Quotulatiousness

September 5, 2013

Sea King replacement program branded as “the worst in Canada’s history”

Filed under: Cancon, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

Sea King unit patchThe Royal Canadian Navy is still operating the Sea King helicopter — which is 50 years old — and the planned replacement helicopters appear to be no closer to delivery than they were 20 years ago:

A naval helicopter procurement program described as the worst in Canada’s history was doomed from the start but could be made “viable and operationally relevant” if the federal government urgently adopts a new approach, says a confidential new report obtained by CBC News.

The independent evaluation of the multibillion-dollar purchase of 28 CH-148 Cyclone helicopters to replace a 50-year-old fleet of Sea Kings, obtained by CBC News Network’s Power & Politics host Evan Solomon, concludes the government can get the problem-plagued program back on track by negotiating with primary supplier Sikorsky to “re-scope” the project’s structure, specifications and delivery approach.

“[The] project could be viable and operationally relevant with a new structure and governance model as described in our recommendations,” reads the report from Hitachi Consulting.

[…]

“A fundamental problem existed at the outset of this project — this set the stage for significant misalignment,” reads the key finding.

The report says the government believed it was buying an “off-the-shelf” product by Sikorsky — a conclusion also drawn in a 2010 auditor general’s report. Yet the project should have been treated as a development program because the “state-of-the-art” aircraft incorporates advanced technology and an in-service support capability “that is likely unsurpassed in the world today,” according to the report.

While the fleet was to begin delivery in late 2008, so far only four of the Cyclone helicopters have been delivered — and only on an “interim” basis. The government won’t formally accept them because they don’t fully meet the specifications.

Last year, then defence minister Peter MacKay cited the Sikorsky deal as an example of how procurement can “go badly wrong.”

“This is the worst procurement in the history of Canada, including the $500-million cancellation costs that are attached to the maritime helicopter program and then the costs of the further maintenance to fly the 50-year old helicopters,” he said at the time. “They’re going to go right out of aviation service and into the museum in Ottawa. And that’s not a joke.”

H/T to Mark Collins for the link.

Youth soccer without keeping score? Too competitive for our kids

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Media, Soccer — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:16

While I’m pretty sure this is a fake news item that the CBC should have run on April 1st, it’s amusing enough to link:

With the growing concern over the effects of competition in youth sports programs this summer, many Canadian soccer associations eliminated the concept of keeping score. The Soccer Association of Midlake, Ontario, however, has taken this idea one step further, and have completely removed the ball from all youth soccer games and practices.

According to Association spokesperson, Helen Dabney-Coyle, “By removing the ball, it’s absolutely impossible to say ‘this team won’ and ‘this team lost’ or ‘this child is better at soccer than that child.'”

“We want our children to grow up learning that sport is not about competition, rather it’s about using your imagination. If you imagine you’re good at soccer, then, you are.”

For reference, a quick Google search for “Midlake, ON” only comes up with links to this story and random uses of “mid-lake” in unrelated posts.

H/T to Doug Mataconis for the link.

QotD: An important lesson for university students

Filed under: Education, Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

You could find a dozen websites offering more trenchant progressive political analysis in five minutes.

Yet Professor Penn’s lesson has value to his students. They can learn the following important things:

1. In the course of your life, people with power will act badly with impunity.

2. People with power over you will use that power to indulge themselves in droning, whether or not their droning offers any value.

3. People can be tremendously talented and knowledgeable about Subject X and be useless louts about Subject Y. Often they’ll want to talk about Subject Y.

4. People think others want to hear their opinions about politics, and think their opinions about politics are insightful.

5. A significant part of developing as an adult is deciding how you will deal with points 1 – 4.

6. Huge amounts of government money pay for absolute shit.

7. People who nominally favor freedom of expression will drop it like a hot coal when their political biases are aroused. Case in point: many angry conservative people saying that Professor Penn should be fired for a banal political rant, even though he’s a professor at a state university enjoying First Amendment protections that are rather broad. Check the comments on the sites complaining about Professor Penn if you don’t believe me.

