The fol­low­ing was posted to an inter­nal Mac users’ mail­ing list at work. Since it doesn’t men­tion any com­pany busi­ness, I thought it was inter­est­ing enough to post here:

Fig­ured I would let peo­ple know I was able to get a rather nice
hack­in­tosh up and run­ning w/out any sort of mod­i­fied OS install soft­ware
using the EFi-X “don­gle”. I build I quad core with 8 GB of RAM with a
Giga­byte moth­er­board for about 1/3 the cost of equiv­a­lent Apple hard­ware
(even bet­ter if you assume the mon­i­tor I bought is com­pa­ra­ble to the
apple 23 inch — likely it’s not the same qual­ity). After 4 days of
run­ning it still seems sta­ble. I’ve been suc­cess­ful in updat­ing all the
OS and soft­ware patches for my legally owned copies of apple soft­ware
(yah fam­ily license!) with no prob­lems what so ever. Basi­cally you plug
a usb don­gle directly into the usb pins on the mother board and use it
as a boot loader that mim­ics the EFI code from the Apple bios. Pop in
your nor­mal install disk and away things go. About time I replaced my
2k1 Sun­flower Imac! If any­one else wants to hear more about it shoot me
a question.

Secu­rity Cer­tifi­cate Warn­ings Don’t Work. angry tapir writes “In a lab­o­ra­tory exper­i­ment, researchers found that between 55 per­cent and 100 per­cent of par­tic­i­pants ignored cer­tifi­cate secu­rity warn­ings, depend­ing on which browser they were using (dif­fer­ent browsers use dif­fer­ent lan­guage to warn their users). The researchers first con­ducted an online sur­vey of more than 400 Web surfers, to learn what they thought about cer­tifi­cate warn­ings. They then brought 100 peo­ple into a lab and stud­ied how they surf the Web. They found that peo­ple often had a mixed-up under­stand­ing of cer­tifi­cate warn­ings. For exam­ple, many thought they could ignore the mes­sages when vis­it­ing a site they trust, but that they should be more wary at less-trustworthy sites.“

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Slash­dot]

Every time I’ve encoun­tered a cer­tifi­cate warn­ing it’s been for a per­fectly valid but self-issued cer­tifi­cate. If the peo­ple in the exper­i­ment have had sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences, it’s not sur­pris­ing they would have got­ten into the habit of ignor­ing the warnings.

Jail­ing the Inno­cent.

[John Stossel’s Take]

This is some­thing that Ayn Rand pre­dicted in Atlas Shrugged:

There’s no way to rule inno­cent men. The only power any gov­ern­ment has is the power to crack down on crim­i­nals. Well, when there aren’t enough crim­i­nals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impos­si­ble for men to live with­out break­ing laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding cit­i­zens? What’s there in that for any­one? But just pass the kind of laws that can nei­ther be observed nor enforced nor objec­tively inter­preted — and you cre­ate a nation of law-breakers — and then you cash in on guilt.

For your ref­er­ence: Roth­bard against the Fugi­tive Child Act.

Rod­er­ick recently posted a link to a creep-out ad for this sado-fascist hor­ror show — The Total Trans­for­ma­tion® self-help course for par­ents who are frus­trated at their inabil­ity to uni­lat­er­ally dom­i­nate their chil­dren. (Just as a side­bar, I used to hear ads for this ser­vice or one sim­i­lar to it dur­ing the inter­stices for a nom­i­nally lib­er­tar­ian minimal-statist talk radio show — I think it was the Down­size DC radio show. I dunno how that reflects on the show itself; I think it doesn’t reflect well at all on the tar­get audi­ence for the sta­tion that was run­ning it.)

Any­way, in reply, Andrea Shep­ard men­tioned some of the child humil­i­a­tion industry’s pri­vate intern­ment camps for way­ward youths (which actively encour­age anx­ious par­ents to force their chil­dren into the camp, in secret, on false pre­texts). In reply, Anon73 wrote:

Yeah I came across this stuff a few years ago and was hor­ri­fied by it. I remem­ber hav­ing this in mind when social anar­chists accused ancaps of sup­port­ing pri­vate tyranny since most ancaps accept fam­i­lies and fam­ily prac­tices gen­er­ally. If the alter­na­tive to hav­ing my kid be a pot-smoking starv­ing stoner is to have them sent to Amer­i­can Guan­tanamo then I’d rather have them be stoners.

