Quotulatiousness

August 21, 2009

For fans of The Clash

Filed under: Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:34

Today only, you can download the Sandinista Project for free:

Joe Strummer of the Clash would have been 57 today. So today seems like a good day to give Clash fans a present.

It’s been two years. Does anyone remember The Sandinista Project?

In May 2007, Abe Bradshaw and the crazy geniuses at 2 Minutes 59 Records let me put out a borderline-insane track-by-track tribute to the Clash’s Sandinista!, with a different artist performing each of the album’s 36 songs. (You can read Abe’s version of the origin myth here.) We received mostly positive reviews from publications ranging from The New York Times to Pasadena Weekly, although someone told me that Robert Christgau hated it. More important, it was a great experience: I got to work with many of my favorite performers and create something.

The Sandinista Project is free for a day

H/T to BoingBoing for the link.

Am I a sexist for saying I favour this?

Filed under: Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

By way of The Register. At risk of being labelled as a sexist, I think GoTopless (probably NSFW in most workplaces) is a worthy effort:

Welcome to GoTopless.org! – We are a US organization, claiming that women have the same constitutional right to be bare chested in public places as men.

[. . .]

Why a National GoTopless Protest day? Gotopless.org claims constitutional equality between men and women on being topless in public. Currently, women who dare to be topless in public in the US are repeatedly being arrested, fined, humiliated, criminalized. On SUNDAY AUGUST 23RD, 2009, topless women will rally in great numbers across the USA to protest this gross inequality in the law and will demand that they be granted the fundamental right to be topless where men already enjoy that right according to the 14th amendment of the Constitution (please see our exact legal argument on the right to be topfree for women under “14th amendment” in news section)

It’s legal here in Ontario, although I don’t think I’ve seen anyone taking advantage of the newly established right since the day after it became legal . . .

However, my support for this particular effort in no way means I’m in favour of the Raelian agenda . . . which is, um, spacey in the extreme.

QotD: Heroin as a treatment for addiction

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:53

Stripped of the medicalese, what the researchers found is that if you give heroin addicts heroin, they will keep coming back for more. They will also be less likely to buy heroin on the street or commit crimes to support their habit. These findings, similar to the results of European studies, are not exactly surprising. The puzzling thing is that we’re asked to pretend that heroin is a “treatment” for heroin addiction. “Study Backs Heroin to Treat Addiction,” says the headline over a New York Times story that begins, “The safest and most effective treatment for hard-core heroin addicts who fail to control their habit using methadone or other treatments may be their drug of choice, in prescription form.”

What the study actually shows is that the problems associated with heroin addiction are largely caused by prohibition, which creates a black market in which prices are artificially high, quality is unreliable, and obtaining the drug means risking arrest and associating with possibly violent criminals. The drug laws also encourage injection by making heroin much more expensive that it would otherwise be and foster unsanitary, disease-spreading injection practices by treating syringes and needles as illegal drug paraphernalia. When you take these dangers out of the equation, regular use of heroin is safe enough that it can qualify as a “treatment” dispensed by men in white coats. That rather startling fact should cause people to question not just current addiction treatment practices but the morality of trying to save people from themselves by making their lives miserable.

Jacob Sullum, “This Just In: Heroin Addicts Like Heroin”, Hit and Run, 2009-08-21

Stratford: Canada’s gayest town?

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:36

It’s definitely the slow news season: the Ottawa Sun summarizes an article in Outlooks magazine entitled “The Gayest Small Town in Canada”:

Travel editor Randall Shirley came to see a show or two and met with some of Stratford’s prominent gay and lesbian residents and business owners, some of whom were featured in the article.

The piece — “The Gayest Small Town in Canada” — appears in the July/August edition in print and online. The national magazine is geared toward the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered (GLBT) population.

Shirley wasn’t surprised to find a relatively large gay and lesbian community in the southwestern Ontario city of 30,000, but what did surprise him was the openness he found there.

“Growing up in a small town myself, I know how difficult it could be. I was just really surprised at how open they are about it,” he said from his Vancouver home.

He noted the artistic community connected to the theatre is a draw for GBLT visitors but Stratford is unique because it’s in the middle of a rural area.

Okay, perhaps Ottawa is far enough removed from Stratford that this might come as a surprise to Sun readers, but really? Stratford has two industries: pig farming and the Festival. Historically, the theatre has been one of the few areas where being gay was not an automatic career-destroyer. Stratford’s theatre industry is huge for the town … it literally put the place on the map. Put these facts together, and you’re surprised that the town is gay friendly (or, at the very least, nowhere near as gay-hostile as a typical small town in a rural area)?

More on DNA as a crime-fighting tool

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:10

Charles Stross looks at the situation in Britain:

NDNAD, the UK’s National DNA Database, run by the Forensic Science Service under contract to the Home Office contains DNA “fingerprints” for lots of folk — 5.2% of the population as of 2005, or 3.1 million people. Some of them are criminals; some of them are clearly innocent, but were either charged with a crime and subsequently found not guilty, or had the misfortune to be detained but not subsequently charged (that is: they’re not even suspects). The Home Office takes a rather draconian view of the database’s utility, and objects strenuously to attempts to remove the records of innocent people from it — it took threats of legal action before they agreed to remove the parliamentary Conservative Party’s Immigration spokesman from the database (which he’d been added to in the course of a fruitless investigation into leaked documents that had embarrased the government) — so if senior opposition politicians have problems with it, consider the prospects for the rest of us.

In use …

Whenever a new profile is submitted, the NDNAD’s records are automatically searched for matches (hits) between individuals and unsolved crime-stain records and unsolved crime-stain to unsolved crime-stain records — linking both individuals to crimes and crimes to crimes. Matches between individuals only are reported separately for investigation as to whether one is an alias of the other. Any NDNAD hits obtained are reported directly to the police force which submitted the sample for analysis.

Now, this in itself is merely a steaming turd in the punchbowl of the right to privacy: but its use as a policing intelligence tool is indisputable. While there are some very good reasons for condemning the way it’s currently used (for example, its use in the UK has sparked accusations of racism), I can’t really see any future government forgoing such a tool completely; a DNA database of some kind is too useful. So what interests me here is the potential for future catastrophic failure modes.

Now that we’re pretty certain that DNA evidence can be easily faked, the focus of how it can be used in investigations must shift from “presence proving guilt” to “absence implying innocence”.

The Caster Semenya furor

Filed under: Sports — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:56

Over at the Daily Mail, there’s a surprisingly comprehensive article on the debate over Caster Semenya’s gender:

At first thought, it seems strange that the South African runner Caster Semenya needs to take a sex test to determine whether she is indeed a woman — or a man, as rumours suggest.

One would imagine that sex is something fairly clear-cut: that you are either one or the other.

It seems even stranger to discover that the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) says that the tests are ‘extremely complex’, and that the results will not be known for days, even weeks.

Again, this seems to run contrary to common sense. Surely, one would think, determining one’s sex is as simple as removing one’s underwear and taking a look.

In fact, it can be rather more complicated than that. It is not generally appreciated that gender in humans — and many other species, too — is not just a binary affair, a simple case of being male or female.

While the vast majority of people are clearly either a man or a woman, many others are somewhere between the two — often with tragic consequences.

Indeed, while people have been making jokes for decades about burly, allegedly female shot putters and javelin throwers, who turn out — after often humiliating and invasive ‘investigations’ — really to be men, the fact is that such cases do not always involve intentional deception, and can result from true biological ambiguity.

H/T to Ghost of a Flea, who says “Ban all sports or award points for freakishness”.

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