I submit those are all valuable lessons.

I think that it’s pathetic that these students are paying to hear Professor Penn indulge himself like that even for ten minutes. I think his calling out a student in class for seeming to disagree displays low character and an excellent reason to avoid his class. But I don’t see anything that merits firing from his position at a public institution, and I am not enthused about a system in which public universities will be policed for insipid partisanship by other partisans.

But how enthusiastic do you suppose Professor Penn’s students are about faculty free speech rights after sitting through that?

Ken White, “William S. Penn of Michigan State University Teaches Important Lessons To College Students”, Popehat, 2013-09-04

September 4, 2013

Corporations are (legally) people

Filed under: Business, History, Law, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 16:26

At Not Quite Noahpinion, Josiah Neeley explains why the legal notion of corporate personhood was actually intended as consumer protection:

Contrary to popular impression, corporate personhood did not start with Citizens United. In fact, corporate personhood dates back to the old English common law, where it was originally conceived as a consumer protection measure.

Suppose I buy meat from a butcher and it makes me sick. I might wish to sue the butcher for damages. But suppose that I bought the meat not from an individual butcher but from Acme Meat, Inc. It was a central doctrine of the common law that only persons could sue or be sued, own property, or make legally binding contracts. So if a corporation is not a person, I am out of luck. The response to this was to treat corporations as legal persons, who could sue or be sued, make and enforce contracts, buy, sell, and hold property, and so on.

Of course, courts could have granted corporations all the same rights, abilities and duties without calling them persons. But this would have been merely a semantic difference. Once a society decides to have corporations, it has to grant them something along the lines of legal personhood if for no other reason than to protect those who deal with it.

Likewise, once a society decides to grant corporations the right to own property, it is absurd to deny them constitutional protections. The New York Times, the AFL-CIO, and the Sierra Club are all corporations. But it would be ridiculous if the government tried to use those organizations’ corporate status as a justification for regulating the editorial position of the New York Times, or controlling the advocacy position of the Sierra Club or the AFL-CIO.

[…]

More than 150 years ago Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his Democracy in America that the genius of the American political tradition lay in what he called associations but what in today’s terminology we would call corporations. In Europe, to advance some political, social, or economic cause required some wealthy patron. In America, by contrary, groups of people who individually might not have had deep pockets could come together and pool their resources by founding an organization to advance the cause.

Far from being a tool of repression, corporations advanced the interests of democracy and equality by allowing the little guy to organize to accomplish what otherwise could only be achieved by the very rich. Ending corporate personhood would not stop billionaire individuals like the Koch brothers or George Soros from using their wealth to affect the political process, but it would hamper small grass roots organizations which choose to use the corporate form. Ultimately, the long tradition of corporate personhood represents not a threat to democracy, but a support of it.

Air-Sea Battle as a response to Chinese military expansion

Filed under: China, Military, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:18

The Diplomat‘s Amitai Etzioni looks at the US Air-Sea Battle plan:

On the face of it, the Pentagon’s Air-Sea Battle plan makes eminently good sense; it is a clear response to a clear challenge. China has been developing a whole slew of weapons (especially anti-ship missiles) over the past two decades that are of great concern to the U.S. military. These weapons, known in Pentagon-speak as anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities, could undermine the international right to free passage in China’s surrounding waters or, in the case of a conflict over Taiwan or contested islands in the South and East China Seas, prevent the U.S. from making good on defense commitments to its friends in the region.

In response, the Pentagon developed Air-Sea Battle (ASB), the employment of which entails, according to position papers developed to promote it, a blistering assault on China’s mainland. A report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) gives a detailed account of how an ASB-style war with China would unfold. In the opening “blinding campaign,” the U.S. attacks China’s reconnaissance and command-and-control networks to degrade the PLA’s ability to target U.S. and allied forces. Next, the military takes the fight to the Chinese mainland, striking long-range anti-ship missile launchers. Given that this is where the anti-ship missiles are located, it is only logical that the U.S. would target land-based platforms. And to go after them, one of course needs to take out China’s air defense systems, command control centers, and other anti-access weapons. In short, ASB requires a total war with China.

