Quotulatiousness

September 2, 2019

What You Didn’t Know About the 1968 Machine Gun Amnesty

Filed under: Bureaucracy, History, Law, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 11 Oct 2017

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When the 1968 machine gun amnesty was announced in the US, it was treated with widespread suspicion among gun collectors. Some thought it would merely a pretense to find and arrest owners of unregistered machine guns. Others though it was just the first step in a prohibition and confiscation of machine guns. Both of these groups would prove to be wrong, however and the amnesty was in fact a true amnesty.

In fact, the amnesty was even more substantial than people recognize even today. It was not just an amnesty for possession of an unregistered machine gun, but also pretty much any crime associated with the gun. For example, it would legalize guns that had been stolen from military property rooms, and guns with defaced serial numbers. In fact, it even allowed felons to register machine guns, and retain the legal right to own them to this very day.

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QotD: The abolition conspiracy of the 1850s

Filed under: History, Law, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the “slave power conspiracy” was a misnomer. Oh, the Southern senators all voted together, but that’s not a conspiracy. “Conspiracy” implies an end, a goal, and the slave power simply didn’t have one. Their actions were purely negative, and if that meant absolutely nothing got done, well, so be it. They were deeply skeptical of federal power anyway; if vetoing anything and everything that might somehow affect slavery meant that the nation would simply drift along, directionless, that suited them just fine.

But there was another conspiracy afoot in the 1850s: The abolition conspiracy. You don’t hear about this one in high school history because the victors write the textbooks, but it was quite real. And this one really was a conspiracy, in that they had a clear goal: The end of chattel slavery. And it was a conspiracy in a more fundamental sense, in that it was illegal. The so-called “slave power conspiracy” was obstructionist to the bone, but it’s perfectly legal for legislators to vote against proposed legislation. It’s not legal to advocate armed insurrection but that’s what the abolitionists did.

On October 16, 1859, a lunatic abolitionist named John Brown led a partisan band in an attack on the Federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. He wanted to distribute the stolen guns to local slaves, thus sparking a race war. We know this because Brown was captured alive, and the great state of Virginia put him on trial, as they were legally required to do. Being a fanatic, and knowing that he was a dead man already, Brown took the opportunity to advertise his cause to the world …

At which point it became obvious that not only did Brown have the financial backing of several prominent Northerners, but he had the moral backing of a large segment of the Northern population. Brown became a martyr, literally — he was frequently compared to Jesus Christ in Northern periodicals. The important thing to note is this: Brown was captured in armed insurrection against the United States, and lots of the country was ok with it. This man simply decided that the legal processes could never result in the outcome he deemed morally necessary, so he took the law into his own hands — with the active connivance of prominent Northern financiers and intellectuals, and the avid approval of many Northern citizens.

Remember that, and Southern belligerency makes a whole lot more sense. The North was obviously ready to go to the gun in 1861, because they’d already gone to the gun in 1859. The “John Brown Moment,” then, is the point at which violence becomes inevitable, because one significant, influential segment of the country not only passively tolerates it, but actively cheers it.

Severian, “The John Brown Moment”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-16.

August 30, 2019

EFF sues Homeland Security over illegal GPS vehicle trackers

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Kieren McCarthy on a recent lawsuit by the Electronic Frontiers Foundation:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has sued the US Department of Homeland Security to find out more about a program where, it is claimed, officers secretly stick GPS trackers on vehicles they are suspicious of as they come through the border.

The EFF has made repeated freedom of information act (FoIA) requests about the program’s policies but has been stonewalled, with Homeland Security’s responses claiming any information would contain “sensitive information” that could lead to “circumvention of the law.”

The foundation’s main concern is that Homeland Security is carrying out its secret tracking without a warrant, or even anything beyond a single officer’s suspicion. And it points to a recent US Supreme Court decision where it ruled that warrantless GPS tracking was unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.

Details of the program came to light last year when customs officers revealed in court filings that they had used GPS trackers without a warrant at the border. Since then the EFF has tried to find out what the policies and procedures are for deciding when a vehicle can be tagged. The relevant authorities have not been keen to go into any detail.

