Quotulatiousness

June 19, 2013

Even the Chinese statistics office couldn’t accept these numbers

Filed under: Bureaucracy, China, Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:57

In the Wall Street Journal‘s ChinaRealtime section, an amusing story about a local Chinese government whose official statistics were so unrealistic that the central statistics office called them out on it:

It’s typically advisable not to accept Chinese economic data at face value – as even the country’s own premier will tell you. Figures on everything from inflation and industrial output to energy consumption and international trade often don’t seem to gel with observation and sometimes struggle to stack up when compared with other indicators.

How the figures are massaged and by whom is as much a secret as the real data itself. But in an unusual move, the National Bureau of Statistics – clearly frustrated with the lies, damn lies – has recently outed a local government it says was involved in a particularly egregious case of number fudging, providing rare insight into just how we’re being deceived.

According to a statement on the statistics bureau’s website dated June 14 (in Chinese), the economic development and technology information bureau of Henglan, a town in southern China’s Guangdong province, massively overstated the gross industrial output of large firms in the area.

[. . .]

The statistics bureau doesn’t say why Henglan inflated its industrial output numbers. But indications that a local economy is sagging could reflect poorly on the prospects for promotion of local officials, and China’s southern provinces have been particularly hard hit by the global slowdown in demand for the country’s exports. Factories have closed, moving inland and overseas in search of cheaper labor, denting local government revenues.

“When governments are looking to burnish their track record, that can put the local statistics departments in a very awkward situation,” said a commentary piece that ran Tuesday in the Economic Daily (in Chinese), a newspaper under the control of the State Council, China’s cabinet. The article said that one of the biggest obstacles to ensuring accurate data is that the agencies responsible for crunching the numbers aren’t independent from local authorities. Moreover, it argues that penalties for producing fake data were too mild to act as a deterrent.

June 18, 2013

Radley Balko’s new book

Filed under: Books, Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:17

I’m a fan of Radley Balko’s work (I quote him and hat-tip him a fair bit), so I’m looking forward to reading his new book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, The Militarization of America’s Police Forces. Here’s a glowing review from Scott Greenfield:

The book, published by Public Affairs and scheduled for release on July 9, 2013, starts at the beginning, taking us from the days when Americans policed themselves to the birth of the occupation of policing. While I was well aware of Radley’s persistence and acumen at chronicling current events, I never realized what a thorough researching her is. The history of policing is remarkably impressive.

It’s critical to appreciate the history of policing, to understand that what we now see as normal and inescapable wasn’t always the case. For most of our history, this country did not have a group of people with shields and guns who wandered the streets ordering people about. The fall from grace, If you perceive it as I do, came fast and hard.

American attitudes toward police were built on images of Andy Griffith, strolling the streets of Mayberry to save random cats and, an allusion Radley employs, serving as guest umpire in the occasional baseball game. Good. Honest, One of us. This was the police officer upon whom we relied, and the one we pictured as we told our children that they were here to help us; they were our friend.

Starting in the 1960’s, Radley takes us decade by decades down the road to perdition. As he wears his libertarian politics on his sleeve, it came as no surprise that he gave the politics of law enforcement special scrutiny. His hatred of Richard Nixon for manipulating the silent majority’s hatred of hippies and counterculture into the War on Drugs is palpable. On the other hand, there is no reluctance to blame Bill Clinton for his deceitful abuse of the COPS program, and its infusion of billions into the drug war a few decades later.

Radley is not only a surprisingly good story teller, generally low key in recounting tales of individual harm interspersed with broad influences that gave rise to putting heavy weaponry into the hands of children. There are times when the narrative gets a bit breathless, trying hard to capture the confluence of political deceit on the part of some and ignorance on the part of others. Then again, the alternative would be to simply call out the liars and morons for their contribution to a state of affairs that served to put a naïve American public at grave risk for such puny and transitory purposes as winning an election.

Console game industry model is broken – must be patched with huge wads of customer money

Filed under: Business, Gaming, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

At Techdirt, Tim Cushing explains why the console gaming industry’s problems should not be “fixed” by taking away the customer’s rights:

If the current business model is unsustainable, why is that the consumer’s fault? More specifically, why are customers being pushed into giving up their “first sale” rights, along with being asked to plug the holes in the leaky business model with wads of hard-earned cash?

