Quotulatiousness

July 25, 2012

Michael Bloomberg’s call for a national police strike

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:45

At the Simple Justice blog, Scott H. Greenfield explains why New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is so very, very wrong to call for a national police strike:

There are some virtues that come with having a billionaire mayor. He’s not easy to bribe, for example, so you know whatever comes out of his mouth does so honestly. And therein lies the downside when he says something like this:

    “I don’t understand why the police officers across this country don’t stand up collectively and say, ‘We’re going to go on strike. We’re not going to protect you. Unless you, the public, through your legislature, do what’s required to keep us safe,’” Bloomberg said on CNN Monday night.

Within this idiotic comment are two fallacious assumptions. The first is the “war on cops” tripe, that there is a trend against cops, putting them at increasing risk of harm from gun-toting criminals. Radley Balko has beaten that myth to death. Mike Riggs too. It’s a good myth to further a public agenda in favor of order at the expense of law, but it just doesn’t hold water.

The second, however, is the mayor’s encouragement to police to take the First Rule of Policing a step further than ever before, to use their singular authority to hold a nation hostage. This is perhaps the most dangerous idea Bloomberg could promote.

[. . .]

Ironically, the only means of staying this armed takeover, should the police ever come to recognize that they have the power if not the authority to seize control, would be guns in the hands of citizens. No rational person could want it to come to such a battle.

So while a billionaire mayor may be above the influences that drive mere mortals, they sometimes utter the most insanely foolish things that take us to a place we must never go. The day the police, as a whole, think they can use their posts to take our government hostage is the day every citizen will need to dust off his arms. The day a billionaire mayor suggests that the police should use their power to influence our government is a day he’s been in office too long.

Update: Walter Olson at the Cato@Liberty blog:

It’s enough to make you wonder whether Bloomberg is secretly a passionate admirer of the Second Amendment and keeps saying things this outrageous from a covert intent to sabotage the case for gun control.

Chris Selley on the burka’d bottles

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:56

Following up from yesterday’s amusing story about the Sun News stunt of dressing an underaged teen in a burka and successfully buying booze at the LCBO, Chris Selley gets to the real reason the stunt worked:

Debates about face coverings in this country almost always boil down to policy, not people. Should people wearing burkas have to unveil to vote? We went pretty crazy about that issue, a while back, and probably will some day again (especially if Sun News has anything to say about it). Should Quebecers have to unveil to take a government-run French class? Quebec went a bit crazy about that, and eventually said yes. What about to board an airplane, or to get a driver’s license? Controversies along these lines pop up every now and again and get thrown into the coliseum of Canadian debate, where the right’s and the left’s gladiators battle it out.

Meanwhile, off to the side, you’ll usually find representatives of the miniscule number of Canadian women who actually wear burkas explaining that they have no problem unveiling in circumstances where it is logically required. But they’re largely ignored, because the left wants to fight for a woman’s right to wear the veil (even if she doesn’t feel it’s being impinged upon) while the right wants to take that right away (on grounds of “liberating” Muslim women).

[. . .]

Again, this wasn’t the Sun’s angle. But it seems reasonable to speculate that those LCBO clerks looked at the veiled customer, realized what they ought to do, and didn’t do it for fear of winding up in their supervisor’s office, the newspaper or some kind of human rights court. That’s not healthy at all, and there’s no point blaming Muslim immigrants for it. In pursuing a harmonious, egalitarian, rights-conscious society, longer-established Canadians may have created a fear of making reasonable requests of fellow citizens who aren’t superficially “like” us. That drives people apart, not together. It perpetuates precisely the sort of nonsensical backlash that the Sun’s critics worry about.

Reason.tv: Fan fiction versus copyright

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

“It takes a big studio to make The Avengers, but it doesn’t necessarily take a big studio to write a piece of Avengers fan fiction,” says Georgetown University law professor and fan fiction advocate Rebecca Tushnet. “Big content companies largely recognize that fan activities are really good for them because they engage people.”

