Quotulatiousness

July 22, 2013

Detroit as Ayn Rand’s “Starnesville”

Filed under: Books, Economics, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:59

In the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan quotes Ayn Rand:

Look at this description of Detroit from today’s Observer:

    What isn’t dumped is stolen. Factories and homes have largely been stripped of anything of value, so thieves now target cars’ catalytic converters. Illiteracy runs at around 47%; half the adults in some areas are unemployed. In many neighbourhoods, the only sign of activity is a slow trudge to the liquor store.

Now have a look at the uncannily prophetic description of Starnesville, a Mid-Western town in Ayn Rand’s dystopian novel, Atlas Shrugged. Starnesville had been home to the great Twentieth Century Motor Company, but declined as a result of socialism:

    A few houses still stood within the skeleton of what had once been an industrial town. Everything that could move, had moved away; but some human beings had remained. The empty structures were vertical rubble; they had been eaten, not by time, but by men: boards torn out at random, missing patches of roofs, holes left in gutted cellars. It looked as if blind hands had seized whatever fitted the need of the moment, with no concept of remaining in existence the next morning. The inhabited houses were scattered at random among the ruins; the smoke of their chimneys was the only movement visible in town. A shell of concrete, which had been a schoolhouse, stood on the outskirts; it looked like a skull, with the empty sockets of glassless windows, with a few strands of hair still clinging to it, in the shape of broken wires.

    Beyond the town, on a distant hill, stood the factory of the Twentieth Century Motor Company. Its walls, roof lines and smokestacks looked trim, impregnable like a fortress. It would have seemed intact but for a silver water tank: the water tank was tipped sidewise.

    They saw no trace of a road to the factory in the tangled miles of trees and hillsides. They drove to the door of the first house in sight that showed a feeble signal of rising smoke. The door was open. An old woman came shuffling out at the sound of the motor. She was bent and swollen, barefooted, dressed in a garment of flour sacking. She looked at the car without astonishment, without curiosity; it was the blank stare of a being who had lost the capacity to feel anything but exhaustion.

    “Can you tell me the way to the factory?” asked Rearden.

    The woman did not answer at once; she looked as if she would be unable to speak English. “What factory?” she asked.

    Rearden pointed. “That one.”

    “It’s closed.”

Now here’s the really extraordinary thing. When Ayn Rand published those words in 1957, Detroit was, on most measures, the city with the highest per capita GDP in the United States.

Examining post-traumatic stress disorder

Filed under: Health, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:23

In the New Yorker, David J. Morris looks at the psychological chameleon we call PTSD:

As it is understood today, post-traumatic stress disorder is a grab bag of symptoms that emerges after experiencing trauma, like nearly dying or having one’s bodily integrity violated. It includes a persistent sense of hypervigilance and recurrent, intrusive memories of past traumatic events. In the worst cases, veterans with P.T.S.D. may hallucinate the voices of dead comrades, enemy combatants, or their commanding officers. A 1995 study of combat veterans with P.T.S.D. published in Traumatology found that sixty-five per cent of subjects reported hearing voices, including command hallucinations that they felt compelled to obey. As the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, the author of Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, put it, “P.T.S.D. can unfortunately mimic virtually any condition in psychiatry.”

But there are a growing number of psychiatrists and researchers who are challenging our understanding of P.T.S.D. — even its very nature as an ailment. Modern psychiatry, they argue, is locked into a mindset that systematically overdiagnoses P.T.S.D. without nurturing veterans’ ability to heal themselves. American culture, meanwhile, vacillates between elevated ideas of hero worship and victimhood in its conception of veterans, which can be destructive to the veterans themselves. One of the chief proponents of this school of thought is Ben Shephard, a leading British historian of military psychiatry. In his provocative book, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century, he describes a historical cycle that governs the treatment of war stress: “the problem is at first denied, then exaggerated, then understood, and finally, forgotten.” Shephard claims that the West, and America in particular, are deeply mired in the exaggeration phase of that cycle. These skeptics of the prevailing model of P.T.S.D. were described in Scientific American as a “broad array of experts indeed, giants of psychology, psychiatry and epidemiology.” One of the major tenets of this argument is a fact that, on its face, suggests that P.T.S.D. is a culturally determined phenomenon as well as a medical one: American veterans are 2.5 to four times more likely to be diagnosed with P.T.S.D. than British veterans.

[…]

As Jonathan Shay, the author of Achilles in Vietnam, shows in his follow-up, Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, while the problem of returning from war is one of humanity’s oldest struggles, the use of P.T.S.D. to frame a wide variety of traumatic experiences is a relatively recent development. The growing criticism of our current understanding of P.T.S.D. suggests that what was once ignored or treated as a failure of character — the soldier’s weakness — has now been medicalized to the exclusion of discussing its moral and spiritual dimensions. “It feels to me as if the U.S. civilian population has pathologized the veteran experience,” Elliott Woods, an Iraq veteran-turned-reporter, told me not long ago. “One well-intentioned person said to me the other day, ‘I can’t see how anyone could go to Iraq and not come back with P.T.S.D.’

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

The latest revival of the anti-pornography crusade

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:10

Laurie Penny explains why the renewed urge to blame pornography for social ills is misplaced:

We’ve been here before. The debate about the causes of sexual violence has been going on since the feminist porn wars of the 1980s, which were both more and less exciting than they sound and involved a great deal of shouting in draughty meeting rooms. The internet is the current culprit, but the arguments against explicit material are exactly the same as they were when the main smut delivery systems were rental videos and grubby mags. In 1981, the writer Ellen Willis noted that “if anti-porn feminists see pornography as a brutal exercise of predatory male sexuality, a form of (and incitement to) violence against women, the right also associates pornography with violence and with rampant male lust broken loose from the saving constraints of God and Family”. Today, the same social conservatives who are cutting child benefit and closing domestic violence shelters still borrow freely from feminist rhetoric about exploitation of women and children when it suits them.