On top of this imposition is the assumption the current model is the only model [$200m movie, anyone?] and that mankind greatly benefits from “thousands of developers” crafting AAA titles. This is completely backward. The industry exists because of its customers, not despite them. AAA studios are not benevolent deities. They’re companies that exist because there’s a market for their products. If this market dies, so do they. If the prices are too high, customers buy elsewhere. Or not at all.

[. . .]

It’s beginning to look like a few members of the industry have been cribbing pages from the disastrous playbook of the recording industry. Raise prices. Blame customers. Bend the world to your business model. Is it only a matter of time before the gaming industry begins lobbying Congress to shut down secondhand sales?

Oh, and if the above twitrant weren’t galling enough, Cliff B. throws in a little something for those who find the online requirements of the Crossbone to be dealbreaker.

    “If you can afford high speed internet and you can’t get it where you live direct your rage at who is responsible for pipe blocking you,” he said.

Really? Maybe I’ll direct my rage at the entitled jackass who’s supporting a company’s decision to effectively limit its own market simply because it can’t live without some sort of DRM infection. And what if you can’t afford high speed internet? Well, you must be one of those people who live in the area marked “Whogivesashitland” in Cliffy’s mental map. And trust me, plenty of rage has been directed at the “pipe blockers,” but they care even less about their customer base than the area of the gaming industry Bleszinski represents.

Those interested in gutting the resale market to protect their margins are turning potential customers into enemies. If you can’t adapt, you can’t succeed. These moves being made by Microsoft (and supported by industry mouthpieces) are nothing more than attempts to subsidize an unsustainable business model by forcibly extracting the maximum toll from as many transactions as possible. The industry is not a necessity or a public good. If it’s going to make the changes it needs to survive, it needs to give up this delusion.

A brief history of Habeas Corpus

Filed under: History, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:09

In Reason, Jonathan Hafetz reviews a new book by Anthony Gregory called The Power of Habeas Corpus in America: From the King’s Prerogative to the War on Terror:

This tension between the ideal and the reality of habeas corpus is central to Anthony Gregory’s excellent new book, The Power of Habeas Corpus in America. Gregory, a research fellow at the Independent Institute, provides a valuable contribution to the literature on habeas corpus, one with broader implications for civil liberties, state power, and justice in a liberal democracy. The book does not attempt to capture all of the complex doctrinal shifts in habeas over the centuries. Instead, it synthesizes these developments to underscore a paradox: the way habeas serves as “both as an engine and a curb on state power.” In the process, Gregory charts how power dynamics have historically shaped struggles over habeas and its role in American society.

Gregory situates this paradox early in habeas‘ history. During the 15th and 16th centuries, habeas served mainly as a mechanism for England’s central courts to assert control over ecclesiastical courts and other rival tribunals. By demanding that reason be given why any of the king’s subjects was imprisoned, habeas helped increase the crown’s authority and legitimacy.

By the late 17th century, on the other hand, habeas had become a means of challenging royal authority itself, eventually taking on its modern incarnation as the Great Writ of Liberty. Yet even here, the story is more complex. Building on the pioneering work of historian Paul Halliday, Gregory points out that, contrary to popular interpretations, habeas‘ potential as a judicial constraint on state power was threatened by legislation. Gregory notes, for instance, how the famous Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, labeled by William Blackstone as a “second Magna Carta and stable bulwark of our liberties,” ultimately diluted the writ’s potency and flexibility by tying it down to statute. Increasingly, habeas‘ efficacy would be seen to depend on legislative action — an understanding perhaps best illustrated by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall’s statement that a federal court’s power to award the writ “must be given by written law.”

[. . .]

The contradictions within habeas were manifested during antebellum America, where the writ was used both to bolster slavery and to undermine it. Slave owners employed habeas to apprehend runaways — for example, by petitioning state courts in the North to assist in apprehending their “property.” Other state courts in the North, by contrast, sometimes used habeas to free slaves or block their return to the South. Ultimately, the ability of state courts to wield habeas in defense of individual liberty was limited by Supreme Court rulings barring state interference with the enforcement of federal fugitive slave laws and, eventually, with federal detentions generally — an example of what Gregory describes as the dangers of centralization.

A significant counter to Gregory’s thesis is the role federal habeas corpus played during the 20th century in helping enforce civil rights in the South and in advancing the criminal procedure revolution undertaken by the Supreme Court to protect the rights of defendants. Gregory’s account here runs against the traditional narrative in which habeas‘ centralization was critical to its continuing role in protecting liberty. In response, Gregory cites the declining utility of federal habeas corpus following several decades of Supreme Court decisions and congressional restrictions that have made it more difficult for prisoners not merely to obtain relief but even to have their claims heard by a judge. Federal habeas, Gregory writes, has become a “shell of what it promised to be.”