[…]

The main flaw Air-Sea Battle it is not merely that it is a particularly aggressive military response to the anti-access/area-denial challenge. The problem is that ASB is developing in a foreign policy vacuum. If the U.S. were to conduct a thorough review of China’s military capabilities and its regional and global ambitions — and found that the Chinese were planning to forcefully expand their territory or unseat the U.S. as the global power, perhaps Air-Sea Battle might be deemed appropriate.

“Despite a rash of deadly train crashes…”

Filed under: Media, Railways — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

Coyote Blog indulges in a good old-time fisking of an article built on the claim that there has been a “trend” of increasingly deadly railway accidents:

The best way to explain the phenomenon is with an example, and the Arizona Republic presented me with a great one today, in the form of an article by Joan Lowy of the Associated Press. This in an article that reads more like an editorial than a news story. It is about the Federal requirement for railroads to put safety electronics called Positive Train Control (PTC) on trains by a certain date. The author has a pretty clear narrative that this is an absolutely critical piece of equipment for the public good, and that railroads are using scheming and lobbying to unfairly delay and dilute this critical mandate (seriously, I am not exaggerating the tone, you can read it for yourself.)

My point, however, is not to challenge the basic premise of the article, but to address this statement in her opening paragraph (emphasis added).

    Despite a rash of deadly train crashes, the railroad industry’s allies in Congress are trying to push back the deadline for installing technology to prevent the most catastrophic types of collisions until at least 2020, half a century after accident investigators first called for such safety measures.

The reporter is claiming a “rash of deadly train crashes” — in other words, she is saying, or at least implying, that there is an upward trend in deadly train crashes. So let’s ask ourselves if this claimed trend actually exists. She says it so baldly, right there in the first seven words, that surely it must be true, right?

[…]

So let’s go to the data. It is actually very easy to find, and I would be surprised if Ms. Lowy did not actually have this data in her hands. It is at the Federal Railway Administration Office of Safety Analysis. 2013 data is only current through June and seems to be set up on an October -September fiscal year. So I ran the data only for October-June of every year to make sure the results were comparable to 2013. Each year in the data below is actually 9 months of data.

By the way, when one is looking at railroad fatalities, one needs to understand that railroads do kill a lot of people every year, but the vast, vast majority of these — 99% or more — are killed at grade crossings. People still do not understand that a freight train takes miles to stop. (see postscript below, but as an aside, I would be willing to make a bet: Since deaths at grade crossings outnumber deaths from collisions by about 100:1, I would be willing to bet any amount of money that I could take the capital the author wants railroads to invest in PTC and save far more lives by investing it in grade crossing protection. People like Ms. Lowy who advocate for these regulations never, ever seem to consider prioritization and tradeoffs.)

Anyway, looking at the data, here is the data for people killed each year in US railroad accidents (as usual click to enlarge any of the charts):

Train accident deaths Oct-Jun

So, rather than a “rash”, we have just the opposite — the lowest number of deaths in a decade. One. I will admit that technically she said rash of “fatal accidents” and this is data on fatalities, but I’m going to make a reasonable assumption that one death means one fatal accident — which certainly cannot be higher than the number of fatal accidents in previous years and is likely lower.

Most of you will agree that this makes the author’s opening statement a joke. Believe it or not — and this happens a surprising number of times — this journalist is claiming a trend that not only does not exist, but is of the opposite sign.