The growing popularity of fan fiction, a genre in which fans create their own stories featuring characters or settings from their favorite works of popular culture, raises thorny copyright issues. “Given how broad copyright is now, it’s now possible to say fan fiction is an infringing derivative work,” Tushnet explains. “In order to deal with that…we now talk about fair use, which allows people to make fair, limited uses of works without permission from the copyright owner.”

As a member of the Organization for Transformative Works, Tushnet works to defend fan fiction creators caught in the legal debate between protected intellectual property and fair use.

Smartphone swordfight: what could possibly go wrong?

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:06

Jacob Siegal reports on a new (but not publicly available) smartphone app:

FAR can accurately determine the distance between two smartphones by measuring the time it takes for one sound emitted from one phone to reach the speaker of another.

The first implementation of FAR is an application called SwordFight, which is exactly what it sounds like. Two smartphone owners stand across from each other, jabbing at each other’s phones in order to score a hit. A player has to strike within 15 centimeters to score, causing the other player to lose a point. Using FAR, along with the accelerometer and digital compass, the phones not only keep track of their distance from one another, but can determine which player is attacking, and which player has been struck.

Microsoft is dubbing this subgenre of gaming Mobile Motion Games, and it can only be accomplished with the supreme accuracy of the FAR sound-ranging scheme. Considering the mass hysteria in the gaming world surrounding motion devices, this project does not come as much of a surprise. Nonetheless, I still desperately want to wave an imaginary sword around for a few minutes and know for sure who won.

July 24, 2012

Quebec continues to strive to exclude Anglophones

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:54

A real head-scratcher in the Montreal Gazette: telephone staff at the Régie de l’assurance maladie du Québec (the Quebec health insurance board) are now required to assess callers’ language skills to determine if they actually require service in English.

Where before callers were given the option of service in English or French by way of a simple touch of the telephone keypad, it has now become more complicated. Now some people who would prefer to have the information given in English could be denied the service on the basis of a subjective judgment of their ability to speak French.

The way it works now is that calls to RAMQ are answered automatically in French, and callers are told that the agency first communicates with its clientele in French. Only after half a minute of silence is it mentioned that service in English is available by pressing 9. But wait: that doesn’t automatically get you service in English.

What it gets you is another recorded message, this time in English, informing you once more that the board prefers to deal with customers in French. The agents who subsequently come on the line do not speak English right away, even though the language of service chosen is English. No, the agents proceed in French, and are then required by the new policy to “use their judgment” to determine whether the caller speaks French well enough to be able to hold a conversation about health in French rather than English. Only if the caller fails that test will service in English be forthcoming.

LCBO sells booze to underaged teen in a burka

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:00

I foresee a rush of interest among teenage boys in temporarily cross-dressing as Muslim women:

Three liquor stores in the Greater Toronto Area recently sold booze to a 14-year-old boy whose identity was hidden because he was wearing a full-length burka and face veil at the time.

The teenager, clad in an Islamic female’s traditional garb of a burka, headscarf and facial covering, shopped in three different LCBO stores north of Toronto last Wednesday.

In each location, the Grade 8 student paid cash for a bottle of sambuca liqueur.

[. . .]

The stunt was co-ordinated and video recorded by Sun News host David Menzies, who has made a career out of lambasting Canada’s politically correct institutions.

Menzies said the unopened bottles — totalling just over $80 — were promptly taken from the teen at the day’s end but suggested the fact the boy was never asked to uncover his face or show photo identification at multiple store locations reveals a deeply ingrained reluctance on the part of Canadian institutions to challenge cultural practices, even when they conflict with broader societal goals such as preventing underage drinking. “The reason why you have to unveil is that is photo ID is absolutely useless if you don’t see the actual face of the person,” said Menzies, adding he came up with the idea after an acquaintance told him he had seen this happen at various LCBO locations.

JourneyQuest S2E3: Mewling Monkey Talk

Filed under: Gaming, Humour — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:23

Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, welcomes you to the Olympic Games

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:12

H/T to Nick Packwood for the link.

