Photograph Your Work


If you work as a sysadmin you probably have a good phone, if you are going to run ssh from a phone or use a phone to read docs while in a server room with connectivity problems you need a phone with a good screen. You will also want a phone that has current security support. Such a phone will have a reasonable amount of storage space, I doubt that you can get a phone with less than 32G of storage that has a decent screen and Android security support. Admittedly Apple has longer security support for iPhones than Google does for Nexus/Pixel phones so it might be possible to get an older iPhone with a decent screen and hardly any space (but that’s not the point here).

If you have 32G of storage on your phone then there’s no real possibility of using up your storage space by photographing a day’s work. You could probably take an unreasonable number of photos of a week’s work as well as a few videos and not use up much of that.

The first time I needed photos recently was about 9 months ago when I was replacing some network gear (new DSL modem and switch for a client). The network sockets in the rack weren’t labelled and I found it unreasonably difficult to discover where everything was (the tangle of cables made tracking them impossible). What I should have done is to photograph the cables before I started and then I would have known where to connect everything. A 12MP camera allows zooming in on photos to get details, so a couple of quick shots of that rack would have saved me a lot of time – and in the case where everything goes as planned taking a couple of photos isn’t going to delay things.

Last night there was a power failure in a server room that hosts a couple of my machines. When power came back on the air-conditioner didn’t start up and the end result was a server with one of it’s disks totally dead (maybe due to heat, maybe power failures, maybe it just wore out). For unknown reasons BTRFS wouldn’t allow me to replace the disk in the RAID-1 array so I needed to copy the data to a new disk and create a new mirror (taking a lot of my time and also giving downtime). While I was working on this the filesystem would only mount read-only so no records of the kernel errors were stored. If I had taken photos of the screen I would have records of this which might allow me to reproduce the problem and file a bug report. Now I have no records, I can’t reproduce it, and I have a risk that next time a disk dies in a BTRFS RAID-1 I’ll have the same problem. Also presumably random people all over the world will suffer needless pain because of this while lacking the skills to file a good bug report because I didn’t make good enough records to reproduce it.

Hopefully next time I’m in a situation like this I’ll think to take some photos instead of just rebooting and wiping the evidence.

As an aside I’ve been finding my phone camera useful for zooming in on serial numbers that I can’t read otherwise. I’ve got new glasses on order that will hopefully address this, but in the mean time it’s the only way I can read the fine print. Another good use of a phone camera is recording error messages that scroll past too quickly to read and aren’t logged. Some phones support slow motion video capture (up to 120fps or more) and even for phones that don’t you can use slow play (my favourite Android video player MX Player works well at 5% normal speed) to capture most messages that are too quick to read.

Words Have Meanings

As a follow-up to my post with Suggestions for Trump Supporters [1] I notice that many people seem to have private definitions of words that they like to use.

There are some situations where the use of a word is contentious and different groups of people have different meanings. One example that is known to most people involved with computers is “hacker”. That means “criminal” according to mainstream media and often “someone who experiments with computers” to those of us who like experimenting with computers. There is ongoing discussion about whether we should try and reclaim the word for it’s original use or whether we should just accept that’s a lost cause. But generally based on context it’s clear which meaning is intended. There is also some overlap between the definitions, some people who like to experiment with computers conduct experiments with computers they aren’t permitted to use. Some people who are career computer criminals started out experimenting with computers for fun.

But some times words are misused in ways that fail to convey any useful ideas and just obscure the real issues. One example is the people who claim to be left-wing Libertarians. Murray Rothbard (AKA “Mr Libertarian”) boasted about “stealing” the word Libertarian from the left [2]. Murray won that battle, they should get over it and move on. When anyone talks about “Libertarianism” nowadays they are talking about the extreme right. Claiming to be a left-wing Libertarian doesn’t add any value to any discussion apart from demonstrating the fact that the person who makes such a claim is one who gives hipsters a bad name. The first time penny-farthings were fashionable the word “libertarian” was associated with left-wing politics. Trying to have a sensible discussion about politics while using a word in the opposite way to almost everyone else is about as productive as trying to actually travel somewhere by penny-farthing.

