Quotulatiousness

August 29, 2012

Brendan O’Neill on the rape debate

Filed under: Britain, Law, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:09

Always willing to take a contrarian stand, Brendan O’Neill refutes the very common meme:

In the words of Salma Yaqoob of Galloway’s Respect party, “rape occurs when a woman has not consented to sex”. Or in the widely reported phrasing of a spokesperson for Rape Crisis, “Sex without consent is rape”.

This sounds correct. It seems simple yet right to assert that if a woman has not consented to sex, then rape has occurred.

But it is wrong. More than that, the idea that all “non-consensual sex is rape”, as Galloway himself has now said in his clarification of his defence of Assange, represents a dangerous rewriting of what rape really means.

Feminists always focus on the state of mind of the woman or women involved in an alleged rape and disregard the state of mind of the man.

This is a terrible error, because in order for rape to have occurred, it is not enough to prove that the woman did not consent; we must also surely prove that the man knows she did not consent, or was utterly reckless as to the question of her consent, and carried on regardless.

That is, rape must involve an intention on the part of the man to commit rape. The man must have a guilty mind — or what is referred to in law as mens rea — in the sense that he knows he is committing rape. In leaving out this key component of rape, feminists are not only undermining the meaning and gravity of this crime — they are also displaying a cavalier disregard for some of the key democratic principles of the modern legal system.

August 28, 2012

Last of my Guild Wars 2 pre-release journal entries

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:38

I started doing these short posts using my nom-de-gaming identity “Raphia Naon” at GuildMag during the first beta weekend event — partly because we needed something to keep the page active while everyone was busy playing in the beta test. I continued doing a daily entry for almost all the beta events and stress tests (I missed a few because they were scheduled at times I couldn’t take part). This is the final entry in that series, briefly talking about the last day of the headstart access period (the game is now on sale to the general public).

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JourneyQuest S2E7: Much to Discuss

Filed under: Gaming, Humour — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:35

Rehabilitating Florence Nightingale’s reputation

Filed under: Britain, Health, History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:31

History Today has a defence of the much-maligned Florence Nightingale:

Jamaican-born Mary Seacole (1805-81), voted top of the list of the 2004 ‘100 Great Black Britons’ poll, is now slated to replace Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) as the true ‘heroine’ of the Crimean War. She is to be honoured as no less than the ‘Pioneer Nurse’ with a massive statue to be erected at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. This in spite of the strong links between Nightingale and the hospital, her base for over 40 years. It was there she established the first secular school for nurses in 1860 with funds raised in her name for her work in the Crimean War during the conflict of 1854-56. The Nightingale School operated for over a century from the hospital, whose redesign in the 1860s Nightingale also influenced.

[. . .]

The campaign promoting Seacole over Nightingale builds on 30 years of books, articles and films denigrating the latter. While she always had detractors, the serious assault on Nightingale’s reputation can be dated to 1982, with the publication of the Australian historian F.B. Smith’s Florence Nightingale: Reputation and Power (Croom Helm, 1982). The next major hit came in 1998 with Florence Nightingale: Avenging Angel (Constable, 1998) by a retired management consultant Hugh Small, which argues that Nightingale was actually responsible for the high death rates of the Crimean War and had a nervous breakdown as a result when she supposedly recognised this. Neither claim is supported by any serious documentation. Social media goes even further: see Facebook ‘Florence Nightingale was a Murdering Bitch’, later renamed ‘Florence Nightingale: The World’s Worst Nurse’, where she is described as a ‘deluded power hungry bitch’, who ‘looks like an uptight bitch’, so that ‘the day she died’ was ‘the best thing that ever happened to the field of nursing’.

[. . .]

The French were the instigators of the Crimean War, sent more troops and were better prepared than the British. Their death rates were lower in the first year. But the British government learned from the commissions it sent out and made enormous changes. British death rates fell dramatically, from 23 per cent in the first winter to 2.5 per cent in the second — no greater than deaths among soldiers in peacetime barracks in London, as Nightingale proudly showed in a chart. In contrast, the French (lower) 11 per cent death rate in the first winter, rose to 20 per cent in the second winter. Since the French were late in publishing their statistics, neither Nightingale nor the royal commission could use them for comparison. However French doctors themselves credited the British reforms for their superior performance. Once they were properly cleansed and functioning Nightingale was proud of the Crimean hospitals. In her own charts she separated the two periods, before and after the sanitary and supply commissions, to emphasise the crucial role they played in reducing mortality.