The racist history of gun control

Filed under: History, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:55

Brendan O’Neill wonders how gun control — traditionally a racist and xenophobic attempt to disarm blacks and foreigners — became a left-wing policy:

One of the great mysteries of modern politics is how gun control came to be seen as a natural Left-wing cause. Following the horrific shootings in Aurora, Denver, the usual lineup of Left-liberal activists and commentators have pleaded, for the ten thousandth time, for America to get rid of its stupid constitutional guarantee of the right to bear arms and to clamp down on gun ownership. This is the default setting of virtually every observer who considers himself of the Left, particularly those outside of America, who love nothing more than to look down their long noses at the Wild West-style, gun-wielding, blood-spattered mess they believe modern America to be.

Which is all a bit weird, because for years — for two centuries, in fact — gun control was a largely Right-wing, reactionary campaign issue, not a Left-wing one. The fact that it has now been adopted by Leftists is very revealing indeed.

[. . .]

In the modern period, too, there was a hugely reactionary bent to gun-control campaigns. In the early 20th century new laws, such as the 1911 Sullivan Law in New York City, were passed to prevent the huge influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe from getting their hands on guns. As Gary Kleck puts it in his book Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, gun control was anything but a liberal cause: “In the 19th and early 20th century, gun-control laws were often targeted at blacks in the south and the foreign-born in the north.”

The Gun Control Act of 1968 was ostensibly passed in response to assassinations of Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King, but its real targets were inner-city black communities where there had been violent riots for three summers running and where some black activists were beginning to arm themselves. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton, recognising that his liberal supporters were converting en masse to the cause of gun control, started to talk about the “evil” of assault rifles. Who tended to own assault rifles? “Drug dealers, street gang members and other violent criminals”, the Clinton adminstration said — long-recognised polite political codewords for blacks and Latinos.

Update: Dan Baum on the reduction in gun crime across the US by nearly half over the last two decades.

Among the many ways America differs from other countries when it comes to guns is that when a mass shooting happens in the United States, it’s a gun story. How an obviously sick man could buy a gun; how terrible it is that guns are abundant; how we must ban particular types of guns that are especially dangerous. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence responded to the news with a gun-control petition. Andrew Rosenthal of the New York Times has weighed in with an online column saying that “Politicians are far too cowardly to address gun violence . . . which keeps us from taking practical measures to avoid senseless shootings.”

Compare that to the coverage and conversation after Anders Behring Breivik murdered sixty-nine people on the island of Utøya in Norway, a year ago next Sunday. Nobody focused on the gun. I had a hard time learning from the news reports what type of gun he used. Nobody asked, “How did he get a gun?” That seemed strange, because it’s much harder to get a gun in Europe than it is here. But everybody, even the American media, seemed to understand that the heart of the Utøya massacre story was a tragically deranged man, not the rifle he fired. Instead of wringing their hands over the gun Breivik used, Norwegians saw the tragedy as the opening to a conversation about the rise of right-wing extremism in their country.

Rosenthal is wrong, by the way, that politicians haven’t addressed gun violence. They have done so brilliantly, in a million different ways, which helps explain why the rate of violent crime is about half what it was twenty years ago. They simply haven’t used gun control to do it. Gun laws are far looser than they were twenty years ago, even while crime is plunging — a galling juxtaposition for those who place their faith in tougher gun laws. The drop in violence is one of our few unalloyed public-policy success stories, though perhaps not for those who bemoan an “epidemic of gun violence” that doesn’t exist anymore in order to make a political point.

QotD: The totalitarian tendency

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

[…] This illustrates very well the totalitarian tendency which is implicit in the anarchist or pacificist vision of Society. In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by “thou shalt not”, the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by “love” or “reason”, he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.

George Orwell, “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels“, Polemic, September-October 1946.

July 23, 2012

China’s latest ploy in the South China Sea

Filed under: China, Military, Pacific — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:29

To cement Chinese claims to the vast majority of the South China Sea, a garrison is being established in the Paracel Islands:

China’s powerful Central Military Commission has approved the formal establishment of a military garrison for the disputed South China Sea, state media said, in a move which could further boost tensions in already fractious region.