More on Britain’s aircraft carrier program

Filed under: Britain, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:02

The always informative Sir Humphrey responds to yesterday’s Daily Mail and other media reports on the CVF program:

The first thing that struck the author on reading it was that it highlighted the challenges posed in bringing any large piece of equipment into service. There was a lot of comments about the risk posed to the UK by not having the so-called ‘Crowsnest’ AEW capability in service until 2022 which left the platform at risk. It is very easy to focus on the idea that a carrier is late, and that is a relatively simple piece of kit, so why should it take so long to bring into service? In reality the introduction into service of CVF is a watershed moment for the Royal Navy — it will represent a step change in capability, and merge together several very different capabilities which the RN has either not operated for a while, or which it has not operated at all. At its heart the RN is having to simultaneously introduce a brand new class of ship into service, with all the technical risk that this entails. This is then backed up by the near simultaneous introduction into service of the most technically advanced jet the UK has ever operated, and also bring the UK back into the world of fixed wing carrier operations, a skill which even with the mitigation measures in place will still be a challenge to regain. Its also about bringing a new AEW platform into service, after a near 6 year gap in cover, and again with all the very considerable technical risk posed by this. Finally its about bringing the whole package together and working with the rest of the RN to ensure that what exists isn’t just a collection of equipment of very levels of operational utility and capability, but is in fact a fully worked up and integrated system which has an effect far beyond the sum of its parts.

[…]

One thing that reads through very clearly in the evidence is the clear emphasis that CVF is seen as a joint asset for Coalition operations. While obviously it provides a national capability in extremis, it is clear that provision of a CVF hull and airwing is seen as a major means of the UK working with coalition partners. This is an important part of the reality of future naval operations — while we like to fondly imagine that CVF provides the UK with the ability to work in isolation, in reality its an asset that will provide great influence in coalition work. The evidence is clear that in future the UK sees provision of CVF on operations as being part of a wider multi-national force, and particularly early in its life, there is an expectation that capability gaps such as AEW would be met either by working with partner nations, or by wider UK assets (e.g. AEW Sentry).

This is important as it highlights the gradual shift in UK thinking away from funding the provision of an entire wholesale package of capabilities into assuming that risks can be taken in some areas. When one reads the evidence though, it is suddenly clear how far fetched the scenarios sound — for instance it was only under heavy questioning, when the line of assumptions reached ‘fighting an enemy with French and US cover in high seas away from landbased cover’ did we discover that the RN may struggle a wee bit without CROWSNEST. One would hope that between 2020 and 2022 the RN is not going to be re-enacting scenes from a Tom Clancy novel?

QotD: Quebec and religious minorities

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

As this blog has pointing out for many years now, too many for these tired old eyes, at its core Quebec nationalism is an ethnic nationalism. By their nature ethnic nationalists are bigots. Certainly the sort of bigotry that emanates from the pure laine wing of the PQ is fairly tame. This is Canada and even our fanatics have a dullness about them. Still bigotry is bigotry. Tyranny is tyranny. Telling people what they can wear in the workplace, regardless of any objective public health and safety concerns, is tyranny. A private employer may discriminate at his leisure. The government cannot. It must represent all its people.

Our tax dollars, for Quebec is the great mendicant of modern Canada, are financing a policy of religious bigotry. Some conservatives might welcome this decision as it seems, on the face of it, to be going after the burqa. The ban, however, is on all religious headware. At the moment it applies only to the public sector, which is vast in Quebec, but knowing the statist inclinations of the PQ it will soon apply to the private sector as well.

To borrow from Churchill, this is worse than a crime, it’s a mistake.

Quebec is not an appealing place for ethnic and religious minorities. It’s why so many flee to Ontario when they receive their citizenship papers. Expect a second Exodus from La Belle Province should this Charter of Quebec Values come into force. Just as talented Anglos were driven from Montreal and the Eastern Townships in the 1970s, we’ll soon have waves of Sikhs arriving in Toronto. I will be delighted to greet them. There is a large community here in the Imperial Capital and they are peaceful and productive. If Quebec wants to put their bigotry ahead of economic common sense, let them. Then let us cut the equalization life line that has propped up these statist and bigoted policies for over forty years. First they discriminated against the English. Then the Jews. Now the time comes for all the others who are not of the blood.