Her analysis of what went wrong was widely accepted and led to major changes to health care in the British Army. The ‘Nightingale Fund’ raised in her honour for that work paid for the training school at St Thomas’, which led to raising nursing to the level of a profession throughout much of the world. Her experience of the war, and her reputation and research as a result of it, grounded all the social and public health work she did for the rest of her life. Her vision for health reform included bold statements, such as the belief that the poor should receive as good quality hospital care as private patients and warnings as to the dangers of hospital acquired infections. Nightingale, in short, is no mere historical figure. Her lamp should not be retired but shone brightly onto the hospital and health care problems of today.

A possible solution to Pakistan’s Taliban problem

Filed under: Asia, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:11

Strategy Page on recent developments in Pakistan over domestic terror groups and the Afghani Taliban:

There are currently 150,000 troops in the Pakistani tribal territories, and nearly 40,000 surrounding North Waziristan (an area of 4,700 square kilometers, with 365,000 people). North Waziristan has been surrounded since late 2009, but Pakistani generals have refused to go in and take down this terrorist refuge. Politicians have been under growing pressure from the West, especially the United States to do something about the continued terror attacks by what the Pakistanis call “bad Taliban”. These are mostly Pakistani Taliban who wants to establish a religious dictatorship in Pakistan. The Afghan Taliban, who wants to establish a similar government in Afghanistan are considered “good Taliban” (along with the minority of Pakistani Taliban who don’t want to overthrow the government.)

In the last two years, the Pakistani Taliban have also caused hundreds of casualties among pro-government tribesmen throughout the tribal territories, and it’s no secret that the army hires tribesmen and puts them in dangerous situations to minimize army casualties. The army cannot afford to lose the support of the loyal tribes up there. All this has put pressure on the army to eliminate the refuge the killers can flee to in North Waziristan. Several times, because of the demands of Pakistani and American politicians, the Pakistani generals have said they will consider advancing into North Waziristan. But it hasn’t happened yet. The most likely outcome to all this is a very special army operation in North Waziristan, one that will avoid doing too much damage to their terrorist friends, and just go after a few towns known to be terrorist (who attack Pakistan) hangouts. In other words, the army will put on a show, and hope that the intended audience (the United States) approves. Bad reviews will be bad news indeed. Then there’s the fact that there will be a lot of advance publicity for this operation, including details (in the Pakistani media) of which Pakistani brigade will go where, giving the terrorist groups plenty of time to get out of the way. This has happened before, and could happen again.

The bottom line is that the Pakistani military is not likely to attack its longtime and loyal terrorist allies (especially Haqqani Network) in North Waziristan, at least not as long as the elected politicians have no control over selecting the senior military leaders. The Pakistani military is a self-selected aristocracy that extorts a large chunk of the national wealth to sustain itself. More Pakistanis are looking at the military this way, especially in light how well serving and retired generals (and lower ranking officers) live. But the military has the firepower and few civilians are eager to take the troops on.

The Pakistani generals deny that there is any agreement with the Americans to shut down terrorist operations in North Waziristan in return for NATO action against Pakistani Taliban hiding out in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, in the last week, American air power appears to have done just that, killing several senior Pakistani Taliban leaders in their Afghan hideouts. Now the Americans are waiting for their Pakistani counterparts to do something in North Waziristan. This is one reason civilians in North Waziristan are fleeing their homes. They know how such deals work; you do a big favor for someone and there has to be payback. It’s the code of honor and must be observed. But maybe not. Officially, Pakistan opposes the American UAV patrols over North Waziristan and the hundreds of missile attacks on terrorists below. Pakistani politicians openly decry these attacks as violations of Pakistani sovereignty, while privately supporting these operations that kill Islamic terrorists the Pakistani security forces will not or cannot get to. It’s all a convenient hypocrisy.

What can Caesar’s Gallic War commentary tell us about Afghanistan?

Filed under: History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:10

According to this reading, lots and lots:

I finished Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War this weekend […] and a few things struck me:

a. The successful Roman counterinsurgency campaign in Gaul took eight years.

b. The enemies against which Rome fought were not a unitary actor, and neither were Rome’s allies.

c. Rome’s allies one summer were often Rome’s enemies by winter. And visa versa.

