Ortrud of Albany connives again.

Speaking to an adoring crowd of anti-speed activists, Governor Ortrud of Albany made it clear that she would not accept a Supreme Court ruling for an answer. “We are ready for 'em” she said.

“There is no rational reason for people to posses and drive fast cars,” Governor Ortrud said. “It is an absolute fact that the faster a car goes the more likely it is to be involved in an accident and the more likely the accident will be FATAL ... to INNOCENT people, children and cats crossing the street”

Ortrud continued: “No person needs to drive more than 25 miles per hour. Our Founding Persons never envisioned VEHICLES OF MASS DESTRUCTION that could travel over even 10 mph. When they authorized Congress to regulate interstate commerce they never imagined sixteen wheelers carreening destructively down the road at 70 mph.

“A High Speed Capacity ASSAULT VEHICLE in the hands of oversexed teenage boys and frustrated menopausal women represents a CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER to society, she said. “Only police, firemen and ambulance drivers need High Speed Capacity Assault Vehicles. Everyone else can either walk, bike or drive low voltage e-carts.”

To achieve these laudable goals and evidently relishing her own cleverness, Ortrud of Albany proposed a laundry list of licensing requirements that would make it burdensome to the point of impossibility to qualify for an open road HSCV permit. Among these requirements were

“an in person interview,
“household member contact information
“social media viewing information...”

WHOOOA!!! “social media viewing information”? What kind of information? That you have a Facebook account? Well, that's nice but that doesn't tell you much, just about everyone has some kind of social media account. What the bill obviously seeks is the content of those accounts: who your friends are, what topics have interested you, what feelings or opinions you have expressed on various topics.

Don't Turn Around -- The Kommisar's in Town.

To be free is to be free from surveillance. Anything less is a prison. Apart from the grotesque and outrageous violation of all truly liberal norms, this requirement is paradigmatic of tyrannical absurdity. By what standard shall social media “information” be evaluated? What specific kinds of things should a license examiner look for and how should he factor them in with other criteria?

Given the number of feelings, the number of attitudes, the number of opinions people have about the number of things it is possible to have opinions, attitudes and feelings about, such criteria would necessarily be infinite. Any possible “list” of “red flags” to focus on would still be as thick as a telephone book.

Nor is it simply a question of quantity. Words, emotions, opinions are not just numbers. They are qualitative things and these are always subject to nuance and context. And supposing the “nuance” is grasped, how then is it to be connected to the causal likelihood of any supposed conduct?

The whole foundation of this sort of legislation is an illusory falsehood: the idea that we can predict aberrational behaviour. We cannot because by definition the behaviour deviates from norms; i.e. from that which is predictable. So we are left with the small beer of “correlations” and “associations.” As Mark Twain said, “there are lies, damned lies and statistics.”

Even assuming the veracity of the damned lies, rights accrue to individuals not to abstractions. Not only that, but the whole of our legal system is based on the assumption of free choice. It is for that reason that we do not bar poor people from entering stores based on the statistic that “shoplifting has been associated with lower socio-economic status.” Nor, until now, have we banned people from buying High-speed Capacity Vehicles on the ground that their Facebook page showed an “inappropriate” or “troubling” interest in race cars and bungi chord jumping.

Thus, the very kernel of Ortrud's licensing process is pure, undiluted arbitrariness, leaving it up to the examiner whether he or she or they likes your “in person appearance,” your “attitudes,” your opinions, your sarcasm, your likes and disklikes.

Ortrud of Albany enjoying her Legislative Triumph

“A tyrant knows no law but her own caprice.” (Voltaire.) What Ortrud's caprice ignores is that privacy is a fundamental constitutional right. It is axiomatic that the exercise of one constitutional right cannot be conditioned on giving up another. You know, as in “we'll give you a jury trial, alright; so long as you give up your right not to testify.”

The hypocrisy of so-called liberals on this score is nauseating. We have no doubt that Governor Ortrud is of the “my body my choice” persuasion. We would be astonished if she felt anything less than that a woman's right to “dispose” of her fetus should not be “limited” or “conditioned” by intrusive consent and consultation requirements or waiting periods. Aha... but when it comes to something she doesn't like, then the reverse is the case. Shameless.

Ortrud's Plot to ensnare Lohengrin in an electric go-cart deserves to ignominiously fail.