“Call it Jihadi sushi”

Filed under: Middle East, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:00

The difficulty of choosing the right side in the Syrian civil war is that there may not be one:

At his awkward press conference with David Cameron on Sunday, Vladimir Putin made an astonishing claim — the Syrian rebels eat people. It happens to be true. Putin was presumably referring to Abu Sakkar, a rebel leader who videoed himself eating a combatant’s lung. Sakkar explained that he did it in revenge for footage he found on the dead man’s phone of the government soldier raping women. “I swear to God we will eat your hearts and your livers, you soldiers of Bashar the dog!” cried Sakkar. For some Islamists, dedicating such an act to God is not as sacrilegious as it sounds. Students at Al Ahzar University in Cairo — an educational institution once graced by Obama’s presence — have access to a textbook that teaches it’s okay to eat apostates so long as the meat is not cooked. Call it Jihadi sushi.

The story underlines how difficult it is to choose the side of good in Syria: Assad’s men are rapists, the rebels are cannibals. When deciding what to do, the West has to avoid two templates of disaster. We don’t want another Rwanda, when the West stood aside and tolerated a genocide and we don’t want another Iraq, when the West got involved and stayed involved almost for a decade.

What Britain, France and America have decided to do is something in-between. Ignore the hyperbole about intervention from some in the press: at this stage all the alliance is threatening is to give logistical support to the rebels through non-military aid and a no-fly zone. Of course, this could escalate. But no Western leader wants to put boots on the ground and the goal of the sabre-rattling is actually to prod Russia into dragging Assad to the negotiating table at the proposed conference in Geneva (by the way, Putin might deliver on that but it’s far less likely that we’ll get the rebels to play ball on our side). We are deliberately internationalising the conflict, turning it into a giant game of chicken between America and Russia in the hope that they will resolve the war on behalf of the Syrian combatants.

June 17, 2013

Top this – wine corks meet screw-tops

Filed under: Business, Europe, Wine — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:14

BBC News looks at the latest attempt to blend the tradition of the wine bottle’s cork closure with the convenience of the twist-off screw top:

Helix wine bottle closure

The unveiling this week of a new style of cork raises the question of why the traditional kind continues to dominate much of the wine world.

The Helix is opened with just a twist of the hand. No corkscrew is necessary as the top of the bottle has a thread inside.

The glass bottle and cork combination for wine is thought to have started in the 17th Century. But newer materials exist today that some argue are better suited for sealing a bottle than cork.

Screw caps and plastic corks have been embraced by producers fed up with wine becoming “corked” — the unpleasant musty taste, likened to wet dog, which is caused by tainted cork.

Influential US wine critic Robert Parker reckons that during the mid 1990s 7-10% of the wine he tasted was corked. In 2004 he predicted that by 2015 screw caps would dominate the wine industry.

The screw cap — generic name “Stelvin” after its biggest brand — advanced spectacularly in “New World” wine nations. By 2011, 90% of New Zealand wine was sealed this way.

But in Europe and the US the cork remains king.

It’s a little puzzling to some. Wine has become democratic and modern. There are prices and drinking styles to suit everyone. So why hasn’t the closure method evolved?

Portugal, where most of the world’s corks are harvested, has fought back against the chemical compound trichloroanisole (TCA), one of the most common causes of tainted corks.

But the screw cap not only avoids the problem of tainted cork, it forms a tighter seal. Most critics say that this guarantees a better flavour for all but the more expensive wines (which may age better with more oxygen).

“We prefer seals that ensure the wine is not going to be faulty,” says Ewan Murray, spokesman for the Wine Society. “Wines that are ready to drink young are always going to be fresher under a screw cap.”

QotD: Demands for less US control over the internet will get much more insistent

Filed under: Quotations, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:40

Writing about the new Internet nationalism, I talked about the ITU meeting in Dubai last fall, and the attempt of some countries to wrest control of the Internet from the US. That movement just got a huge PR boost. Now, when countries like Russia and Iran say the US is simply too untrustworthy to manage the Internet, no one will be able to argue.