Richard Anderson, “Quebec Values”, The Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2013-09-02

September 3, 2013

Britain’s new aircraft carriers in the news again

Filed under: Britain, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

It’s from the Daily Mail, so a certain level of de-hystericization is called for…along with salt to taste. First, the discovery that the two carriers will initially be without radar for early warning of incoming planes and missiles:

The Royal Navy’s new aircraft carriers could set sail without a crucial radar which warns commanders of incoming enemy warplanes and missiles.

A damning report by MPs reveals the Crowsnest early warning system will not be ready until six years after the first of the £5.5billion Queen Elizabeth-class warships enters service in 2016.

Delays in fitting the ‘eyes in the sky’ system to military helicopters until 2022 were a ‘concern’, the Commons’ Public Accounts Committee (PAC) says today.

And the costs incurred by changing the planned acquisition of F-35 aircraft to equip the carriers is rather eye-watering:

The bill for the two new warships, given the green light in 2008, is almost twice the original £3.6billion — and there are ‘huge risks’ it will increase further, says the report.

MPs heap criticism on the Coalition for wasting money after a U-turn over the type of warplanes to fly from the aircraft carriers.

In 2010 ministers controversially decided to scrap the last Labour government’s plans to buy a fleet of jump jets, which take off and land vertically.

Instead, Prime Minister David Cameron ordered conventional versions of the US-built F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that would need catapults and arrester gear to take off from and land on the vessels.

But this was based on ‘deeply flawed information’, say the committee. When the cost of fitting the ships with ‘cats and traps’ more than doubled to £2billion, Mr Cameron flip-flopped and returned to buying the jump jet.

The move cost a staggering £74million in squandered in lost man hours, administrative costs and needless planning.

Labour MP Margaret Hodge, the PAC’s chairman, said: ‘The Committee is still not convinced that the MOD has this programme under control. It remains subject to huge technical and commercial risks, with the potential for further uncontrolled growth in costs.’

Queen Elizabeth class side and overhead views

Queen Elizabeth class side and overhead views

The switch back to the jump jet was made last year. Back in 2010, I was rather pessimistic that the carriers would even be built and I suggested that India would likely take them off the Royal Navy’s hands once they were complete.

Social media and the new alienation problem

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:50

Russell Taylor went to a wedding recently, in a rural area outside the range of cell towers and wifi signals. Some of his fellow guests treated the lack of connectivity as if it were the end of the world. The constant need to be “connected” has other unhealthy aspects:

Where social media differs from telephone, radio or television is in turning its users into broadcasters. This makes it useful as a business tool and as a gazette for news of interest to family and loved ones; but it also enables bores and exhibitionists to publish their every passing thought. This self-absorbed waffling does little to bring people together. On the contrary, it appears to distort their perception of others, until they become mere abstractions: bit-part players in the story of their lives.

This phenomenon was seen in extremis in the reaction of onlookers to the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby earlier this year. Rather than running to his aid, finding a policeman or simply freezing in terror, dozens of bystanders whipped out their phones and started filming the horror show unfolding before them. Possibly they figured that by the time the police had done a risk assessment and checked their diversity training was in order, the killers would be at home with their feet up; in which case, capturing some incriminating video evidence was the responsible thing to do. But I doubt it. It’s far more likely that they saw someone being butchered and simply thought, “Wait until they see this on Facebook”.

When your first reaction to seeing someone murdered is to film it and post it online, you are no longer an active moral being; you’re a detached observer of the world around you. If this is a symptom of the always-connected age, so too is faux concern. Consider those Facebook posts that ask you to ‘like’ a sob story about a complete stranger. They have to be among the most pitiful and inauthentic expressions of human emotion ever devised, making the wearing of a charity wristband look like donating a kidney by comparison. When someone being hacked to death is an exciting ‘I was there’ moment and compassion is demonstrated by means of a mouse-click, something is seriously awry with our moral compass.

The big question is whether social media has contributed to this apparent atomisation of society, or if people’s use of it is merely a symptom. Or could the relationship between the two be dialectical? If so, habitual users of social media can expect to see their usage increase as their resemblance to well-adjusted human beings diminishes. Time will tell how much further they have to fall, but once you start treating murder as status update gold, you must already be somewhere near the bottom.

