Error upgrading postfix on debian

When upgrading my mail server this morning, I got this error message:

 insserv: script postfix: service mail-transport-agent already provided!
insserv: exiting now!
update-rc.d: error: insserv rejected the script header
dpkg: error processing postfix (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 postfix

If you run into this, grep /etc/init.d for "mail-transport-agent" and find the associated file.  "insserv" manages the daemon startup files.  It decides if a service is present from specially formatted comments in the init.d files, not from the package database.  In my case, the problem was a stray init file from a long-uninstalled instance of exim4.  "apt-get purge exim4" hadn't removed it.  "rm -f" did :-)

Don't Waste your Vote: Vote Third Party

You hear it every time someone brings up the question of voting for a third party candidate:  "You're wasting your vote!  If you don't vote for slightly-better-candidate-X, you're increasing the chances that
slightly-worse-candidate-Y will win!"

Let's do a brief reality check here.  Your vote will not influence a major election.  Never.  Never in a million years.  No major election has ever been won by a single vote.  Just look at Bush v. Gore in Florida - it was won by a few hundred votes, and look what a big deal that was.  If, at the end of the day, all of the chads were counted and it came down to a single, solitary vote, do you really think that the loser would have allowed that to go unchallenged?  Not a chance.

Major elections are won by thousands, even millions of votes.  The people who are urging you to get out there and vote and saying that your vote counts are talking to very large audiences.  If they can get thousands of people to get out and vote, they might be able to make a difference.  You, however, with your single puny vote, will not.  You need to get an audience if you want to make a difference, and having done that, you can just stay home.  Their votes (collectively) might matter, yours will not.

So given that your vote matters less than the opinion of the guy who cleans the bathrooms in the White House, why vote at all?  There are two reasons why I do.  For one thing, when I want to bitch to my representatives, it helps (or is at least satisfying) to be able to start the conversation with "I'm a registered voter in your district."   For another, it is a way for me to voice my discontent.  You could also voice your discontent by just staying home, but that's a more ambiguous message.  The most unequivocal way to voice your discontent in an election is to get out there and vote for the candidate
who most closely matches your prescription for fixing everything that you hate about your government.  For a substantial number of us, that's not one of the candidates who has a chance of winning.

Those numbers won't win an election.  But if they're big enough, they might make the major parties take notice.  If they're bigger than the spread between the major candidates, those parties will most definitely take notice.  When they do, their question becomes "how can I appeal to this disaffected minority?"  Candidates do the same thing for lots of groups -- they try to get the labor vote or the <insert-minority-name> vote.  But membership in a group is not an expression of ideology -- by voting for a major candidate, there is no clear message of what exactly you are voting for.  They can try to appeal to the "blog reading group" with special favors, but they can't interpret your vote as a signal that, for example, you are against internet censorship or favor subsidies for bloggers.  Third parties tend to embrace a political philosophy.  By voting for a third party candidate, you are unambiguously endorsing that philosophy and creating an identifiable sub-constituency that needs to be appeased.

So if you want to do something really relevant this election day, don't throw your vote away on a clueless major candidate and toss your signal into the noise-pool. Send your message loud and clear -- vote third party.

Registering Republican

Today I did something that I never suspected that I'd do: I sent in a voter registration form to the Putnam County Board of Elections to change my party affiliation from "Independent" to "Republican."  Still reading?  Good.  Clearly you have an open mind, and are not easily given to knee-jerk reactions.  Here comes the explanation.

Those of you with whom I have discussed politics may or may not know exactly where I stand on the political spectrum.  In any case, let me state my position clearly: I'm philosophically anarchist and politically libertarian.  I think the ideal that we should strive for is a sort of individualist anarchy in which all social institutions (including the functions of protection and arbitration that most now assume must be provided by government) are the product of voluntary contract.

Unfortunately, not too many other people agree with me.  Certainly not enough of them to protect us from the rest of you who seem to think it's ok to promote social ideals at gunpoint.  So we're a long way off from this ideal, although I do feel what I guess I can only describe as a sort of faith that it is something we are destined to achieve.

But more fundamentally, you can't vote anarchist.  There's no anarchist party.  By voting at all, you're pretty much buying into the whole government thing.  And I do feel that if we have to have a government, we're better off with a minimal one.  So I normally vote Libertarian.  In fact, I've been a member and suporter of the Libertarian party since the mid nineties.

However, the first time I voted Libertarian was long before that.  It was, in fact, the first presidential election that I ever voted in, in 1988. At the time, Ron Paul was running on the Libertarian ticket. He was the only candidate on the ballot who was advocating something very near and dear to my heart at that time: the legalization of marijuana. And so it came to pass that the first time I ever voted, I voted Libertarian. The first presidential candidate I ever voted for was Ron Paul.

Fast-forward to 2012.  On the slightly-left-of-center we have President Barack Obama.  A man who has been just as bad on civil liberties and foreign wars as his predecessor.  A man who architected a package of health-care legislation that imposes the costs and restrictions of socialized health care without even having the ease-of-use benefits.  A man who has presided over the raids of more medical marijuana distributors, even, than his predecessor.

On the slightly-right-of-center, we have a bunch of lackeys whose ideas on protecting our borders seem to disagree only on whether the fence should be made of chain-links or "boots on the ground."  The front runner of this pack is a guy who implemented his own bad socialized health-care in his own state.  And then there's Newt, who had his opposition by the short-hairs in the nineties (I didn't really notice a difference when they shut down the government) but then caved to popular pressure, presumably violating the terms of his "Contract with America".

And then there's Ron Paul.  A man with a long congressional record of voting on small-government principles.  A man with a lot of anti-establishment ideas that he's willing to defend with good arguments when confronted on.  The first man that I ever voted for.

Paul winning the primary would be a libertarian dream come true.  I'd love to see him in the presidential debates pitting his simple arguments against Obama's smug, statist rhetoric.  The other Republican candidates are all just more of the same.  From the perspective of civil rights and cutting government, a Gingrich, Romney or Perry presidency would be no different from the Obama presidency, which in turn was no different from the Bush presidency.  Paul would be different.

This is why I've changed my voter registration.  To vote for Ron Paul.  This is why you should do the same, even if you're a lifetime Democrat (unless, of course, there are other candidates you care about voting for in the primary).  You can't change the Democratic presidential candidate, but you could change the Republican candidate to a man who is unequivocally opposed to our continuing involvement in Afghanistan and the destruction of civil liberties in our country.  And if you believe that Paul is unelectable at the presidential level, what better way to insure a second Obama term than to pit him against an unelectable candidate?

And finally, if you'd like to see me register as a Democrat in 2016, all you have to do is put a candidate on the ballot who is as strong on civil liberties, ending war and government transparency (all positions traditionally given lip-service by Democrats) as Paul has been.  Dennis Kucinich would probably work.