Quotulatiousness

March 23, 2010

Comparing congress to prostitutes is unfair to prostitutes

Filed under: Government, Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 17:12

Scott Stein upbraids Glenn Reynolds (aka the Instapundit) for his sloppy and insulting comparison:

[P]rostitutes sell themselves for money — the most intimate part of themselves, even their souls, some opponents of legalized prostitution might say. So looked at this way, Congress is full of prostitutes. Members of Congress sell their souls (if any in Congress have such things). Principles, values, the interests of the nation, the Constitution — all of it — are up for sale to the highest bidder, and that bidder need not be offering money directly. Votes or influence in a political party will often do just fine. Of course, these lead to money and power, which is what the whores in Congress want.

But in many ways Congress is nothing like a prostitute. A prostitute only wants cash that customers actually have, and usually tells them the real price of the services being purchased. A prostitute doesn’t impose hidden fees through inflation (we don’t generally give prostitutes the power to print money, but somehow we let Congress approve stimulus packages and spend money that doesn’t exist). A prostitute doesn’t increase the national debt (in fact, it is government, by keeping prostitution illegal, that increases the deficit in yet another way, by making income from prostitution outside of the system and not taxable).

[. . .]

Yet I’ve never heard of a prostitute that had to convince constituents that they wanted to get laid. I don’t recall prostitutes having to give speeches to persuade their constituents that the sex would be good for them and worth the price. Prostitutes have willing and eager constituents. Prostitutes might proposition men, advertise their wares, but they don’t have to force themselves on johns. Prostitutes don’t have to rape anyone.

Can the same be said of Congress?

Glenn, comparing prostitutes to Congress is insulting — to the prostitutes. Perhaps you owe them an apology.

Even parliamentarians have to watch what they say

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:28

A British member of parliament was investigated by the police after a complaint from a would-be British equivalent to one of our infamous Human Rights Commissions, for an ill-advised comparison of a burkha to a paper bag:

A race equality council was “outrageous” for complaining to police about criticism of the burka in a political debate, an MP said today.

Tory Philip Hollobone said he faced a police investigation after he dubbed the burka “the religious equivalent of going around with a paper bag over your head with two holes for the eyes”.

Northamptonshire Race Equality Council contacted police after the comment made during a parliamentary debate last month.

[. . .]

“There will be those who agree and those who disagree, and that is fine. What we cannot have in this country are MPs being threatened when they speak out on contentious issues.

“The judgment of the Northamptonshire Race Equality Council is quite wrong in speaking to police as they haven’t tried to engage in any debate.

“I have no criticism of the police — the police have behaved impeccably. But I do have huge criticisms of the Northamptonshire Race Equality Council, which is a taxpayer-funded organisation and should not be spending time trying to prosecute members of parliament. Their behaviour is outrageous.”

The fact that he’s an MP only makes this story more news-worthy, but it does illustrate just how circumscribed freedom of speech has become.

Anglo-Saxon hoard to stay in the Midlands

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:18

It’s been called the greatest archaeological discovery in Britain since the second world war, and it’ll now be permanently housed near where it was discovered. The Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent museums will share the artifacts, thanks to private fundraising and a major grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund:

A grant of £1,285,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) will keep the glittering treasures of the Staffordshire hoard, the most spectacular heap of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found, in the region where an amateur metal detector found it last summer after it spent 1,300 years buried in a nondescript field.

[. . .]

When the find was announced in September the news went round the world. The gold was found by Terry Herbert, a passionate amateur metal detector whose best previous find was a broken piece of medieval horse harness, on farmer Fred Johnson’s land near Lichfield in July. When Herbert had covered his dining room table with gold, and was becoming thoroughly alarmed at the scale of his find, he called in the experts. The archaeologists and forensic scientists who hit the field – under the cover story from the local police that they were investigating a murder – found most of the pieces just below the surface, and some tangled in clumps of grass which had grown up through the delicate filigree gold: eventually they retrieved 2.5kg of silver and 5kg of gold. One gold-and-garnet Anglo-Saxon sword pommel would be regarded as a find of international importance: there were scores in the hoard, along with unique and enigmatic objects still baffling the archaeologists such as the wriggling gold serpents, and a biblical inscription on a strap of gold folded in half like a shirt collar.