The worst thing about this debate is that it turns a real-world, complex problem into a simple moral choice: porn is either good or bad, right or wrong, and not one shade of grey can be permitted, let alone 50. Having watched a great deal of pornography in the name of research and recreation, I can assure you that not all of it is violent, and indeed that almost any sexual taste, from the placid and petal-strewn to the eyebrow-raisingly reptilian, is catered to online for a modest fee. It is equally true that there is something traumatic about a lot of modern-day pornography, something repressed, violent and deeply involved with a particularly vengeful misogyny that has been on the rise only since women have become more economically independent over the past two generations. Some people like that sort of thing; others have grown up learning it as an erotic script, because sex is fundamentally a social idea. To say that dirty pictures are the problem in themselves, rather than a structure of violent misogyny and sexual control, is to confuse the medium with the message.

One of the most common retorts to the anti-porn alliance is that to campaign against online smut is to do something disgusting and decidedly post-watershed into the wind. The genie of unlimited filth has been let out of its dodgy bottle and no amount of legislation will stop us polishing our lamps.

That’s true, but it’s inadequate. After all, I spend my life, as an idealist and a feminist, arguing that vast, ambitious social change is not only possible but essential. Controlling the consumption of online pornography would require an enormous programme of state and corporate censorship, and the argument against this sort of socio-sexual state control should be not that it is unfeasible, but that it is monstrous. I do not want to live in a world where the government and a select few conservative feminists get to decide what we may and may not masturbate to, and use the bodies of murdered women or children as emotional pawns in that debate.

It is supremely difficult to achieve radical ends by conservative means. Feminists and everyone who seeks to end sexual violence should be very cautious when their immediate goals seem to line up neatly with those of social conservatives and state censors. I believe in a world where violence against women and children is not routine. After all, the idea of a world without sexism is no more unrealistic than getting rid of pornography — and a lot more fun.

It’s useful to keep in mind when claims about pornography being responsible for cases of sexual assault or rape … as the availability of porn on the internet has increased, incidences of violent sexual crimes have been decreasing in most countries. That little fact seems to get omitted when the accusations are being hurled.

Update: Simon Bisson says that the “key to cleaning up the internet is tackling the darknets, not letting censorship in by the back door”.

The latest proposals to lock down the UK internet in the name of preventing child pornography are at best a misunderstanding of how the dark side of the internet works, and at worst a basis for a censorship infrastructure that could make the Great Firewall of China look like a leaky sieve.

In an interview with the BBC, prime minister David Cameron proposed that search engines should block certain terms, warning users of the consequences of searching for those terms.

While that’s all very well, it’s an approach that’s not going to stop the real trade in illegal images — which never touches the big search engines, and hides behind encryption and custom-built networks that Peter Biddle and three other Microsoft engineers christened “darknets” in their 2002 paper. That flaw makes the proposals both misguided and dangerous, as the Open Rights Group notes in its considered response.

The problem facing anyone trying to block child porn or online drug dealing is that it doesn’t happen on the public internet. Online criminals know what they’re doing is illegal, and they’ll take complex precautions to hide their locations and the services.

[…]

While Silk Road is a publicly-known darknet site, there are many, many more that are only known to a small group of trusted individuals, bound together to secrecy in the knowledge that what they are doing is illegal. It’s on sites like those that illegal images and video are traded and shared, and bought and sold.

You won’t find them in the web space your ISP gives you, or through searches on Google or Bing. They’re squirreled away at the end of a DSL line somewhere well away from the jurisdiction of the UK government, in a country with loose regulations, and looser policing. Or worse still, they’re hosted in the fast flux DNS of a bot network, distributed across the unwitting PCs of hundreds or thousands of innocent users.

Stopping the web’s bad guys is not a matter of censoring the internet. That’s impossible. What’s needed instead is an international agreement on notice and take down for illegal content, and on shared intelligence about the servers and services criminals are using, with cooperation on shutting down botnets and cybercrime syndicates.

When is an “arrest” not really an arrest?

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Answer: when you try to sue them for false arrest:

The Portland police and City Attorney are making an argument in federal court this month that gives another glimpse into the increasing claims of authority of police in our society. Scott Miller was stopped for jaywalking by Officer Dean Halley in 2010 and admitted that he committed the common violation of pedestrians. The officer however proceeded to handcuff him, tell him “you’re under arrest,” throw him into the back of a cruiser and then drove him a block away. He was in custody for about 30 minutes, but Deputy City Attorney William Manlove is arguing that citizens cannot sue because such acts do not constitute an actual arrest. They are something between a chat and custody, but not an arrest for purposes of legal action.

So, according to Portland, this constitutes just being detained and is effectively beyond any challenge of a citizen. In other words, police can routinely handcuff citizens, lock them in court and even tell them that they are under arrest without being subject to accountability for wrongful arrests.

Deputy City Attorney William Manlove insists that when Miller briefly jaywalked one morning while trying to catch a bus, he could be detained and handcuffed but not treated as an arrested person despite the express statement of the officer. It is an argument that would allow officers virtually unchecked authority in handcuffing citizens and holding them. It is the perfect authoritarian loophole and the city Portland wants to help establish it for future cases.

When Officer Friendly roughs you up, searches your car, and detains you for an indeterminate period of time, in no way does that imply that your rights have been infringed, citizen. Move along … nothing to see here.

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