There’s another legal precedent too: a California court ruled that government officials’ use of GPS devices to track two suspected drug dealers without getting a warrant violated the Supreme Court decision, made in 2012, and was government misconduct.

August 25, 2019

QotD: Bipartisan authoritarianism

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

Hey, remember how Bill Clinton doubled down on the War on Drugs, perfecting Reagan’s haphazard and shoddily made race-war into a well-oiled incarceration machine that turned America into the world’s greatest incarcerator, a nation that imprisoned black people at a rate that exceeded Apartheid-era South Africa?

Some Democrats want to double down on their party’s shameful Drug War history. Massachusetts Rep. Stephan Hay [D-Fitchfield] has introduced House Bill 1266, which treats the existence of “a hidden compartment” in a vehicle as “prima facie evidence that the conveyance was used intended for use in and for the business of unlawfully manufacturing, dispensing, or distributing controlled substances.”

This means that if a cop stops you and finds no drugs or other contraband, but decides that part of your car is a “hidden compartment,” that cop can subject your car to civil asset forfeiture — that is, they can steal it, and force you to sue them to get it back.

The role of the Democratic Party is often to take the Republicans’ stupidest, red-meat-for-the-base policies, sloppily designed and doomed to collapse under their own weight, and operationalize them, putting them on the kind of sound bureaucratic footing that they need to have real staying power. Exhibit A is the drug war, but see also Obama’s perfection of GWB’s mess of a mass-surveillance apparatus, turning it into an immortal and pluripotent weapon that Donald Trump now gets to wield.

Cory Doctorow, “Proposed Massachusetts law would let cops steal your car if it had a ‘hidden compartment'”, Boing Boing, 2017-07-16.

August 22, 2019

The “tragedy of the corporate commons”

Filed under: Business, Law, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Corporations are being urged to take on responsibility to a wider — in fact, the widest possible — group of people rather than the narrowly defined group of shareholders. Arthur Chrenkoff explains why this is not likely to improve either corporate governance or the wider world:

Whatever you thought of Friedman’s formulation, at least both the chain of accountability and the performance assessment criteria were pretty clear. Now, not so much. It sounds great on paper, this corporate social responsibility on steroids; we take everyone’s interests into account: shareholders, employees, customers, the society in general; everyone is a stakeholder. But what does it mean in practice? Previously, boards were accountable to people whose investment in the company made the company’s existence possible. That the company should have a good workforce, satisfy the customers, and obey the laws of the land all went without saying, being the necessary conditions for successful operations. Now, the Business Roundtable recommends everyone and everything has to be taken into consideration and companies need to “deliver value to all of them”. What if you can’t? What if the interests of the nearly infinite number of stakeholders conflict with one another? How do you gauge all these interests? How do you prioritise? How do you assess “value for all”?

What this initiative seems to me to be about is giving the official blessing for corporations to be political and social actors, to pursue every trendy cause and campaign for issues that have nothing to do with the actual business conducted or business in general, and to do so without the fear of any negative consequences for the management. It’s a great way to avoid any responsibility and accountability, particularly if the bottom line suffers as a result. “Sure, our revenue is way down, but our campaign for separate toilets for each of the 32 separate genders is what the society needs and expects from us”. Previously, you assessed the management on their stewardship of the company and its commercial performance. But since now that’s only one of the criteria to be taken into consideration, it will become more difficult to sanction bad and underperforming directors. They might suck at business but they’re woke enough so, hey, it balances out. Or more than balances: after all, why should the interests of a thousand shareholders be privileged over the interests of the amorphous but clearly much numerically bigger community? Satisfying the interests of shareholders is an objective exercise, delivering value to the country as a whole – or to the whole world – is so vague that it’s impossible to disprove; it’s unmeasurable and very much in the eye of the beholder. Which is how the new corporate class wants to keep it; if you are answerable to everyone, you are answerable to no one.

August 18, 2019

The SNC-Lavalin affair was “unethical and contrary to law”, but “relatively above board”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The initial affair itself, that is. Andrew Coyne:

It is the element of deception that raises the conduct described in the ethics commissioner’s report from the merely unlawful to the potentially criminal.