We can’t fight for Internet freedom around the world, then turn around and destroy it back home. Even if we don’t see the contradiction, the rest of the world does.

Bruce Schneier, “Blowback from the NSA Surveillance”, Schneier on Security, 2013-06-17

Collectivism, voluntary and mandatory

Filed under: Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Paul Bonneau makes a case for — gasp — collectivism. Well, certain kinds of collectivism:

This is of course a disease of the political “right”; those on the left generally embrace collectivism so there is nothing hypocritical about their behavior. Sometimes their honesty is refreshing, even when I don’t agree. Anyway it’s easier to make an argument directly against collectivism, than it is to first have to convince the person you are talking to that he is advocating collectivism — and then arguing against it. Thus, collectivist leftists are easier to deal with than are collectivist rightists in denial. This is assuming any argument needs to be made, of course; generally I don’t have any dispute with collectivism per se, but only against the imposition of it on me and mine. If someone wants to live as a cog in a commune, who am I to complain? How is it my business?

To know how not to be a collectivist, for those rightists who are interested in that, we first have to know what collectivism is. Merriam-Webster online says:

    Collectivism

    1: a political or economic theory advocating collective control especially over production and distribution; also : a system marked by such control

    2: emphasis on collective rather than individual action or identity

Already we can see some problems. This is such a broad definition that it includes, for example, members of a church getting together to voluntarily build a church school, at least by the second definition. Few reasonable people of any stripe would have a problem with such actions; indeed, any free/anarchist country would crucially depend on large amounts of voluntary collective action for society to function. What we really mean when we argue against collectivism is the first definition, particularly the political aspect. In that case, people are forced to participate in the schemes of others.

This point raises a question. When leftists say they support collective action, are they thinking of the voluntary sort, against which no reasonable person would argue? Is that the picture they have in their mind as they speak? Perhaps we are wrong to argue against collectivism at all, since we are in fact voluntary collectivists; and what we should be arguing against is coercion. Coercion would be much harder for a leftist to defend — assuming he goes along with it at all (which might or might not be so). Maybe we should remove “collectivism” from the libertarian Lexicon of Bad Things. Maybe we should force leftists to argue for coercion, which is really what we object to, rather than collectivism, which we don’t — that is, to draw him out from behind his usual euphemistic veil. Maybe I should change the title of this article!

Orwell, Huxley, and the world we’re in

Filed under: Books, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

In Salon, Andrew O’Hehir considers the separate strains of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Philip K. Dick that predicted the way we’d be:

In 1946, two years before writing 1984, Orwell wrote an essay about the new form of social organization he saw on the horizon. He predicted it would do away with private property, which didn’t happen – but if we suppose that his idea of private property meant individual autonomy and freedom from debt slavery, this starts to sound more familiar:

    These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new “managerial” societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.

That vision of the future, so much more sober than what we’re used to calling “Orwellian,” sounds eerily like the world we actually live in (with a few doses of Ayn Rand thrown in). So far as we know, our Huxley-Orwell hybrid society emerged organically from the end of the Cold War, rather than resulting from an apocalypse or a grand plan. It’s almost a case of life imitating art, as if Earth’s rulers had selected the most effective elements from various dystopian visions and strategically blended them. But I’m not sure we can blame all this on a secret meeting of the Bilderberg Group, or some Lee Atwater ad campaign. As in The Matrix, we chose the simulacrum of democracy and bumper stickers about “freedom” instead of the real things. We chose to believe that our political leaders stood for something besides rival castes within the ruling elite, chose to believe that a regime of torture and secrecy and endless global warfare was a rational response to the tragedy of 9/11. We still believe those things, but our dystopia is still messy, still incoherent, still incomplete. Which means, in theory, that it can still be undone.

June 16, 2013

Chinese banks have a “hidden second balance sheet”

Filed under: China, Economics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:40

It’s been a while since I posted one of my links to articles about the Chinese economy. Time to redress that now:

“There is no transparency in the shadow banking system, and systemic risk is rising. We have no idea who the borrowers are, who the lenders are, and what the quality of assets is, and this undermines signalling,” she told The Daily Telegraph.

While the non-performing loan rate of the banks may look benign at just 1pc, this has become irrelevant as trusts, wealth-management funds, offshore vehicles and other forms of irregular lending make up over half of all new credit. “It means nothing if you can off-load any bad asset you want. A lot of the banking exposure to property is not booked as property,” she said.

[. . .]