Another example is the word “communist” which according to many Americans seems to mean “any person or country I don’t like”. It’s often invoked as a magical incantation that’s supposed to automatically win an argument. One recent example I saw was someone claiming that “Russia has always been communist” and rejecting any evidence to the contrary. If someone was to say “Russia has always been a shit country” then there’s plenty of evidence to support that claim (Tsarist, communist, and fascist Russia have all been shit in various ways). But no definition of “communism” seems to have any correlation with modern Russia. I never discovered what that person meant by claiming that Russia is communist, they refused to make any comment about Russian politics and just kept repeating that it’s communist. If they said “Russia has always been shit” then it would be a clear statement, people can agree or disagree with that but everyone knows what is meant.

The standard response to pointing out that someone is using a definition of a word that is either significantly different to most of the world (or simply inexplicable) is to say “that’s just semantics”. If someone’s “contribution” to a political discussion is restricted to criticising people who confuse “their” and “there” then it might be reasonable to say “that’s just semantics”. But pointing out that someone’s writing has no meaning because they choose not to use words in the way others will understand them is not just semantics. When someone claims that Russia is communist and Americans should reject the Republican party because of their Russian connection it’s not even wrong. The same applies when someone claims that Nazis are “leftist”.

Generally the aim of a political debate is to convince people that your cause is better than other causes. To achieve that aim you have to state your cause in language that can be understood by everyone in the discussion. Would the person who called Russia “communist” be more or less happy if Russia had common ownership of the means of production and an absence of social classes? I guess I’ll never know, and that’s their failure at debating politics.

Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 6


















Definitely a nice laptop if someone else is paying.




I’ve recently setup fail2ban [1] on a bunch of my servers. It’s purpose is to ban IP addresses associated with password guessing – or whatever other criteria for badness you configure. It supports Linux, OpenBSD [2] and probably most Unix type OSs too. I run Debian so I’ve been using the Debian packages of fail2ban.

The first thing to note is that it is very easy to install and configure (for the common cases at least). For a long time installing it had been on my todo list but I didn’t make the time to do it, after installing it I realised that I should have done it years ago, it was so easy.

Generally to configure it you just create a file under /etc/fail2ban/jail.d with the settings you want, any settings that are different from the defaults will override them. For example if you have a system running dovecot on the default ports and sshd on port 999 then you could put the following in /etc/fail2ban/jail.d/local.conf:

enabled = true

port = 999

By default the Debian package of fail2ban only protects sshd.

When fail2ban is running on Linux the command “iptables -L -n -v|grep f2b” will show the rules that match inbound traffic and the names of the chains they direct traffic to. To see if fail2ban has acted to protect a service you can run a command like “iptables -L f2b-sshd -n” to see the iptables rules.

The fail2ban entries in the INPUT table go before other rules, so it should work with any custom iptables rules you have configured as long as either fail2ban is the last thing to be started or your custom rules don’t flush old entries.

There are hooks for sending email notifications etc, that seems excessive to me but it’s always good to have options to extend a program.

In the past I’ve tried using kernel rate limiting to minimise hostile activity. That didn’t work well as there are legitimate end users who do strange things (like a user who setup their web-cam to email them every time it took a photo).


Fail2ban has some good features. I don’t think it will do much good at stopping account compromise as anything that is easily guessed could be guessed using many IP addresses and anything that has a good password can’t be guessed without taking many years of brute-force attacks while also causing enough noise in the logs to be noticed. What it does do is get rid of some of the noise in log files which makes it easier to find and fix problems. To me the main benefit is to improve the signal to noise ratio of my log files.

Google and Certbot (Letsencrypt)

Like most people I use Certbot AKA Letsencrypt to create SSL certificates for my sites. It’s a great service, very easy to use and it generally works well.