Until now what we had thought we were dealing with was only a sustained and mounting campaign, by the prime minister and by those acting at his direction, to pressure the former attorney general of Canada to set aside the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin, a company with a long history of corruption and even longer history of contributing to the Liberal party, for reasons that explicitly included considerations of partisan advantage.

All of this was vastly improper on its own. Prosecutorial independence is one of the bedrock principles of our system of law, as fundamental as judicial independence. It is settled law that the attorney general, in consideration of a particular prosecution, may not be pressured by anyone, least of all the prime minister, for any reason, least of all partisan gain. Yet Jody Wilson-Raybould was, repeatedly, to the point of being threatened with dismissal if she did not capitulate.

Still, if unethical and contrary to law, this was relatively above board, in so far as the pressure on the attorney general was direct and undisguised: a scandal, to be sure, and grounds for more resignations than those submitted to date, but not, as the cliché has it, a crime. That, of course, is not the standard we should expect of public office holders — that they should merely avoid committing crimes — but it is at least a standard.

Whereas the conduct unearthed by the ethics commissioner may have fallen below even that line. What we have learned is that senior government officials were not just pressuring the former attorney general to interfere in a criminal proceeding, by the unprecedented means of overturning a decision of the independent director of public prosecutions: they were deceiving her.

They did so not only by keeping important information from her, but by providing her with misleading information. They acted, not only in concert with each other, but with officials at SNC-Lavalin, and they carried on this conspiracy to, in the commissioner’s words, “circumvent, undermine and ultimately attempt to discredit” the authority of the attorney general even as the company’s appeal of the DPP’s ruling was before Federal Court — a proceeding to which the attorney general, via the DPP, was a party.

August 14, 2019

Hong Kong’s struggle with the Chinese government

Filed under: China, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Coyne on the desperate situation of the Hong Kong protests:

2019 Hong Kong anti-extradition law protest on 16 June, captured by Studio Incendo from Flickr.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons

A sickening pall of inevitability hangs over the protests in Hong Kong, now in their tenth week. Neither side can afford to back down – the protesters, because their way of life, indeed their very lives, are at stake; the Beijing-backed government, for the precedent it would set, and the hope it would inspire.

As the violence mounts — most of it, to date, on the part of the police, or in some cases the Triad gangs hired to beat and intimidate the protesters — so does the likelihood of mass bloodshed, a reprise of the Tienanmen massacre of 30 years ago. Some of the protesters may indeed hope to tempt Beijing into such an appalling overstep; however horrific the prospect, or improbable their chances, it is difficult to blame them.

For as the people of the world’s freest city fend off being swallowed by one of the world’s most repressive dictatorships, they do so largely alone. Fifty-six years ago, when West Berlin faced a similar threat from the Eastern Bloc, the democratic world rallied to its cause – because its cause, they knew, was their cause. President John F. Kennedy went to Berlin to give his great, moving “ich bin ein Berliner” speech, declaring before the world that “all free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin.” These were not just words — it was NATO policy to defend the city with arms, if necessary.

And today? The president of the United States refers to the protesters as “rioters,” the Beijing-approved term. Should President Xi Jinping decide to suppress the unrest in Hong Kong by force, he seems to be signalling, he would be willing to look the other way — perhaps for reasons of state (what are a few hundred or even thousand lives if it helps close a trade deal?), or perhaps just out of his habitual admiration for dictators. But the government of Canada — 300,000 of whose citizens, let us remember, live in the city — has been scarcely more robust in their defence; neither have most western governments.

August 9, 2019

What’s happening in Jammu and Kashmir?

Filed under: Government, History, India, Law, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Pieter J. Friedrich reports on recent events concerning the unique constitutional status of Jammu and Kashmir within the Republic of India:

CIA map of the Kashmir Region in 2004.
Via Wikimedia Commons. Click image to see full-sized map.

Terror grips the most militarized zone in the world after India’s Central Government terminated Jammu and Kashmir’s 70-year-old “special status” as the first step towards stripping the disputed region of statehood entirely.