Fitch warned that wealth products worth $2 trillion of lending are in reality a “hidden second balance sheet” for banks, allowing them to circumvent loan curbs and dodge efforts by regulators to halt the excesses.

This niche is the epicentre of risk. Half the loans must be rolled over every three months, and another 25pc in less than six months. This has echoes of Northern Rock, Lehman Brothers and others that came to grief in the West on short-term liabilities when the wholesale capital markets froze.

Mrs Chu said the banks had been forced to park over $3 trillion in reserves at the central bank, giving them a “massive savings account that can be drawn down” in a crisis, but this may not be enough to avert trouble given the sheer scale of the lending boom.

Overall credit has jumped from $9 trillion to $23 trillion since the Lehman crisis. “They have replicated the entire US commercial banking system in five years,” she said.

The ratio of credit to GDP has jumped by 75 percentage points to 200pc of GDP, compared to roughly 40 points in the US over five years leading up to the subprime bubble, or in Japan before the Nikkei bubble burst in 1990. “This is beyond anything we have ever seen before in a large economy. We don’t know how this will play out. The next six months will be crucial,” she said.

Latest installment of the corporate tax crusade

Filed under: Britain, Business — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:16

In Forbes, Tim Worstall explains why a company that has paid full corporate taxes on its income has no further legal or moral obligation to pay more:

Read that through again: they’re saying that the company has already paid full corporation tax on that money. And we don’t tax dividends going to people in foreign countries. Whatever the tax rate is there, we simply don’t tax them. Because of course that’s up to the country where the money goes to to tax: it’s not actually something that is taxable in the UK. For, obviously, they’ve already paid the full corporation tax due.

But it does actually get better. Those dividends, paid out of post tax (and do please note, post tax) profits wouldn’t be subject to further corporation tax in the UK either:

    The general rule is that dividends paid by a UK company to another UK company out of post-tax profits are exempt from further taxation.

That the recipient corporation is in the British Virgin Islands thus makes not one whit or iota of difference to the amount of corporation tax payable. So this is all really a rather strange complaint. Perhaps the newspaper has just got caught up in the frenzied atmosphere over the subject.

[. . .]

As to why this story is being blown up allow me to offer some speculation. There’s a group of people who are quite vociferous in their demands that the corporate tax system must be radically changed. Richard Murphy (who just for complete disclosure, used to write here at Forbes) is one of the leading lights of that group. Various members of the loose knit group have been behind all sorts of claims about Vodafone, Boots, Starbucks, Google, Apple and a number of other companies. The problem with the claims is that none of them have really stuck. There’s been absolutely no finding of illegality anywhere.

The claim has thus moved onto, well, OK, so it’s not illegal: all of these companies are indeed obeying the law. But we still don’t think they’re paying enough tax. Therefore the law must be changed simply because we think they should be paying more tax. Which is, when you think about it, a fairly extreme claim. Companies should pay more tax because a group of 20 or so people demand that they should be doing so?

Recognizing a sociopath

Filed under: Books, Health, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:06

At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen discusses a book that may or may not be a dependable guide to sociopaths:

The author argues that sociopaths are often very smart, have a lot of natural cognitive advantages in manipulating data, and are frequently sought out as friends for their ability to appeal to others. It is claimed that, ceteris paribus, we will stick with the sociopath buddies, as we are quite ready to use sociopaths to suit our own ends, justly or not. It is claimed that for all of their flaws, many but not all sociopaths are capable of understanding what is in essence the contractarian case for being moral — rational self-interest — and sticking with it. Citing some research in the area (pdf), the author speculates that sociopaths may have an “attention bottleneck,” so they do not receive the cognitive emotional and moral feedback which others do, unless they decide very consciously to focus on a potential emotion. For sociopaths, top down processing of emotions is not automatic.

We even learn that (supposedly) sociopaths are often infovores. It seems many but not all sociopaths are relatively conscientious, and the author of this book (supposedly) teaches Sunday school and tithes ten percent to the church. It just so happens sociopaths sometimes think about killing or destroying other people, without feeling much in the way of remorse.

[. . .]

I cannot evaluate the scientific claims in this book, and would I trust the literature on sociopaths anyway, given that the author claims it is subject to the severe selection bias of having more access to the sociopathic losers and criminals? (I buy this argument, by the way.) It did occur to me however, that for the rehabilitation of sociopaths, whether through books or other means, perhaps they should consider…a rebranding exercise? But wait, “Sorry, I could not find synonyms for ‘sociopath’.”