Recently the server running among other domains couldn’t get a certbot certificate renewed, here’s the error message:

Failed authorization procedure. (http-01): urn:acme:error:unauthorized :: The client lacks sufficient authorization :: "" was considered an unsafe domain by a third-party API, (http-01): urn:acme:error:unauthorized :: The client lacks sufficient authorization :: "" was considered an unsafe domain by a third-party API

 - The following errors were reported by the server:

   Type:   unauthorized
   Detail: "" was considered an unsafe domain by a third-
   party API

   Type:   unauthorized
   Detail: "" was considered an unsafe domain by a
   third-party API

It turns out that Google Safebrowsing had listed those two sites. Visit or today (and maybe for some weeks or months in the future) using Google Chrome (or any other browser that uses the Google Safebrowsing database) and it will tell you the site is “Dangerous” and probably refuse to let you in.

One thing to note is that neither of those sites has any real content, I only set them up in Apache to get SSL certificates that are used for other purposes (like mail transfer as the name suggests). If Google had listed my blog as a “Dangerous” site I wouldn’t be so surprised, WordPress has had more than a few security issues in the past and it’s not implausible that someone could have compromised it and made it serve up hostile content without me noticing. But the two sites in question have a DocumentRoot that is owned by root and was (until a few days ago) entirely empty, now they have a index.html that just says “This site is empty”. It’s theoretically possible that someone could have exploited a RCE bug in Apache to make it serve up content that isn’t in the DocumentRoot, but that seems unlikely (why waste an Apache 0day on one of the less important of my personal sites). It is possible that the virtual machine in question was compromised (a VM on that server has been compromised before [1]) but it seems unlikely that they would host bad things on those web sites if they did.

Now it could be that some other hostname under that domain had something inappropriate (I haven’t yet investigated all possibilities). But if so Google’s algorithm has a couple of significant problems, firstly if they are blacklisting sites related to one that had an issue then it would probably make more sense to blacklist by IP address (which means including some entries on the same IP). In the case of a compromised server it seems more likely to have multiple bad sites on one IP than multiple bad subdomains on different IPs (given that none of the hostnames in question have changed IP address recently and Google of course knows this). The next issue is that extending blacklisting doesn’t make sense unless there is evidence of hostile intent. I’m pretty sure that Google won’t blacklist all of when (not if) a server in that domain gets compromised. I guess they have different policies for sites of different scale.

Both I and a friend have reported the sites in question to Google as not being harmful, but that hasn’t changed anything yet. I’m very disappointed in Google, listing sites, not providing any reason why (it could be a hostname under that domain was compromised and if so it’s not fixed yet BECAUSE GOOGLE DIDN’T REPORT A PROBLEM), and not removing the listing when it’s totally obvious there’s no basis for it.

While it makes sense for certbot to not issue SSL certificates to bad sites. It seems that they haven’t chosen a great service for determining which sites are bad.

Anyway the end result was that some of my sites had an expired SSL certificate for a day. I decided not to renew certificates before they expired to give Google a better chance of noticing their mistake and then I was busy at the time they expired. Now presumably as the sites in question have an invalid SSL certificate it will be even harder to convince anyone that they are not hostile.

Suggestions for Trump Supporters








Words Have Meanings







Sources of Information





Covering for Nazis








Decent Trump Supporters



Passwords Used by Daemons


I’m writing this post with some rough ideas about the topic, please let me know if you have any better ideas. Also I’m considering passwords and keys in a fairly broad sense, a private key for a HTTPS certificate has more in common with a password to access another server than most other data that a server might use. This also applies to SSH host secret keys, keys that are in ssh authorized_keys files, and other services too.

Passwords in Memory

When SSL support for Apache was first released the standard practice was to have the SSL private key encrypted and require the sysadmin enter a password to start the daemon. This practice has mostly gone away, I would hope that would be due to people realising that it offers little value but it’s more likely that it’s just because it’s really annoying and doesn’t scale for cloud deployments.