The Sansha garrison would be responsible for “national defence mobilisation … guarding the city and supporting local emergency rescue and disaster relief” and “carrying out military missions”, the Xinhua news agency said on Sunday.

China has a substantial military presence in the South China Sea and the move is a further assertion of its sovereignty claims after it last month upped the administrative status of the seas to the level of a city, which it calls Sansha.

Sansha city is based on what is known in English as Woody Island, part of the Paracel Islands also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan.

The eternal Prime Minister

Filed under: Cancon, Government — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:53

The Globe and Mail is not usually so positive about Prime Minister Stephen Harper:

In Stephen Harper’s first cabinet, a rookie prime minister who had never run anything of any significance relied on powerful cabinet ministers in key portfolios: Stockwell Day at Public Safety, David Emerson at International Trade, Jim Flaherty at Finance, Chuck Strahl at Agriculture and Jim Prentice at Indian and Northern Affairs.

Apart from Mr. Flaherty, they’re all gone now. Mr. Harper’s critics are correct when they accuse him of running virtually a one-man government.

But it’s not easy. Mr. Harper is the hardest-working prime minister in living memory. Those who have watched him say he reads everything; he has a better grasp of the files than most of the ministers responsible for them. He involves himself intimately in the budget; Mr. Flaherty is already one of Canada’s longest-serving finance ministers, but he is far from sovereign in his portfolio.

The Prime Minister has gone from being an inexperienced newcomer in foreign affairs to one of the developed world’s longest-serving heads of government. He takes a personal interest in aboriginal affairs issues, in natural resources, in trade, in – well, you name it.

In short, Mr. Harper exercises near-total control over his government because it’s in his nature and because he can.

Disproportional British and Canadian combat casualties in Afghanistan

Filed under: Asia, Britain, Cancon, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:35

Although the total losses hide it, British and Canadian soldiers took higher casualty rates than Americans during combat in Afghanistan:

In the last year, British troops in Afghanistan have been getting killed at twice the rate (1,300 per 100,000 troops per year) as Americans during the height of the fighting in Iraq. Canadian troops, until they withdrew from combat, had an even higher rate of loss. But the U.S. has a lot more troops in Afghanistan. Thus total combat deaths since late 2001 are; U.S.-2,050, Britain-422 and Canada-158.

The British military describes “major combat” as an operation where losses (killed) were greater than 600 per 100,000. Thus only recently did British losses go north of 600. There are several reasons for these different death rates. For one thing, a higher proportion of British and Canadian troops in Afghanistan are in combat. The Americans handle a lot more of the support functions and thus a smaller proportion of the U.S. force is combat troops. Finally, the U.S. had more helicopters for moving troops and a much larger number of MRAP (bomb resistant vehicles) for troops moving on the ground.

[. . .]

Despite the higher casualty rates for the British and Canadians, the overall death rate for foreign troops in Afghanistan is still lower than it was in Iraq. In the last four years, foreign troops in Afghanistan lost about 300-400 dead per 100,000 troops per year. In Iraq, from 2004-7, the deaths among foreign troops ran at 500-600 per 100,000 per year. Since al Qaeda admitted defeat in Iraq four years ago, the U.S. death rate in Iraq has dropped to less than 200 dead per 100,000 troops per year within two years, and to nothing by the end of 2011 (as the last Americans troops left). Meanwhile, the rate in Afghanistan peaked at 400 dead per 100,000 troops in 2010 and has been declining ever since.

Guild Wars 2 final beta weekend, day three

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:42

This is the final beta weekend for Guild Wars 2, and I posted a daily journal of my experiences at GuildMag over the weekend. This is my entry for Sunday.

July 22, 2012

HMCS Victoria torpedoes and sinks US Navy ship!

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

The word “decommissioned” should appear in that headline. Details here: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=c51_1342677437

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