The market for civilian armoured vehicles

Filed under: Americas — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:33

Strategy Page on the growing demand in some areas of the world for protected civilian vehicles:

Since September 11, 2001 there has been a sharp increase in the use of such bullet proof automobiles. The wealthy are buying most of them, but government has become a major customer as well, accounting for about a third of sales. The biggest markets are those suffering from lots of kidnapping and seemingly random violence. Mexico, Colombia and many Middle Eastern countries are the main markets for these expensive vehicles.

[…]

Because of the cartel wars in Mexico, over 2,500 armored sedans, SUVs and light trucks are now produced each year in Mexico alone. The violence down there has been horrendous. The government believes about a thousand people a month are dying from drug cartel related violence. This puts Mexico ahead of the recently increased terrorist violence in Iraq and where Syria was earlier this year. Some 70,000 have died in the Mexican cartel war since 2007, compared to over 100,000 in two years of Syrian violence and 120,000 Iraqi dead in a decade of religious violence. Since the 1970s there have been similar internal conflicts in Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey. Mexico is a bit of Middle East style civil violence in North America. This is not the first time the Americas have suffered this. Leftist and drug gang violence in Colombia have left over 220,000 dead in the last 60 years. That’s for a country with only about 40 percent as many people as Mexico. This war in Colombia in finally winding down, but is shows you how long and bloody such conflicts can be. Some 20,800 people have disappeared in Mexico since 2006, including 1,200 children under the age of 11. Another estimate holds that that 24,000 people were missing since 2000, and that around 16,000 bodies have been discovered but not identified.

The armored vehicles must, at a minimum, be protected against pistol bullets. But most now are resistant to sniper and assault rifles. Some manufacturers will also build vehicles that provide some protection from roadside bombs. Turning a civilian sedan or SUV into an armored vehicle is a labor-intensive job. First, you have to strip the vehicle down to the bare frame. Then you install Kevlar and steel plate armor and bullet-proof glass. The standard tires are replaced with run-flat models. The additional weight (up to a ton or more) requires the installation of enhanced shocks and a more powerful engine. It takes a few hundred pounds of armor to provide protection from pistol bullets. Protection from rifle bullets requires half a ton. For protection against heavy machine-gun (12.7mm) and bombs, you need a ton or more. The first armor kits for military vehicles, like the hummer, weighed a ton. Soon that was up to two tons. The additional load on high-end vehicles 1.5 tons, which is enough armor to stop heavy machine-gun bullets.

Microsoft buys Finland

Filed under: Business, Europe, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:16

Oh, sorry, I misread the headline … it should say “Microsoft buys Finland’s tech sector“:

Microsoft has agreed a deal to buy Nokia’s mobile phone business for 5.4bn euros ($7.2bn; £4.6bn).

Nokia will also license its patents and mapping services to Microsoft. Nokia shares jumped 45% on news of the deal.

The purchase is set to be completed in early 2014, when about 32,000 Nokia employees will transfer to Microsoft.

While Nokia has struggled against competition from Samsung and Apple, Microsoft has been criticised for being slow into the mobile market.

Describing the deal as a “big, bold step forward”, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer told the BBC that his company was in the process of transforming itself from one that “was known for software and PCs, to a company that focuses on devices and services”.

“We’ve done a lot of great work in the two-and-a-half years that we’ve been in partnership with Nokia, going literally from no phones to 7.4 million smart Windows phones in the last quarter that was reported,” he said.

But he admitted: “We have more work to do to expand the range of applications on our product.”