If there was a benefit to having the password only in RAM (IE no readable file on disk) then there are options such as granting read access to the private key file only during startup. I have seen a web page recommending running “chmod 0” on the private key file after the daemon starts up.

I don’t believe that there is a real benefit to having a password only existing in RAM. Many exploits target the address space of the server process, Heartbleed is one well known bug that is still shipping in new products today which reads server memory for encryption keys. If you run a program that is vulnerable to Heartbleed then it’s SSL private key (and probably a lot of other application data) are vulnerable to attackers regardless of whether you needed to enter a password at daemon startup.

If you have an application or daemon that might need a password at any time then there’s usually no way of securely storing that password such that a compromise of that application or daemon can’t get the password. In theory you could have a proxy for the service in question which runs as a different user and manages the passwords.

Password Lifecycle

Ideally you would be able to replace passwords at any time. Any time a password is suspected to have been leaked then it should be replaced. That requires that you know where the password is used (both which applications and which configuration files used by those applications) and that you are able to change all programs that use it in a reasonable amount of time.

The first thing to do to achieve this is to have one password per application not one per use. For example if you have a database storing accounts used for a mail server then you would be tempted to have an outbound mail server such as Postfix and an IMAP server such as Dovecot both use the same password to access the database. The correct thing to do is to have one database account for the Dovecot and another for Postfix so if you need to change the password for one of them you don’t need to change passwords in two locations and restart two daemons at the same time. Another good option is to have Postfix talk to Dovecot for authenticating outbound mail, that means you only have a single configuration location for storing the password and also means that a security flaw in Postfix (or more likely a misconfiguration) couldn’t give access to the database server.

Passwords Used By Web Services

It’s very common to run web sites on Apache backed by database servers, so common that the acronym LAMP is widely used for Linux, Apache, Mysql, and PHP. In a typical LAMP installation you have multiple web sites running as the same user which by default can read each other’s configuration files. There are some solutions to this.

There is an Apache module mod_apparmor to use the Apparmor security system [1]. This allows changing to a specified Apparmor “hat” based on the URI or a specified hat for the virtual server. Each Apparmor hat is granted access to different files and therefore files that contain passwords for MySQL (or any other service) can be restricted on a per vhost basis. This only works with the prefork MPM.

There is also an Apache module mpm-itk which runs each vhost under a specified UID and GID [2]. This also allows protecting sites on the same server from each other. The ITK MPM is also based on the prefork MPM.

I’ve been thinking of writing a SE Linux MPM for Apache to do similar things. It would have to be based on prefork too. Maybe a change to mpm-itk to support SE Linux context as well as UID and GID.

Managing It All

Once the passwords are separated such that each service runs with minimum privileges you need to track and manage it all. At the simplest that needs a document listing where all of the passwords are used and how to change them. If you use a configuration management tool then that could manage the passwords. Here’s a list of tools to manage service passwords in tools like Ansible [3].

Cooperative Learning

This post is about my latest idea for learning about computers. I posted it to my local LUG mailing list and received no responses. But I still think it’s a great idea and that I just need to find the right way to launch it.

I think it would be good to try cooperative learning about Computer Science online. The idea is that everyone would join an IRC channel at a suitable time with virtual machine software configured and try out new FOSS software at the same time and exchange ideas about it via IRC. It would be fairly informal and people could come and go as they wish, the session would probably go for about 4 hours but if people want to go on longer then no-one would stop them.

I’ve got some under-utilised KVM servers that I could use to provide test VMs for network software, my original idea was to use those for members of my local LUG. But that doesn’t scale well. If a larger group people are to be involved they would have to run their own virtual machines, use physical hardware, or use trial accounts from VM companies.

The general idea would be for two broad categories of sessions, ones where an expert provides a training session (assigning tasks to students and providing suggestions when they get stuck) and ones where the coordinator has no particular expertise and everyone just learns together (like “let’s all download a random BSD Unix and see how it compares to Linux”).

