I really don’t think think this is a debate about politeness. I mean, I’m happy to have that debate, too, but it’s not as important. Is it polite to call someone a liar? Probably not; but if they are a politician, like Jennifer Lynch is, and they really are lying, as I’ve meticulously documented, and the lies are important lies, then I think that politeness must take second place behind public accountability. I think it would be unethical to elevate mere politeness for politeness’s sake ahead of responsible government. Those who think that one can expose the lies — and corruption and abuse and neo-Nazi activities(!) — of a 200-person, $25-million/year government agency without marshalling the full force of the English language are either naive and inexperienced, or — as Jennifer Lynch is doing — simply trying to change the subject from the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s bad behaviour.
When Canada’s censorship laws are finally repealed, and the abusive, corrupt staff at the CHRC and other HRCs are disciplined for their outrageous (and, in some cases, illegal) behaviour, we can then have a debate as to whether or not it is fair game to call their chief politician and spin doctor “haggard”. Until we have shut down the real and pressing menace to our civil liberties, I’m not too interested about whether or not I’m using the wrong fork for my salad, or other exquisite courtesies.
Ezra Levant, “More letters”, EzraLevant.com, 2008-08-04
August 5, 2009
QotD: It’s not about politeness
August 4, 2009
California looking for all kinds of new sources of income
Neil Gaiman has some issues with the California tax department (individual Twitter messages, in sequence):
It wasn’t identity theft screwing up my credit rating. Twas the idiot state of idiot california deciding I lived there & wasn’t paying tax.
I know that California is bankrupt and stupid, but ohhhh the stupidness and ohhh the cupidity. Twerps.
They decided I lived there & wasn’t paying tax & took out a Tax Lien; then cancelled it when we yelled, but it lives on in the credit rpt.
Right. I just spoke to a nice man who pretended he wasn’t in India who said he’d get onto fixing it. We shall see what happens.
July 24, 2009
QotD: Government waste
For the people in government, rather than the people who pester it, Washington is an early-rising, hard-working city. It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.
P.J. O’Rourke, “The Winners Go to Washington, D.C.”, Parliament of Whores, 1991
July 22, 2009
July 20, 2009
Decoded: the secret of modern education
Tyler Cowen provides the skeleton key to understand the modern education system:
Placebo effects can be very powerful and many supposedly effective medicines do not in fact outperform the placebo. The sorry truth is that no one has compared modern education to a placebo. What if we just gave people lots of face-to-face contact and told them they were being educated?
[Ben Casnochna writes:] He reluctantly provides the terrifying conclusion: Maybe that’s what current methods of education already consist of.
July 12, 2009
Sauce for the goose
Rick Newcombe provides an insight into why Los Angeles is suffering from a killer combination of rising unemployment and tax rates that no longer meet expenses:
[. . .] 15 years ago we had a dispute with the city over our business tax classification. The city argued that we should be in an “occupations and professions” classification that has an extremely high tax rate, while we fought for a “wholesale and retail” classification with a much lower rate. The city forced us to invest a small fortune in legal fees over two years, but we felt it was worth it in order to establish the correct classification once and for all.
After enduring a series of bureaucratic hearings, we anxiously awaited a ruling to find out what our tax rate would be. Everything was at stake. We had already decided that if we lost, we would move.
You can imagine how relieved we were on July 1, 1994, when the ruling was issued. We won, and firmly planted our roots in the City of Angels and proceeded to build our business.
Everything was fine until the city started running out of money in 2007. Suddenly, the city announced that it was going to ignore its own ruling and reclassify us in the higher tax category. Even more incredible is the fact that the new classification was to be imposed retroactively to 2004 with interest and penalties. No explanation was given for the new classification, or for the city’s decision to ignore its 1994 ruling.
Their official position is that the city is not bound by past rulings — only taxpayers are. This is why we have been forced to file a lawsuit. We will let the courts decide whether it is legal for adverse rulings to apply only to taxpayers and not to the city.
The rule of law requires that both parties are equally subject to the outcome of a trial, win or lose. The city clearly feels that it’s above that.
(Cross-posted to the old blog, http://bolditalic.com/quotulatiousness_archive/005574.html.)
July 11, 2009
Parkinson: the man behind “the Law”
He may be less familiar now, but most of us have heard of his most popular work: Parkinson’s Law:
The book expanded on an article of his first published in The Economist in November 1955. Illustrated by Britain’s then leading cartoonist, Osbert Lancaster, the book was an instant hit. It was wrapped around the author’s “law” that “work expands to fill the time available for its completion”. Thus, Parkinson wrote, “an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis . . . the total effort that would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil.”
Parkinson’s barbs were directed first and foremost at government institutions — he cited the example of the British navy where the number of admiralty officials increased by 78% between 1914 and 1928, a time when the number of ships fell by 67% and the number of officers and men by 31%. But they applied almost equally well to private industry, which was at the time bloated after decades spent adding layers and layers of managerial bureaucracy.
(Crossposted to the old blog, http://bolditalic.com/quotulatiousness_archive/005572.html.
July 10, 2009
Maybe photographers in the UK actually do have rights
Clive sent me this update from The Register:
The Metropolitan Police has issued guidance to its officers to remind them that using a camera in public is not in itself a terrorist offence.
There has been increasing concern in recent months that police have been over-using terrorism laws and public order legislation to harass professional and amateur photographers. The issue was raised in Parliament and the Home Office agreed to look at the rules.
The guidance reminds officers that the public do not need a licence to take photographs in the street and the police have no power to stop people taking pictures of anything they like, including police officers.
The over-used Terrorism Act of 2000 does not ban photography either, although it does allow police to look at images on phones or cameras during a search to see if they could be useful to a terrorist.
This is a belated follow-up to incidents like this one (oh, and this one, too). It’s refreshing to see that at least one government recognizes that recent police enforcement of a non-existant law must be curtailed. It’s also sad that this sort of thing is still so rare as to be noteworthy.
Oh, and Canadians shouldn’t try to be smug about this . . . we have over-enthusiastic police enforcement of mythical laws as well.
(Cross-posted to the old blog, http://bolditalic.com/quotulatiousness_archive/005569.html.)
