kept New Hampshire’s largely Tea Party legislature from overturning the same-sex marriage legislation. Those guys didn’t go for the “protecting marriage” rhetoric because they didn’t believe in giving marriage a state imprimatur at all. I thought it was a great sauce-for-the-gander moment since on the Web those guys are always the ones derailing pro-same-sex-marriage arguments.
Anne Laurie
@Matt McIrvin:
Almost all the self-identified libertarians I’ve actually known have been smart, raised-middle-class, reasonably-to-very-well-educated, white men who for one reason or another aren’t doing very well financially. There are usually obvious reasons why — massive general recessions, bad personal choices, indifference to social cues approaching the autism spectrum — but all these guys see is that they’re not getting everything to which they’re entitled.
Instead of saying to themselves, “Well, maybe I am going to have to make some tedious compromises about personal grooming and time management if I want a high-ranking position in a government-sponsored lab” or “Even if I feel my ex-wife made a really unfortunate choice in her current partner, I guess I still have to make those child support payments if I don’t want my paychecks garnished” or “Dammit, a stud like me deserves a high-powered prestige-label sports car, affordability be damned”, they decide “IF NOT FOR THE MOOCHERS WITH THE GUVMINT BEHIND THEM I WOULD BE A GOD IN MY OWN KINGDOM”.
Because, really, it’s easier to say “The world is badly arranged” than to say “I’m not actually perfect”, isn’t it?