Andrea responded:

You haven’t been pay­ing atten­tion to the same an-caps I have. I’m an an-cap and that sort of You’re a slave until you turn 18. It’s for your own good bull­shit has always been a rather hot-button issue for me.

I think that Anon73’s point is a fair one against some anarcho-capitalists and not against oth­ers, and that it’s impor­tant to track the dis­tinc­tion. Anon73 men­tioned he wasn’t sure about Rothbard’s view on the matter:

I’m not sure how Roth­bard was on the slave until you’re 18 doc­trine but I remem­ber at one point he did repu­di­ate it. Not sure about other ancaps. At any rate this is def­i­nitely a pri­vate tyranny worse than many types of sta­tist tyranny, which was the point I wanted to make.

For what­ever it’s worth, here is the deal on Roth­bard, as it per­tains to children’s rights, and in par­tic­u­lar as it per­tains to children’s rights to defy par­ents and not to be forced into quote-unquote Behav­ior Mod­i­fi­ca­tion hell­holes, whether pub­lic or pri­vate, by their parents.

Rothbard’s plumbline posi­tion in Kid Lib (1974) and The Ethics of Lib­erty ch. 14 (1982) is that par­ents have a right to set rules for house­hold con­duct, as the pro­pri­etor of the house­hold, until chil­dren move out and take up liv­ing on their own. But also that par­ents have no right to phys­i­cally aggress against chil­dren^[1], that chil­dren should be able to legally pros­e­cute par­ents for injuries com­mit­ted against them in the name of dis­ci­pline, that if chil­dren do not like how their par­ents are treat­ing them that they have an uncon­di­tional right to end their par­ents’ guardian­ship at any age where they are phys­i­cally capa­ble of run­ning away, that this right shuld include the right to strike out on their own or to take up with any fos­ter par­ents who agree to take them in, and that nei­ther par­ents nor the State have any right to force run­away chil­dren to return to the guardian­ship of any adult against the child’s will.

In the ear­lier piece, Kid Lib,” Roth­bard aims to posi­tion his view as a middle-road between tra­di­tional coer­cive par­ent­ing and (his notion of) “Pro­gres­sive” anything-goes par­ent­ing, with most of the rhetor­i­cal energy being spent on the lat­ter, so he spends a fair amount of time grump­ing about kids “kick­ing adults in the shins” and dis­cussing how he thinks that par­ents should insist on rules of con­duct and a cer­tain degree of uni­lat­eral author­ity, but that it must be on a “my house, my rules” basis and not on the basis of using phys­i­cal or legal coer­cion to keep the child cap­tive. But the last, which he views as the fun­da­men­tal tyranny of the con­tem­po­rary parent-child rela­tion­ship, he denounces as kid­nap­ping, and as enslave­ment of chil­dren by parents.

In Ethics of Lib­erty, Roth­bard got more in-depth and went fur­ther. Most of the stuff about the­o­ries of par­ent­ing and house-rules is dropped, in favor of a more sys­tem­atic exam­i­na­tion of children’s rights, with a long sec­tion on the vio­la­tion of children’s rights by sta­tist law in par­tic­u­lar. Among other things, this sec­tion high­lights the use of arbi­trary and uni­lat­eral legal force to give par­ents, or the pater­nal State, near-absolute coer­cive con­trol over chil­dren. He con­demns the use of tru­ancy laws and all other Fugi­tive Child Acts to force chil­dren to stay in the places that adults have made for them; he also spends a great deal of time dis­cussing the use of inquisi­to­r­ial court pro­ceed­ings and reha­bil­i­ta­tive impris­on­ment — through tru­ancy laws, catch-all pun­ish­ment of juve­nile delin­quency (which more often than not encom­passes anti­so­cial acts which are nei­ther vio­lent nor crim­i­nal and which no adult could be impris­oned for com­mit­ting), and, in the last resort, the use of arbi­trary PINS cat­e­go­riza­tion as a lettre-de-cachet for the indef­i­nite impris­on­ment of way­ward youths. Rothbard’s posi­tion cat­e­gor­i­cally rules out the use of force to con­fine inde­pen­dent chil­dren to humiliation-camps for behavior-modification (whether gov­ern­men­tally or pri­vately admin­is­tered), and in his dis­cus­sion of the juve­nile prison sys­tem against chil­dren who have done noth­ing to vio­late anyone’s rights but who have dared to skip school, have unap­proved sex, or oth­er­wise offended against their par­ents’ or the state’s sense of pro­pri­ety, Roth­bard con­demns this use of force against chil­dren as noth­ing more than a legal means to extend and inten­sify the power of abu­sive par­ents over chil­dren who would be inde­pen­dent, or for the state to step in if a par­ent isn’t judged to be vig­or­ously abu­sive enough for the child’s own good.

