Author: Kalin

Our personal lives are not properly regulated. This was my attempt at satire. Please do not take this seriously. I often hear the argument from libertarians and anarchists that our government should not have authority over our marriages. I think getting laws out of our personal relationships would be a disaster. That legal document means something to many people. The government stamp makes the relationship official. Without that, what reason would people have to stay married? Divorce would skyrocket, but we would have no way of knowing because nothing would…

The rampant discrimination you’ve never heard of. Someone sent this around an email chain today, kind of as a joke about wanting to only work half days. This is an article about “decision fatigue”, the idea that if you make tons of decisions in a day you just kinda get worn out and your brain just doesn’t want to keep going. It’s an interesting idea, but my point has nothing to do with this. Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? — NYTimes.com. The article is talking about a parole board in Israel who…

We tell ourselves our system is better but we’re just as cruel. A woman is caned for violating Islamic sharia law outside a mosque. From BBC news. After reading a few articles recently about some extreme acts of criminal justice, I decided I needed to write another post examining the fundamental attitudes that allow humans to feel so justified in bringing others intense suffering. The first is about a 14 year old Bangladeshi girl who was lashed to death for adultery. The next is a story from Ireland about police threating to…

The pro-life perspective is so fascinating and difficult for liberals to understand. 15%-20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage and 74% of women say that miscarriage was “partly their fault”. Now, I know probably a hundred or more women who have had babies, but can only think of one who has ever had a miscarriage. For comparison I know several who have had abortions. So this leads me to believe, that if that statistic is correct, then there truly is this deep taboo against talking about miscarriages. Granted, I’m not exactly…

An example of how laws trick us into letting them multiply and feed on themselves. This image is from a story about a carjacking. I was unable to find an image related to pedestrians being injured in drive-thrus. This is a comment I received on an old story I did where I basically complained about how I had to drive my car to the drive-thru instead of being allowed to walk and pointed out how these rules encourage drunk driving and are discriminatory toward people who don’t own cars. i’m…

Since we have a government we can blindly assume everything is safe The other day I was telling a story about a time when I was going to lunch with a bunch of co-workers and we tried to cram too many people into an elevator. As everyone was trying to jam in, I tried to tell them that we were over the weight limit, but everyone insisted it wouldn’t be a problem. When we finally got everyone wedged in, we found that the doors wouldn’t close. This as an example of…

It happens to so many kids I watched a recent episode of The Simpsons (Postcards from the Wedge, Season 21 episode 14 — spoilers follow) where Marge and Homer decide to let Bart do whatever he wants because otherwise he’s going to drive them crazy with stress. Bart then gets frustrated with his new freedom and talks about it with the bully, Nelson, who tells him that he’s got to up the ante, to do something really awful to get their attention. Bart takes this advice, then writes a note, pretending to be…

It’s a cop out to avoid thinking When someone kills a bunch of people or does something else horrible that normal people can’t understand, the natural reaction from many of us is to say “he was just crazy”. But I don’t buy this. First of all, this attitude seems like a mental trick to avoid thinking about the rationality of what the person did, to avoid sympathy for the person and to distance yourself from them. Sure, many people are quote-unquote “crazy”, but we’re all crazy in some little way, and…

It’s how we choose some of the most important things The other day I heard someone talking about a time when he was on a jury. He said, “It was one of those cases where we all knew he was guilty but just couldn’t find the evidence.” This frightened me because everyone else seemed to nod as though they know the situation… but I’m wondering how is that even possible? If you don’t have evidence, isn’t that just a modern witch hunt? During the real witch hunts, the persecutors felt…

I originally wrote this article in 2010 when I lived in Seattle. Now I live in Pittsburgh and have realized that it’s a whole other ballgame on the east coast when it comes to driving safety. People just don’t seem to care about safety the way they do in Seattle. Stand at a red light in Pittsburgh for five minutes and you are practically guaranteed to see someone run a red light. A few months ago I visited New York and witnessed more traffic crime in nine days than I…

As of 2020 I no longer identify as an anarchist but I still hold a lot of the same values so this article is still valid. When people think of anarchism, they think of Mad Max and Timothy McVeigh, because that’s the vision that’s been drilled into them. But putting an end to people like Timothy McVeigh is exactly the reason I chose anarchism, because ultimately McVeigh was out for the same justice that our government taught us to seek, and saw the horrible things the government has done in…