Internationally infamous as the world’s hottest potential nuclear flashpoint, J&K originally acceded to India in 1947 only on the condition that the newly-formed country be restricted from interfering in the domestic affairs of the mountainous northern region. The agreement was sealed between the last king of J&K, Maharaja Hari Singh Dogra, and the representative of the British crown, Governor-General Lord Mountbatten. In 1949, when passage of the constitution formed the Republic of India, the Maharaja’s conditions for accession were enshrined in Article 370.

The crux of the article – in combination with Article 35A of 1954 – was that, while J&K accepted India’s handling of issues like defense and foreign policy, the state otherwise reserved the right to autonomy in handling its domestic affairs. Kashmiris, thus, lived under their own distinct laws. Notably, citizens of other parts of India were prohibited from settling permanently or owning property in Kashmir. In the eyes of many Kashmiris, this prevented settler colonialism. On August 5, 2019, the President of India abolished this “special status” by decree.

Simultaneously, Home Minister Amit Shah – charged with India’s internal security – introduced a bill in the upper house of parliament to strip J&K of statehood, downgrade it to a “Union Territory,” and partition the region.

As Shah did this, the Central Government shut down Kashmir. It imposed a virtual curfew, banning movement of the public, shuttering educational institutions, and barring all public assemblies or meetings. It severed communications, cutting off phone and internet access. And it conducted arrests of mainstream Kashmiri political leaders – such as former chief ministers Mehbooba Mufti and Omar Abdullah – on unknown charges.

India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, which was just re-elected in May, campaigned on promises to scrap J&K’s “special status.” The BJP’s manifesto alleged that it was “an obstacle in the development of the state,” while Shah insisted it stood in the way of of Kashmir becoming an “integral party of India permanently” and was necessary for “national security.” Indeed, the tumultuous region has suffered a significant influx in violence in recent years.

Since 2014, when Prime Minister Modi’s regime first came to power, terrorist incidents in J&K have nearly tripled and security forces deaths have nearly doubled. According to a July 2019 UN report, independent bodies documented 159 security forces deaths in 2018 – a figure comparable to US troop fatalities in Iraq in 2009. The latest round of escalating tensions traces back to at least 2010, when mass protests erupted over an “encounter killing” of three civilians by Indian Army troops. Protests again erupted in 2016. During suppression efforts, security forces killed hundreds of protesters.

The Central Government has responded by flooding J&K with more and more soldiers. The small region – slightly smaller than the United Kingdom – is already occupied by a bare minimum of 500,000 troops. Since late July 2019, India has deployed nearly another 50,000.

Delhi has additionally responded by repeatedly dissolving J&K’s elected state government, imposing direct rule three times since 2015. The last time was in June 2018, after India’s ruling BJP withdrew from a coalition with then J&K Chief Minister Mufti – apparently because she advocated “reconciliation” instead of a “muscular security policy” as the most effective solution to the Kashmir conflict. Elections have not been allowed since 2014.

The ongoing occupation as well as the long-term use of direct rule – imposed for approximately ten of the past 42 years – contribute to the perception of Kashmiris that they are nothing more than vassals within the Republic of India.

July 31, 2019

QotD: Foreshadowing Nuremberg

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Italy, Law, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943

Mussolini, in “Cassius’s” book, after calling his witnesses, enters the box himself. He sticks to his Machiavellian creed: Might is Right, vae victis! He is guilty of the only crime that matters, the crime of failure, and he admits that his adversaries have a right to kill him — but not, he insists, a right to blame him. Their conduct has been similar to his own, and their moral condemnations are all hypocrisy. But thereafter come the other three witnesses, the Abyssinian, the Spaniard and the Italian, who are morally upon a different plane, since they have never temporized with Fascism nor had a chance to play at power politics; and all three of them demand the death penalty.