As this would be IRC based there would be no impediment for people from other regions being involved apart from the fact that it might start at 1AM their time (IE 6PM in the east coast of Australia is 1AM on the west coast of the US). For most people the best times for such education would be evenings on week nights which greatly limits the geographic spread.

While the aims of this would mostly be things that relate to Linux, I would be happy to coordinate a session on ReactOS as well. I’m thinking of running training sessions on etbemon, DNS, Postfix, BTRFS, ZFS, and SE Linux.

I’m thinking of coordinating learning sessions about DragonflyBSD (particularly HAMMER2), ReactOS, Haiku, and Ceph. If people are interested in DragonflyBSD then we should do that one first as in a week or so I’ll probably have learned what I want to learn and moved on (but not become enough of an expert to run a training session).

One of the benefits of this idea is to help in motivation. If you are on your own playing with something new like a different Unix OS in a VM you will be tempted to take a break and watch YouTube or something when you get stuck. If there are a dozen other people also working on it then you will have help in solving problems and an incentive to keep at it while help is available.

So the issues to be discussed are:

  1. What communication method to use? IRC? What server?
  2. What time/date for the first session?
  3. What topic for the first session? DragonflyBSD?
  4. How do we announce recurring meetings? A mailing list?
  5. What else should we setup to facilitate training? A wiki for notes?

Finally while I list things I’m interested in learning and teaching this isn’t just about me. If this becomes successful then I expect that there will be some topics that don’t interest me and some sessions at times when I am have other things to do (like work). I’m sure people can have fun without me. If anyone has already established something like this then I’d be happy to join that instead of starting my own, my aim is not to run another hobbyist/professional group but to learn things and teach things.

There is a Wikipedia page about Cooperative Learning. While that’s interesting I don’t think it has much relevance on what I’m trying to do. The Wikipedia article has some good information on the benefits of cooperative education and situations where it doesn’t work well. My idea is to have a self-selecting people who choose it because of their own personal goals in terms of fun and learning. So it doesn’t have to work for everyone, just for enough people to have a good group.

BTRFS and SE Linux


Here is the link to the patch that fixes this [1]. Thanks to Hans van Kranenburg and Holger Hoffstätte for the information about this patch which was already included in kernel 4.16.11. That was uploaded to Debian on the 27th of May and got into testing about the time that my message about this issue got to the SE Linux list (which was a couple of days before I sent it to the BTRFS developers).

The kernel from Debian/Stable still has the issue. So using a testing kernel might be a good option to deal with this problem at the moment.

Below is the information on reproducing this problem. It may be useful for people who want to reproduce similar problems. Also all sysadmins should know about “reboot -nffd”, if something really goes wrong with your kernel you may need to do that immediately to prevent corrupted data being written to your disks.

The command “reboot -nffd” (kernel reboot without flushing kernel buffers or writing status) when run on a BTRFS system with SE Linux will often result in /var/log/audit/audit.log being unlabeled. It also results in some systemd-journald files like /var/log/journal/c195779d29154ed8bcb4e8444c4a1728/system.journal being unlabeled but that is rarer. I think that the same
problem afflicts both systemd-journald and auditd but it’s a race condition that on my systems (both production and test) is more likely to affect auditd.

root@stretch:/# xattr -l /var/log/audit/audit.log 
0000   73 79 73 74 65 6D 5F 75 3A 6F 62 6A 65 63 74 5F    system_u:object_ 
0010   72 3A 61 75 64 69 74 64 5F 6C 6F 67 5F 74 3A 73    r:auditd_log_t:s 
0020   30 00                                              0.

SE Linux uses the xattr “security.selinux”, you can see what it’s doing with xattr(1) but generally using “ls -Z” is easiest.

If this issue just affected “reboot -nffd” then a solution might be to just not run that command. However this affects systems after a power outage.

