Quotulatiousness

May 28, 2013

Breaking new (legal) trails

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:10

Colby Cosh on the fascinating attempt by former Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Brian Burke to sue his alleged defamers on the internet:

Question: if you can defame someone on the internet, should they be able to sue you over the internet? Grouchy former Leafs GM Brian Burke intends to find out. His lawyers are set to appear in B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver today, where they will argue that Burke should be able to serve notice of his defamation lawsuit against pseudonymous members of various internet forums by means of those forums themselves. “Ding! You’ve… got… mail.”

Early commentary on Burke’s lawsuit over claims he had an affair with a broadcaster was focused on the difficulty of tracking down internet anonymice and serving them with the right papers. The established pathway is to go through internet service providers to get them to disclose the identities behind IP addresses — but privacy-conscious tech firms don’t like to give up that info without a court order, and if Johnny Flapgums did not happen to post from home or work, a plaintiff is more or less out of luck anyway. In an unforeseen development, Burke is now asking the court to let him sue internet usernames as usernames, notifying the users of the action through the personal-messaging apparatus of the sites on which they posted their allegedly scurrilous comments.

If Burke succeeds with today’s motion, defendants such as “CamBarkerFan” and “Slobberface” will be forced into a tricky choice between fighting the lawsuit, and thus exposing themselves to a verdict, or laying low and allowing a default judgment to be entered against them, thus exposing themselves to the risk of being identified and penalized later without any chance of a defence.

Toronto and class snobbery

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:47

Eric Andrew-Gee explains just why the “great and good” of Toronto’s self-consciously progressive “elite” are appalled over Rob Ford — it’s class snobbery colouring everything:

It isn’t Doug Ford’s drug vending that has the city gasping and reaching for the smelling salts. The thing that really shocks the haute bourgeoisie of downtown Toronto is how tacky the Fords seem. I mean, gold chains?

Don’t get me wrong: you can fault the Fords for plenty on the merits alone. But it’s their style that really rankles. For many, it feels like The Beverly Hillbillies have taken over at City Hall.

At first, this seems incongruous with the Fords’ enormous wealth. The family label business is worth millions. Rob and Randy Ford drive Cadillac Escalades. How could such rich people be the subject of classist snobbery?

Because class isn’t really about wealth. George Orwell knew as much in 1945, when he wrote, “Anyone who pays attention to class differences at all would regard an army officer with £1000 a year as socially superior to a shopkeeper with £2000 a year.” This holds more or less true in Canada today. The Fords are the shopkeepers with £2000 a year. For all their wealth and power, they remain members of the petit bourgeois, the lower middle class. Their status is inscribed into everything they do, not least their drug scandals.

[. . .]

The fact is, Rob and Doug Ford are hosers. They say “eh?” They say, “Hooooly Christ!” when they walk into cameras. It’s not hard to imagine them saying “friggin.’” They are “branded on the tongue,” as Orwell put it — their accents are just indelibly hoserish. It’s hard to describe, but imagine the middle of their sentences reaching a high, squeaky pitch of incredulity, then descending to a thudding, exhaling indignation: “You hit me with a camera.” “Jeeez, eh?”

Even removing the filter of their Doug-and-Bob-MacKenzie accents, the Ford diction often conveys the family’s class origin in a way that makes left-wing elites either giggle or retch. Take one representative example from Doug Ford’s Global News interview, transcribed verbatim. The whole thing needs a big, meta, square-bracketed sic: “Their allegations were unfounded, unnamed sources, and, is that the best the Globe and Mail has? Is that the best, thirty years ago? They wanna go back when I was in high school? Come on Jackson: gimme a break.”

H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.

Unseemly worship of the military state

Filed under: History, Liberty, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:21

L. Neil Smith received one of the many email chain letters from a conservative acquaintance about “thanking a veteran” and indulged in a bit of fisking:

So with all that in mind, let’s consider the Memorial Day claims my friend sent to me, and I can only hope he’ll be my friend after this.

“It is the veteran, not the preacher, who has given us freedom of religion.”

The truth is that neither the veteran nor the preacher ever gave us such a right, it is ours, under natural law, the very moment we are born. It can certainly be suppressed, and has been other places in the world, and here, as well — ask any Mormon — but this government hasn’t fought a war to defend any American’s rights since the Revolution.