But the two things that made the biggest impression on me were the following:

d. Caesar was the commander for eight full years, and he enjoyed similar continuity among his subordinate commanders.

e. Caesar very rarely sent green units into the offensive. By the fourth and fifth year of the campaign, he is still making those legions which were the last to be raised in Italy responsible for guarding the freaking baggage. He relies over and over again on those legions — most especially the Tenth — that have proven themselves in combat in Gaul.

With Caesar’s commentaries in mind, I read Doug Ollivant’s lament about Gen. Joe Dunford. Gen. Dunford will be the fifteenth commander of NATO-ISAF in eleven years of combat in Afghanistan and the ninth U.S. commander in Afghanistan. Each of his subordinate commanders have rotated on an annual basis. Gen. Dunford — who is, by all accounts, an excellent officer and highly respected by his peers — has never served in Afghanistan.

The cultures, politics, tribes and peoples of Afghanistan are at least as complex as those of ancient Gaul, yet we Americans are so arrogant to think that we can send officers there with no experience and, owing to our superior knowledge of combat operations, watch them succeed. We will then send units which have never deployed to Afghanistan to partner with Afghan forces and wonder why they do not get along.

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

August 27, 2012

Lego is 80 years old

Filed under: Business, Europe, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:28

In The Register, Brid-Aine Parnell on the 80th birthday of one of the iconic toys of the 20th century:

Way back in 1932, Ole Kirk Kristiansen, a Danish joiner and carpenter, found he wasn’t making enough money from carpentry anymore and decided to try making and selling wooden toys instead. Although he didn’t know it yet, he was on his way to building the Lego company, which would eventually have some of the most recognisable and long-lasting toys in the world: bricks and yellow minifigurines.

[. . .]

According to that research, girls aren’t into Lego. Poul Schou, senior vice president of product group 2, told The Register that Lego was for boys, not girls, because although both sexes loved the larger preschool bricks of Duplo once the girls hit five, they weren’t interested in construction anymore.

“We have seen that girls seem to be less interested in continuing with our products when they get to four or five years old so we don’t really get them into the Lego system,” he said.

Here at Vulture Central, that seemed really odd. Not only did everyone in the office, regardless of gender, remember playing with and loving Lego throughout their childhood, for the most part, their kids, both boys and girls, love it as well.

[. . .]

Schou said that the company got “a lot of feedback from boys and girls”. The kids are encouraged to go online to talk about the products they buy and what age they are, and the boxes often include incentives to answer Lego survey questions as well.

Of course if girls aren’t buying Lego stuff, they won’t be answering any questions, which would be a kind of answer in itself (although whether the answer would be “Girls don’t like Lego” or “Girls don’t like surveys” would be hard to figure out).

Restarting the age of space

Filed under: Media, Space, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:24

sp!ked reposted an older article by James Woudhuysen on the long-term importance of space exploration and the stay-at-home attitudes that oppose further development of the “final frontier”:

One thing unites the critics of lunar exploration. Forty years after man first landed on the moon — on 20 July 1969 — they share a disdain for the grandeur of extra-terrestrial endeavour; for the scale of human ambition involved; for the very idea that human beings should climb into space, as up a mountain, ‘because it is there’.

I have no special preference for size, thrust during lift-off, or the traverse across vast distances. The development of the integrated circuit in the late 1950s, so important to the Apollo programme, was a tribute to miniaturisation rather than to high energy or physical scale. No, my admiration for both Saturn boosters and tiny electronics grows from a respect for open-ended curiosity, for human achievement, and for taking risks. With space travel, a lot of bravery was also at stake. And with both space and the development of semiconductors, there is much teamwork to celebrate — teamwork that, in the case of Apollo, involved not just three astronauts, but the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people.

[. . .]

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Finland and the dangers of being a company town

Filed under: Business, Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:09

I had no idea that Finland’s economy was so tightly tied to the fortunes of Nokia:

Nokia contributed a quarter of Finnish growth from 1998 to 2007, according to figures from the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (ETLA). Over the same period, the mobile-phone manufacturer’s spending on research and development made up 30% of the country’s total, and it generated nearly a fifth of Finland’s exports. In the decade to 2007, Nokia was sometimes paying as much as 23% of all Finnish corporation tax. No wonder that a decline in its fortunes — Nokia’s share price has fallen by 90% since 2007, thanks partly to Apple’s ascent — has clouded Finland’s outlook.