I have reproduced this bug with kernel 4.9.0-6-amd64 (the latest security update for Debian/Stretch which is the latest supported release of Debian). I have also reproduced it in an identical manner with kernel 4.16.0-1-amd64 (the latest from Debian/Unstable). For testing I reproduced this with a 4G filesystem in a VM, but in production it has happened on BTRFS RAID-1 arrays, both SSD and HDD.

set -e 
COUNT=$(ps aux|grep [s]bin/auditd|wc -l) 
 echo "all good" 
 echo "failed" 
 exit 1 

Firstly the above is the script /usr/local/sbin/testit, I test for auditd running because it aborts if the context on it’s log file is wrong. When SE Linux is in enforcing mode an incorrect/missing label on the audit.log file causes auditd to abort.

root@stretch:~# ls -liZ /var/log/audit/audit.log 
37952 -rw-------. 1 root root system_u:object_r:auditd_log_t:s0 4385230 Jun  1 
12:23 /var/log/audit/audit.log

Above is before I do the tests.

while ssh stretch /usr/local/sbin/testit ; do 
 ssh stretch "reboot -nffd" > /dev/null 2>&1 & 
 sleep 20 

Above is the shell code I run to do the tests. Note that the VM in question runs on SSD storage which is why it can consistently boot in less than 20 seconds.

Fri  1 Jun 12:26:13 UTC 2018 
all good 
Fri  1 Jun 12:26:33 UTC 2018 

Above is the output from the shell code in question. After the first reboot it fails. The probability of failure on my test system is greater than 50%.

37952 -rw-------. 1 root root system_u:object_r:unlabeled_t:s0 4396803 Jun  1 12:26 /var/log/audit/audit.log

Now the result. Note that the Inode has not changed. I could understand a newly created file missing an xattr, but this is an existing file which shouldn’t have had it’s xattr changed. But somehow it gets corrupted.

The first possibility I considered was that SE Linux code might be at fault. I asked on the SE Linux mailing list (I haven’t been involved in SE Linux kernel code for about 15 years) and was informed that this isn’t likely at
all. There have been no problems like this reported with other filesystems.

Racism in the Office

Today I was at an office party and the conversation turned to race, specifically the incidence of unarmed Afro-American men and boys who are shot by police. Apparently the idea that white people (even in other countries) might treat non-white people badly offends some people, so we had a man try to explain that Afro-Americans commit more crime and therefore are more likely to get shot. This part of the discussion isn’t even noteworthy, it’s the sort of thing that happens all the time.

I and another man pointed out that crime is correlated with poverty and racism causes non-white people to be disproportionately poor. We also pointed out that US police seem capable of arresting proven violent white criminals without shooting them (he cited arrests of Mafia members I cited mass murderers like the one who shot up the cinema). This part of the discussion isn’t particularly noteworthy either. Usually when someone tries explaining some racist ideas and gets firm disagreement they back down. But not this time.

The next step was the issue of whether black people are inherently violent. He cited all of Africa as evidence. There’s a meme that you shouldn’t accuse someone of being racist, it’s apparently very offensive. I find racism very offensive and speak the truth about it. So all the following discussion was peppered with him complaining about how offended he was and me not caring (stop saying racist things if you don’t want me to call you racist).

Next was an appeal to “statistics” and “facts”. He said that he was only citing statistics and facts, clearly not understanding that saying “Africans are violent” is not a statistic. I told him to get his phone and Google for some statistics as he hadn’t cited any. I thought that might make him just go away, it was clear that we were long past the possibility of agreeing on these issues. I don’t go to parties seeking out such arguments, in fact I’d rather avoid such people altogether if possible.

So he found an article about recent immigrants from Somalia in Melbourne (not about the US or Africa, the previous topics of discussion). We are having ongoing discussions in Australia about violent crime, mainly due to conservatives who want to break international agreements regarding the treatment of refugees. For the record I support stronger jail sentences for violent crime, but this is an idea that is not well accepted by conservatives presumably because the vast majority of violent criminals are white (due to the vast majority of the Australian population being white).