As far as I know, even after his paleo turn in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Roth­bard never actu­ally declared that his prior posi­tion on children’s rights was false. (As a gen­eral thing, he actu­ally hardly ever repu­di­ated any ide­o­log­i­cal posi­tions, no mat­ter how many strate­gic 180s he did and no mat­ter how uncer­e­mo­ni­ously he dumped his ear­lier point on the floor in the inter­est of his new coali­tion; instead, he just swapped out his rhetoric and tended to write a if he had never said the things that he said before.) But by 1992, mainly in the inter­est of demo­niz­ing Hillary Rod­ham Clin­ton and her asso­ci­a­tion with legal activism for children’s rights, he was scare-quote ridi­cul­ing any dis­cus­sion of children’s rights, declar­ing that chil­dren should quote-unquote get gov­erned by their par­ents, and denounc­ing Tibor Machan for sup­port­ing chil­dren who sued their par­ents for dam­ages or for ter­mi­na­tion of cus­tody. (I haven’t read any of Tibor’s stuff from that period, so I can’t be sure, but from the date and from what Roth­bard writes, my guess would be that this was in response to high-profile cases like Kings­ley v. Kings­ley, in which a child was granted legal stand­ing to sue for a trans­fer of cus­tody from his bio­log­i­cal par­ents to fos­ter par­ents. Any­one know for sure? If so, drop a line in the comments….)

Any­way, after the paleo turn, Roth­bard was look­ing to hook up with polit­i­cal allies who took rock-ribbed con­ser­v­a­tive posi­tions on parental con­trol, so all that stuff about the rights of way­ward chil­dren and the use of state vio­lence to keep chil­dren enslaved to their par­ents was pretty quickly dropped out, in favor of a line about the state’s med­dling in parental rights, with folks like Hoppe throw­ing in paeans to the author­ity of the pater­fa­mil­ias and the order of rank within the fam­ily, and the occa­sional casual sup­port­ive shout-out from LRC to the won­der and mys­tery of beat­ing your chil­dren in the name of dis­ci­pline.

Of course, after Rothbard’s paleo turn, there were still plenty of other non-paleo anarcho-capitalists who dif­fered with Roth­bard and with his new­found allies on all this stuff, and who gen­er­ally took some­thing more like the older Roth­bard line. (George H. Smith, for exam­ple, defends the early Spencer’s posi­tion against parental coer­cion.) And the decline of pale­olib­er­tar­i­an­ism (both as a strate­gic alliance and as an ide­ol­ogy) since Mr. Bush’s wars and the rise of Red State Amer­ica has resulted in a pretty sig­nif­i­cant drop-off.

So is the worry about anarcho-capitalists and non-governmental forms of tyranny, in par­tic­u­lar as they affect chil­dren, a fair one? Well, for some yes, and for oth­ers, no. For Roth­bard, both, depend­ing on what period you’re look­ing at. Pale­olib­er­tar­i­an­ism was an impor­tant move­ment (almost entirely impor­tant for ill, rather than for good, but impor­tant nev­er­the­less) in the his­tory of anarcho-capitalism, but it’s impor­tant not to con­fuse it with anacho-capitalism as such; there were plenty of anarcho-capitalists before it who took much more rad­i­cal posi­tions on rights within the fam­ily, plenty of anarcho-capitalists at the time who rejected it, and at this point in lib­er­tar­ian his­tory there are few left, espe­cially among anar­chists, who would iden­tify with any­thing like the full pale­olib­er­tar­ian pro­gram. But those who did, and those who still would, typ­i­cally take really awful posi­tions on children’s rights, which ought to be called out and denounced. On the other hand, many anarcho-capitalists, fol­low­ing Roth­bard and in the more lefty cli­mate of late-1960s, 1970s, and 2000s lib­er­tar­i­an­ism, took very strong stances against the coer­cion of chil­dren, and indeed often took a stronger stance than most social anar­chists. (Social anar­chists who devote a lot of writ­ing to edu­ca­tion, par­ent­ing, or patri­archy typ­i­cally have taken a very strong line for child lib­er­a­tion; the major­ity who haven’t, haven’t.)