If nothing else, this book will wake you up as to how little you (probably) know about sociopaths.

Not from the Scottish Tourist Board

Filed under: Britain, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:40

For more great reasons to love Scotland, click here.

Emmanuel Goldstein? Isn’t that some C-list celebrity from the 70s?

Filed under: Books, Government, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In Maclean’s, Colin Horgan says it’s the Huxley dystopia we’ve actually fallen into, rather than the Orwellian:

Over at the New Yorker, Ian Crouch wondered this week whether we really are living in some version of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It seems like a perpetual question, but it has renewed relevance now, both in light of the revelations last week from the Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian that the National Security Association is, apparently, mining internet data from users (whether guilty or not), without their knowledge or consent, and because in the subsequent days, sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four skyrocketed.

But, as Crouch asked, are we living in Nineteen Eighty-Four? Not quite. It all looks pretty bad, and the nightmare scenario Orwell depicted is, technically speaking, quite possible but, Crouch noted, “all but the most outré of political thinkers would have to grant that we are far from the crushing, violent, single-party totalitarian regime of Orwell’s imagination.” Surely, though, this is not what was envisioned – even when the Patriot Act was debated back at the turn of the century, few (if any) could have envisioned that the laws might be one day stretched quite as far as they appear to have been under the Obama administration. So, if not Nineteen Eighty-Four then when? What time is this?

[. . .]

There are two ways for a culture to die, Neil Postman wrote back in the 1980s: One is Orwellian, “where culture becomes a prison,” and the second is Huxleyan, where “culture becomes a burlesque.” To answer Crouch’s question, we are living the second reality more than the first. Big Brother does not watch us by his choice; rather, as Postman put it, we watch him by ours. “Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance,” Postman wrote.

[. . .]

To paraphrase Postman, we have not been ruined by what we hate, but instead, as Huxley predicted, by what we love. We are prisoners to our own egoism and passivity, drowning in a sea of irrelevant streaming data, presented not in with any hierarchy or inherent importance, but as equal and unweighted. The Harlem Shake and Nyan Cat are just as relevant as a civil war in Syria or a democratic nation spying on its own citizens, just as being watched by millions of strangers via webcam or TV broadcast feels just the same as being watched by the government. And, as Huxley thought we might, we have convinced ourselves that is freedom.

June 15, 2013

Ontario’s abusive relationship with sex ed

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:31

In Maclean’s, Emma Teitel talks about the failure of Ontario’s sex-ed classes to keep up with the times:

In the fifth grade, my friends and I had a special afternoon tradition. When school let out at 3:30, we would walk to Katherine’s house (a pseudonym), raid her fridge, go upstairs to her bedroom, lock the door and watch Internet pornography. Where were Katherine’s parents? They were at work. But it wouldn’t have mattered. When they were around, we just turned off the sound, or read erotic literature on a website called Kristen Archives. This is how we gained the indispensable knowledge that some women like to be ravished by farmhands, and others, by farm animals. The year was 1999. We had not yet sat through our first sex-ed class, but when we did, almost two years later, it was spectacularly disappointing. We had seen it all, and now we were shading in a diagram of the vas deferens.

Since our special after-school tradition came to an end over a decade ago, Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, Formspring, Instagram and Twitter have emerged. But against all logic, nothing has changed in the sex-ed business. Our century is literally on the cusp of puberty, and yet despite these enormous social and technological changes, we remain largely incapable of giving kids the resources they need to deal with their own puberty. I’m talking here, specifically, about the province of Ontario. As you read this, kids from Sarnia to Kingston — kids who, on average, have viewed Internet porn by age 11 — are probably shading in the exact same vas deferens diagram I did. There’s nothing wrong with the vas deferens — or so I’m told — but surely there is more to sexual education in the 21st century than anatomy and colouring. Ontario currently boasts the most out-of-date sex-ed curriculum in Canada. It was last revised in 1998, which means sex ed was out of date when I took it.

[. . .]

Kids shouldn’t watch porn, but they do. We can’t un-invent the Internet. And we can’t reverse puberty. Case in point: In 2001, one of the most determined voyeurs in our special after-school group skipped sex ed at the request of her religious father — for whom an hour of vas deferens shading was just too much to bear. He told her to go to the library instead, which was fine with her. Who, after all, could resist an afternoon with the Kristen Archives?

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