“It is the veteran, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press.”

Once again, not so. When the War of 1812 “broke out” — the U.S. was attempting to bestow the blessings of American life upon Canada whether Canada wanted them or not — and people objected (New England nearly seceded over it) people were accused of “sedition”, a charge that should be impossible under the First Amendment, and thrown in jail.

Later, Abraham Lincoln used the Army to smash the printing presses of his political opposition and intimidate voters during the 1864 election.

“It is the veteran, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.”

Freedom of speech and of the press are natural rights, as well, which governments in general, and the American government in particular, have always regarded as a threat. If any single individual can be thanked for it, that honor belongs to John Peter Zenger (look him up). At some point, the establishment press became so corrupt, concealing or excusing government atrocities, that they became a part of government, and a new press — the Internet — had to evolve in its place.

“It is the veteran, not the campus organizer, who has given us freedom to assemble.”

Having once been a “campus organizer” myself, I am well aware how little we had to do with defending the right to assemble, and how very badly it was done. But please, don’t be ridiculous. Two words: Kent State.

“It is the veteran, not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial.”

Actually, to the extent that any human institution is responsible for the right to a fair trial, it’s a thousand years of English Common Law.

“It is the veteran, not the politician, Who has given us the right to vote.”

A dubious gift, at best, but it didn’t come from any politicians or veterans. Thank the Greeks, and don’t forget the Basques, whose methods of self-government were consciously imitated by the Founding Fathers.

I like and admire veterans, My dad was a vet and his dad before him. But name any war the United States ever fought to defend American rights.

Charles Joseph Minard died for our (infographic) sins

Filed under: History, Media, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Do you remember seeing the amazingly informative diagram by Charles Joseph Minard on the statistical side of Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow:

Charles Joseph Minard's famous graph showing the decreasing size of the Grande Armée as it marches to Moscow (brown line, from left to right) and back (black line, from right to left) with the size of the army equal to the width of the line. Temperature is plotted on the lower graph for the return journey (Multiply Réaumur temperatures by 1¼ to get Celsius, e.g. −30 °R = −37.5 °C)

Charles Joseph Minard’s famous graph showing the decreasing size of the Grande Armée as it marches to Moscow (brown line, from left to right) and back (black line, from right to left) with the size of the army equal to the width of the line. Temperature is plotted on the lower graph for the return journey (Multiply Réaumur temperatures by 1¼ to get Celsius, e.g. −30 °R = −37.5 °C)

That is what a really good infographic can be. But, as Tim Harford points out, they’re not all that good:

Camouflage usually means blending in. That wasn’t an option for the submarine-dodging battleships of a century ago, which advertised their presence against an ever-changing sea and sky with bow waves and smokestacks. And so dazzle camouflage was born, an abstract riot of squiggles and harlequin patterns. It wasn’t hard to spot a dazzle ship but the challenge for the periscope operator was quickly to judge a ship’s speed and direction before firing a torpedo on a ponderous intercept. Dazzle camouflage was intended to provoke misjudgments, and there is some evidence that it worked.

Now let’s talk about data visualisation, the latest fashion in numerate journalism, albeit one that harks back to the likes of Florence Nightingale. She was not only the most famous nurse in history but the creator of a beautiful visualisation technique, the “Coxcomb diagram”, and the first woman to be elected as a member of the Royal Statistical Society.

Data visualisation creates powerful, elegant images from complex data. It’s like good prose: a pleasure to experience and a force for good in the right hands, but also seductive and potentially deceptive. Because we have less experience of data visualisation than of rhetoric, we are naive, and allow ourselves to be dazzled. Too much data visualisation is the statistical equivalent of dazzle camouflage: striking looks grab our attention but either fail to convey useful information or actively misdirect us.

[. . .]

Those beautiful Coxcomb diagrams are no exception. They show the causes of mortality in the Crimean war, and make a powerful case that better hygiene saved lives. But Hugh Small, a biographer of Nightingale, argues that she chose the Coxcomb diagram in order to make exactly this case. A simple bar chart would have been clearer: too clear for Nightingale’s purposes, because it suggested that winter was as much of a killer as poor hygiene was. Nightingale’s presentation of data was masterful. It was also designed not to inform but to persuade. When we look at modern data visualisations, we should remember that.

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