Most anarcho-capitalists, how­ever, just don’t write about the issue at all. Pre­sum­ably because they either don’t think about it, or don’t care to talk about it, or both. Which is unfor­tu­nate but not sur­pris­ing: most polit­i­cal the­o­rists don’t spend much time dis­cussing the sta­tus of chil­dren. Not because it’s unim­por­tant to them (patri­ar­chal author­ity is very impor­tant to lots of the­o­ries) but rather because they have rea­sons for want­ing cer­tain bedrock com­mit­ments to be left unspo­ken so that they can­not be iden­ti­fied, and with­out any explicit defense so that they can­not be challenged.

And for those of us (like me) who are anar­chists but not anarcho-capitalists, and who think that the free­dom of chil­dren from 18 years of vio­lence and despo­tism is among the most impor­tant, press­ing, and uni­ver­sal con­cerns that a modern-day Free­dom Move­ment ought to take up, I think the most impor­tant thing is to take what lessons we can from the best work avail­able and to expand it — to talk about how those who believe that chil­dren ought to be able to take up a free and inde­pen­dent life as they become ready for it, and who are con­cerned to help chil­dren escape from phys­i­cal vio­lence, coer­cive con­trol, bul­ly­ing and emo­tional abuse, and any other assault on their bod­ies, lib­erty, inde­pen­dence, or dig­nity, whether com­mit­ted by par­ents, by teach­ers, by the State, or by any other adult — I think the impor­tant thing to do here is to learn from the best parts of what Roth­bard (among oth­ers) had to offer. What we have to stress is that this can­not be brought about by tak­ing out one form of coer­cive con­trol (by par­ents or other state-approved guardians) only to replace it with another (through lit­eral nanny-statism, government-controlled school­ing, coer­cive child wel­fare bureau­cra­cies, etc.). Rather, what I think the older Roth­bar­dian approach rightly stresses — the right of chil­dren to assert their own inde­pen­dence when they are ready to do so, not to be held cap­tive by over­bear­ing par­ents, and to have their deci­sion respected when they decide it’s time to get the hell out of a house that they hate to be in — is the impor­tance of sol­i­dar­ity rather than res­cue. We must look towards help­ing chil­dren and ado­les­cents name their own sit­u­a­tion and make them­selves free — by oppos­ing laws that allow par­ents to beat and imprison chil­dren at will, and by work­ing in sol­i­dar­ity to sup­port the rights and the well-being of so-called run­away chil­dren and ado­les­cents; to cre­ate alter­na­tive insti­tu­tions that pro­vide them with a sup­port­ive place to go; and to strug­gle against the State’s efforts to force them back into homes that they hate and under the author­ity of par­ents that they risked so much to try to escape.

See also:

• GT 2008-06-19: The Root Cause
• GT 2007-04-30: Over My Shoul­der #34: on par­ent­ing a free and autonomous child, from Harry Browne, How I Found Free­dom in an Unfree World
• Com­ments on children’s rights on GT 2008-05-11: Cops are here to pro­tect you. (#4)
• GT 2008-06-11: Beat­ing up your teenage daugh­ter isn’t just a good idea. It’s the law.
• GT 2008-03-09: The pur­pose of gov­ern­ment schools is to train your chil­dren to love the government.
• GT 2008-05-19: Dr. Anar­chy answers your mail #5: Wher­ever I go, he goes…
• GT 2008-03-01: Per­pet­ual state of supervision

[Rad Geek People’s Daily]