Starkey said: “These are pieces from the period which we were brought up to call the dark ages, and they prove that it was no such thing. When the Normans invaded in 1066, they may have been better organised chaps — but it wasn’t that they were the civilised ones invading a primitive backwater, they came because they were desperate to get their hands on the wealth of Harold’s England.”

Earlier posts on this discovery here and here.

In contrast to my usual “the government has no business doing x” attitude, this is actually something in which I think the government has a valid role to play, and this is the sort of thing they should be doing in cases like this: paying a fair market value (rather than the usual governmental response, which is to expropriate, tax, or regulate).

Stimulus did little, private sector did much more

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:09

Despite all the expensive ads (especially noticeable during the Vancouver Olympic coverage), it wasn’t the federal government’s stimulus package that has been creating jobs: it was the private sector:

Canada’s economic fortunes have seen a dramatic turnaround in the last year, but according to a new study by one of the country’s leading think-tanks, it had little to do with the federal government’s $47.2-billion Economic Action Plan.

The Fraser Institute released a study Tuesday that found that government stimulus packages contributed only 0.2 percentage points to the rise in GDP between the second and third quarter of 2009 and nothing between the third and fourth quarter.

The group found that it was private-sector investment and increased exports that were the driving forces behind the change in GDP growth.

“Although the federal government has repeatedly claimed credit for Canada’s improved economic performance in the second half of 2009, Statistics Canada data show that government spending and investment in infrastructure had a negligible effect on the country’s improved economic growth,” said the Fraser Institute’s senior economist, Niels Veldhuis.

Here is the news release from the Fraser Institute.

This shouldn’t be a surprise: the stimulus was, and continues to be, a media exercise much more than it was an economic plan. As with any outcry in the mass media, the government had to be seen to be doing something, regardless of the likely success. The illusion of positive motion was necessary, and the federal government knows it has little wiggle room as far as the mainstream media is concerned — doing nothing was not going to be an acceptable choice, even if doing nothing was the “correct” response.

The government can’t really “create” jobs — although it certainly can destroy ’em — most of the jobs “created” in response to government funding are going to go away as soon as that funding dries up. There’s no economic justification for them to exist, absent the stimulus money. If there was an economic justification, private employers would have created them (where not hindered by government action of one form or another, that is).

The increase in public sector employment is unsustainable: the money to pay salaries and benefits (ahem), training, equipment, and facilities all has to be taxed from individuals and companies. The more public sector jobs, the greater the drain on the private sector. The greater the burden placed on the private sector, the slower the growth of the economy. As you approach the “break even” point, where the private sector can no longer fund all the demands from the public sector, the economy gets more and more sluggish — no sane private employer is going to expand business if there’s no profit to be made. No expansion means no new jobs.

It might be possible for us all to live by “taking in one another’s laundry”, but it’s not possible for us all to live by approving permission forms, having meetings, and bureaucratic empire-building.

The Canadian “flavour” of free speech

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:15

Marni Soupcoff hits the nail on the head with this observation:

Do Canadians understand freedom of expression? For several years, I’ve been arguing that the majority of them don’t — that despite freedom of speech’s prominent place in the Charter, they think it means the ability to say critical things provided these things don’t offend or upset anybody. Protest away, as long as you don’t actually rock the boat.

It’s part of that notorious “Canadian nice” thing: we’re so terribly afraid of offending someone that we’ve empowered the state to monitor and “correct” our speech and behaviour. We like the idea of free speech, but we also undercut the spirit by carving out exceptions to ensure that free speech is not free to offend or insult or demean the listener (or bystanders, or people totally unconnected to the conversation).