[. . .]

Strip these sorts of firms from the list and only one resembles Nokia: Taiwan’s Hon Hai, an electronics manufacturer. Yet Nokia made 27% of Finnish patent applications last year; the corresponding figure for Hon Hai was 8%. Although numbers are falling, Finland is home to the greatest number of Nokia employees; Hon Hai’s staff is mostly in China. It is a similar story with other firms. Sales of Nestlé, a consumer-goods company, weigh in at 15% of Swiss GDP but its share of Swiss jobs is punier than Nokia’s in Finland. Samsung, whose revenues are twice Nokia’s, has half its clout as a share of GDP: South Korea’s economy is more diversified. The importance of Nokia to Finland looks like a one-off.

US presidential election: one from column A or one from column B

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:00

Jesse Kline explains the lack of excitement among independent voters (those not formally registered as Democrats or Republicans) — they really aren’t being offered much of a choice between the top two candidates:

It would, of course, be unfair to blame Obama for a mess that has been created over decades by both political parties. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush presided over massive spending increases; Clinton and Bush II also increased regulation; while Congress has substantially increased the of new laws it passes on an annual basis since the early 1980s.

But Obama’s record in his first term is still dismal. For all his talk about creating jobs and improving the economy, Obama’s policies have only served to increase the cost of doing business and divert money from productive sectors of the economy to increase government spending. The only question is whether the Republicans can fix the fiscal mess they helped create.

To his credit, Mitt Romney has at least been talking about the regulatory burden the American economy faces. Paul Ryan is, likewise, one of the few politicians talking about entitlement reform.

But Romney has explicitly stated he will not use the Ryan budget as a template for his own economic policies — which he has left incredibly vague. And even the Ryan budget does little to cut real spending in the short term, partially because it does not cut military spending, which is arguably as big an issue as entitlement spending.

Not only are policy makers stuck in a catch-22 over how to prevent the economy from falling back into recession while staving off a looming debt crisis, the American people are also facing a similar conundrum in choosing the next president: Neither party has a track record to suggest it is willing and able to address the country’s serious economic issues, and neither is willing to work co-operatively in a political environment that is entrenched along partisan and ideological lines.

In spite of the way the term is hurled around, the common accusation of “racism” for anyone who doesn’t support Barack Obama has a slight kernel of truth about it: on the policy side, Obama and Romney are not very far apart at all. The two men are much more similar than different … except for race.

Central planning is always attractive to the ones who see themselves in charge

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

At the Why Nations Fail blog, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson explain that central planning is not just a Marxist idea:

Essentially central planning is not about the efficient allocation of economic resources, it is about control.

Central planning maximizes the extent of control that the state, and the people running the state, exercise. The desire to control others is a constant in history and is part and parcel of the construction of states. If the state can grab all the land and resources and control who and on what terms people get access to them, then this maximizes control, even if it sacrifices economic efficiency.

This sort of economic and political control — not Marxist ideology — is what central planning is all about. This is not to deny that Marxist ideology supported and legitimized central planning in several 20th-century societies. But it is to emphasize that the emergence and persistence of central planning is often a solution to the central economic and political problem of many elites: to control and extract resources from society.

The people who push for central planning may say they’re trying to solve a problem, but the problem they say they’re trying to solve is just an excuse. They really just want to gain control over you.

August 26, 2012

Vikings cut 15 players

Filed under: Football — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:15

NFL teams have to cut down their numbers to 53 before the start of the regular season. This is done in two stages, after the third preseason game, teams are only allowed to have 75 players on their roster (down from 90 allowed up to that point). The final cut down comes after the last preseason game. At the Star Tribune, Mark Craig has the list of players waived in the first cut:

Here are the players who were released today. Eleven of them are undrafted rookies:

Bridger Buche.............. G...................... R....... Eastern Michigan
Derrick Coleman............ RB..................... R................... UCLA
Grant Cook................. G...................... R............... Arkansas
Solomon Elimimian.......... LB..................... 1................. Hawaii
Corey Gatewood............. DB..................... R............... Stanford
Levi Horn.................. T...................... 2................ Montana
Anthony Jacobs............. DE..................... R.............. Minnesota
Kamar Jorden............... WR..................... R.......... Bowling Green
A.J. Love.................. WR..................... R.......... South Florida
Tyler Nielsen.............. LB..................... R................... Iowa
Ernest Owusu............... DE..................... R............. California
Tydreke Powell............. DT..................... R......... North Carolina
Chris Stroud............... CB..................... R... Webber International
Kerry Taylor............... WR..................... 1.......... Arizona State
Bryan Walters.............. WR..................... 2................ Cornell

Craig says there were “no surprises”, but a few of these players were certainly mentioned multiple times in the press coverage of training camp, especially Elmimian, Taylor, and Walters. This is probably a useful caution not to put too much stock in training camp reports: the reporters have to file stories — preferably interesting stories — so they’re looking for different things than the coaches are.

The final cuts have to be done by Friday night.

Neil Armstrong, RIP

Filed under: History, Space, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:37

From Buzz Aldrin, an official statement on the death of Neil Armstrong:

I am deeply saddened by the passing of my good friend, and space exploration companion, Neil Armstrong today. As Neil, Mike Collins and I trained together for our historic Apollo 11 Mission, we understood the many technical challenges we faced, as well as the importance and profound implications of this historic journey. We will now always be connected as the crew of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, yet for the many millions who witnessed that remarkable achievement for humankind, we were not alone.

Whenever I look at the moon I am reminded of that precious moment, over four decades ago, when Neil and I stood on the desolate, barren, yet beautiful, Sea of Tranquility, looking back at our brilliant blue planet Earth suspended in the darkness of space, I realized that even though we were farther away from earth than two humans had ever been, we were not alone. Virtually the entire world took that memorable journey with us. I know I am joined by many millions of others from around the world in mourning the passing of a true American hero and the best pilot I ever knew. My friend Neil took the small step but giant leap that changed the world and will forever be remembered as a historic moment in human history.

Google investigates their own in-house Gender Gap

Filed under: Business, Economics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Tim Worstall in Forbes on Google’s unique approach to narrowing the Gender Gap:

As we all know, because we’re reminded about it often enough in rather shrill voices, the gender gap is one of the more pernicious unfairnesses in our society. This idea that women only earn 77 cents to a $1 for men, don’t get the same promotions, are in fact discriminated against by society.

The thing is, the more people study this question the less and less it’s possible to see that there is in fact a gender gap. Or rather, a gender gap driven by discrimination. Do note that economists discriminate (sorry) between taste discrimination and rational discrimination. Taste discrimination would be where women were treated worse than men just because they are women. Akin to say the dreadful racism of the past: and we would all admit that there was indeed discrimination against women in the workplace in the past.

What is a great deal less certain is whether this taste discrimination still exists: of course, we’ll always be able to find examples of it, but does it exist in a general sense, across the economy? Many researchers think not: for when you add up the effects of rational discrimination then look at the gender gap there doesn’t seem to be much if any room left for that taste discrimination. Rational discrimination is things like, well, women and men do tend to self-segregate into different occupations. Some of which are higher paid than others. Men tend to be willing to take riskier jobs and thus earn a danger premium to their wages. Women tend to negotiate less hard for their wages or a promotion. And of course women do tend to be those who take career breaks to have and to raise children. Perhaps this shouldn’t be so but it is and it’s most certainly true that the largest contributor to the gender pay gap is not gender itself but the effects of motherhood.

This is all pretty well known in the academic literature. What Google has done is most unfair. It has entirely ignored the academic work, ignored the partisans of both sides, and actually gone and asked its own staff what’s going on.

August 25, 2012

Posting will be light for a few days

Filed under: Administrivia, Gaming — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:35

ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 2 will be released to the general public on Tuesday, but everyone who pre-purchased the game has early access to the servers today and for the next two days. I’ll be spending a lot of time in the virtual world of Tyria as a result.

If you happen to be in-game, my main character name is Raphia Naon and I’m on the Darkhaven server.

Update: My first day’s gaming report is now posted at GuildMag.

Update the second: The next day’s activity is rounded up here.

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