His next claim was that Africans are genetically violent due to DNA changes from violence in the past. He specifically said that if someone was a witness to violence it would change their DNA to make them and their children more violent. He also specifically said that this was due to thousands of years of violence in Africa (he mentioned two thousand and three thousand years on different occasions). I pointed out that European history has plenty of violence that is well documented and also that DNA just doesn’t work the way he thinks it does.

Of course he tried to shout me down about the issue of DNA, telling me that he studied Psychology at a university in London and knows how DNA works, demanding to know my qualifications, and asserting that any scientist would support him. I don’t have a medical degree, but I have spent quite a lot of time attending lectures on medical research including from researchers who deliberately change DNA to study how this changes the biological processes of the organism in question.

I offered him the opportunity to star in a Youtube video about this, I’d record everything he wants to say about DNA. But he regarded that offer as an attempt to “shame” him because of his “controversial” views. It was a strange and sudden change from “any scientist will support me” to “it’s controversial”. Unfortunately he didn’t give up on his attempts to convince me that he wasn’t racist and that black people are lesser.

The next odd thing was when he asked me “what do you call them” (black people), “do you call them Afro-Americans when they are here”. I explained that if an American of African ancestry visits Australia then you would call them Afro-American, otherwise not. It’s strange that someone goes from being so certain of so many things to not knowing the basics. In retrospect I should have asked whether he was aware that there are black people who aren’t African.

Then I sought opinions from other people at the party regarding DNA modifications. While I didn’t expect to immediately convince him of the error of his ways it should at least demonstrate that I’m not the one who’s in a minority regarding this issue. As expected there was no support for the ideas of DNA modifying. During that discussion I mentioned radiation as a cause of DNA changes. He then came up with the idea that radiation from someone’s mouth when they shout at you could change your DNA. This was the subject of some jokes, one man said something like “my parents shouted at me a lot but didn’t make me a mutant”.

The other people had some sensible things to say, pointing out that psychological trauma changes the way people raise children and can have multi-generational effects. But the idea of events 3000 years ago having such effects was ridiculed.

By this time people were starting to leave. A heated discussion of racism tends to kill the party atmosphere. There might be some people who think I should have just avoided the discussion to keep the party going (really I didn’t want it and tried to end it). But I’m not going to allow a racist to think that I agree with them, and if having a party requires any form of agreement to racism then it’s not a party I care about.

As I was getting ready to leave the man said that he thought he didn’t explain things well because he was tipsy. I disagree, I think he explained some things very well. When someone goes to such extraordinary lengths to criticise all black people after a discussion of white cops killing unarmed black people I think it shows their character. But I did offer some friendly advice, “don’t drink with people you work with or for or any other people you want to impress”, I suggested that maybe quitting alcohol altogether is the right thing to do if this is what it causes. But he still thought it was wrong of me to call him racist, and I still don’t care. Alcohol doesn’t make anyone suddenly think that black people are inherently dangerous (even when unarmed) and therefore deserving of being shot by police (disregarding the fact that police can take members of the Mafia alive). But it does make people less inhibited about sharing such views even when it’s clear that they don’t have an accepting audience.

Some Final Notes

I was not looking for an argument or trying to entrap him in any way. I refrained from asking him about other races who have experienced violence in the past, maybe he would have made similar claims about other non-white races and maybe he wouldn’t, I didn’t try to broaden the scope of the dispute.

I am not going to do anything that might be taken as agreement or support of racism unless faced with the threat of violence. He did not threaten me so I wasn’t going to back down from the debate.

I gave him multiple opportunities to leave the debate. When I insisted that he find statistics to support his cause I hoped and expected that he would depart. Instead he came back with a page about the latest racist dog-whistle in Australian politics which had no correlation with anything we had previously discussed.

I think the fact that this debate happened says something about Australian and British culture. This man apparently hadn’t had people push back on such ideas before.