This is the genesis of our “hate speech” legislation, which legally defines certain kinds of speech as being so harmful that the use must be proscribed. We appear to fear the use of certain words and phrases as much as if they were literal clubs or bludgeons or some other kind of blunt instrument. In other words, we think it worse to hear offensive speech than to be physically threatened with bodily harm.

This is why the University of Ottawa’s François Houle not only felt it necessary to warn Ann Coulter about our draconian speech laws, but almost certainly felt that without such a warning, those laws were likely to be put into motion. The unspoken but hardly concealed subtext is that we recognize that Americans are more mature than Canadians: they can hear those horrible, horrible words without taking damage or harm.

What initially sounds like another example of Canadian smugness turns out to be an example of Canadian inferiority. Again.

Another sign of modernization or just window-dressing?

Filed under: China, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:45

China has been actively modernizing their military forces for the last couple of years, including not only new designs in equipment, but also doctrinal changes in how those forces go about doing their jobs. The generals seem to have finally decided that moving away from the Mao-era massed infantry is necessary, as Korean War tactics won’t prevail against an opponent with modern equipment. A minor name change is a way-marker for all the other military changes happening:

Without any fanfare, China has changed the names of its armed forces. Gone are the PLA (Peoples Liberation Army) prefix for the navy (PLAN) and air force (PLAAF). It’s now just the Chinese Army, Chinese Navy and Chinese Air Force. Since there was no official announcement, there was no explanation for why the old PLA prefix was dropped. The PLA was the original armed forces, founded in 1927, of the Chinese Communist Party. This force was initially known as the Chinese Red Army. After World War II, the PLA name was formally adopted for all the armed communist armed forces.

If nothing else, it will make future reports on the Chinese military sound less like propaganda reels from the 1950s.

Post-traumatic stress in soldiers

Filed under: Health, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:35

Strategy Page looks at the rising rate of reported Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the forces engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq:

As expected the U.S. Army is beginning to see more widespread effects from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). There are two main indicators. The suicide rate, which has gone from 9 per 100,000 troops in 2001, to 23 last year, gets most of the media attention. The less noticed indicator, which impacts a lot more people, is the use of anti-stress medications. These have gone up 76 percent since 2001. About 17 percent of all troops now take these drugs, including six percent of those in combat zones. In 2001, the troops used these drugs to about the same degree as the civilian population (ten percent.) The impact of these drugs, especially in combination, can be unpredictable. The army is still waiting to see how this increased use of anti-stress medications will play out. This is all unknown territory.

[. . .]

Nearly a century of energetic effort to diagnose and treat PTSD (including much recent attention to civilian victims, via accidents or criminal assault), had made it clear that most troops eventually got PTSD if they were in combat long enough. During World War II, it was found that, on average, 200 days of combat would bring on a case of PTSD for American troops. After World War II, methods were found to delay the onset of PTSD (more breaks from combat, better living conditions in the combat zone, prompt treatment when PTSD was detected). That’s why combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan often sleep in air conditioned quarters, have Internet access, lots of amenities, and a two week vacation (anywhere) in the middle of their combat tour. This has extended their useful time in combat, before PTSD sets in. No one is yet sure what the new combat days average is, and new screening methods are an attempt to find out. But more troops appear to be hitting, or approaching, the limits.

Weird

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:20

“Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” from Aaron Paul

QotD: The future of Obamacare

Filed under: Health, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:14

There will be court challenges to Obamacare but I doubt if they will be entirely successful. I further find it unlikely that the GOP, if they achieve majority status again, will be able to repeal it. Perhaps a combination of the two but that may be the most unlikely scenario at all.

Prediction? In five years, the Republican party will be embracing Obamacare and will be running on a platform that boasts they are the best party to manage it efficiently.

Rick Moran, “NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE REFORM DONE”, Right Wing Nuthouse, 2010-03-22

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