I guess we can now retire the “Microsoft is buying RIM Blackberry” rumours…

QotD: Some things never change, military division

Filed under: Britain, History, India, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Then for the first time since I had left the Kotwali I had a moment to run over in my mind the actions I had taken during the last half-hour. The soldier always knows that everything he does on such an occasions will be scrutinized by two classes of critics — by the Government which employs him and by the enemies of that Government. As far as the Government is concerned, he is a little Admiral Jellicoe and this his tiny Battle of Jutland. He has to make a vital decision on incomplete information in a matter of seconds, and afterwards the experts can sit down at leisure, with all the facts before them, and argue about what he might, could, or should have done. Lucky the soldier if, as in Jellicoe’s case, the tactical experts decide after twenty years’ profound consideration that what he did in three minutes was right. As for the enemies of the Government, it does not much matter what he has done. They will twist, misinterpret, falsify, or invent any facts as evidence that he is an inhuman monster wallowing in innocent blood.

Field Marshal William Slim, “Aid to the Civil”, Unoficial History, 1959.

September 2, 2013

Vikings 2013 practice squad set

Filed under: Football — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:43

The “final” roster I posted yesterday didn’t last 24 hours without change … the Vikings claimed former Chicago Bear offensive tackle J’Marcus Webb off waivers and cut Troy Kropog to make room on the 53-man roster. Cornerback Bobby Felder and defensive end D’Aundre Reed were both waived/injured and were put on the Vikings injured reserve list after passing waivers.

Former Vikings Antoine Winfield and Chris Kluwe were both cut by their new teams, which adds a bit more evidence to the “Rick Spielman is an evil genius” file (Spielman cut both players despite good performances over several years and strong fan opinions (Update, 3 September: See this Patrick Reusse post for more grudging acknowledgement of the quality of Spielman’s decision-making)).

The following players have been signed to the eight-man practice squad (for some reason, I always think the PS is 10 players, rather than eight):

  • Joe Banyard, RB
  • Travis Bond, OG
  • Everett Dawkins, DT
  • Chase Ford, TE
  • Kevin Murphy OT
  • Tristan Okpalaugo, DE
  • Rodney Smith, WR
  • Adam Thielen, WR

This month in moral panic watch – “rape porn”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:24

British PM David Cameron has decided that it’s the duty of his government to crack down on internet pornography. In particular, the British government will be attempting to stamp out violent pornography, aka “rape porn”. This may not be his best idea ever:

Lobby organisations like “End Violence Against Women” and sensationalist news rags like the Daily Mail repeatedly claim that watching violent pornography increases sexual abuse and rape by men.

However, the scientific evidence has stubbornly refused to play along with this view:

U.S. Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (1970) found no evidence of a causal link between pornography and rape

“Pornography and rape: theory and practice? Evidence from crime data in four countries where pornography is easily available” (1991) B Kutchinsky

Examined what happened to the rape statistics in four countries (USA, Denmark, West Germany and Sweden) during periods where the availability of violent pornography went from extreme scarcity to relative abundance.

Quoting the report: “The results showed that in none of the countries did rape increase more than nonsexual violent crimes. This finding in itself would seem sufficient to discard the hypothesis that pornography causes rape“

There’s also the problem that pornography is actually quite popular — with both male and female users — over 40% of all internet users view pornography voluntarily. In fact, large numbers of women admit to enjoying rape fantasies:

Whether the puritans or the feminists like it or not, it is a fact that many women enjoy rape fantasies as explained by this female journalist.

Erotic literature such as Fifty Shades of Grey featuring bondage, spanking, hair pulling, fisting and pinwheeling generated sales of over £10M in six months, to a predominantly female audience.

On a more scientific level, a 1988 study by Pelletier and Herold found that over half of their female respondents had fantasies of forced sex.

Nobody (quite rightly) suggests that women who expose themselves to this sort of “violent porn” literature, or who engage in sexual fantasies of rape are more likely to go out and put themselves into situations where they will be raped.

People clearly understand that there is a world of difference between enjoying rape as a sexual fantasy and the violent, painful reality of actual rape.

The same reasoning must logically apply to men who enjoy rape fantasy and rape porn. There is a world of difference between enjoying rape as a sexual fantasy and the violent reality of actual raping another human being.

To assert that women can enjoy rape fantasy, porn and violent BDSM literature without harm because they understand the difference between fantasy and reality, but men do not is nothing more than misandry.

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