Would they demand it in real life? Will any such thing ever happen? It is not very likely, even if the people who have a real right to try Mussolini should somehow get him into their hands. The Tories, of course, though they would shrink from a real inquest into the origins of the war, are not sorry to have the chance of pushing the whole blame onto a few notorious individuals like Mussolini and Hitler. In this way the Darlan-Badoglio manoeuvre is made easier. Mussolini is a good scapegoat while he is at large, though he would be an awkward one in captivity. But how about the common people? Would they kill their tyrants, in cold blood and with the forms of law if they had the chance?

It is a fact that there have been very few such executions in history. At the end of the last war an election was won partly on the slogan “Hang the Kaiser”, and yet if any such thing had been attempted the conscience of the nation would probably have revolted. When tyrants are put to death, it should be by their own subjects; those who are punished by a foreign authority, like Napoleon, are simply made into martyrs and legends.

What is important is not that these political gangsters should be made to suffer, but that they should be made to discredit themselves. Fortunately they do do so in many cases, for to a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armour, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous. Napoleon surrendered to the English in order to get protection from the Prussians, the Empress Eugénie fled in a hansom cab with an American dentist, Ludendorff resorted to blue spectacles, one of the more unprintable Roman emperors tried to escape assassination by locking himself in the lavatory, and during the early days of the Spanish Civil War one leading Fascist made his escape from Barcelona, with exquisite fitness, through a sewer.

It is some such exit that one would wish for Mussolini, and if he is left to himself perhaps he will achieve it. Possibly Hitler also. It used to be said of Hitler that when his time came he would never fly or surrender, but would perish in some operatic manner, by suicide at the very least. But that was when Hitler was successful; during the last year, since things began to go wrong, it is difficult to feel that he has behaved with dignity or courage. “Cassius” ends his book with the judge’s summing-up, and leaves the verdict open, seeming to invite a decision from his readers. Well, if it were left to me, my verdict on both Hitler and Mussolini would be: not death, unless in is inflicted in some hurried unspectacular way. If the Germans and Italians feel like giving them a summary court-martial and then a firing-squad, let them do it. Or better still, let the pair of them escape with a suitcaseful of bearer securities and settle down as the accredited bores of some Swiss pension. But no martyrizing, no St Helena business. And, above all, no solemn hypocritical “trial of war criminals”, with all the slow cruel pageantry of the law, which after a lapse of time has so strange a way of focusing a romantic light on the accused and turning a scoundrel into a hero.

George Orwell, “Who are the War Criminals?”, Tribune, 1943-10-22.

July 30, 2019

Moira Greyland discusses how she came to write The Last Closet

Filed under: Books, Law, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tamara Wilhite discusses some of the events that prompted Moira Greyland to write about her mother, Marion Zimmer Bradley and some of the reactions from readers of the book:

The Last Closet was written by Moira Greyland. She’s the daughter of Marion Zimmer Bradley, author of The Mists of Avalon and Walter Breen. It is Marion Bradley’s book from which the book title is drawn. “The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon” is equal parts autobiography and true-crime thriller with a tragic sprinkling of the history of science fiction fandom mixed in.

Moira’s book includes large sections of horrifying personal stories, but she has gone to great length to document what happened. For example, her father’s repeated arrests on pedophilia charges (he died in prison) and her mother’s testimony during such trials are public record. She’s backed up everything she can from external sources.

I had the opportunity to interview Moira, and the transcript is below.

Tamara: Some of the events in the book go back forty years. What prompted you to write the book in 2017?

Moira: In 2014, a blogger named Deirdre Saoirse Moen contacted me. She was protesting Tor book’s publication of a puff piece lauding my mother, which did not mention either my father’s conviction or her court-documented collusion with him.

I only knew Deirdre as a woman from science fiction fandom who had hired me for a harp concert, and I did not realize how famous she was. My responses to her email consisted of a brief assent that my father had indeed done all that he was accused of and convicted for and more, but it also included the new for her information that my mother had been a great deal worse than my father. I also included my two poems “Mother’s Hands” and “They Did Their Best.”

Deirdre was horrified, and reported that she had lost her lunch upon reading my reply. Her blog posts about my mother and my responses were reblogged to 92 countries all over the world. There was furious controversy, mostly consisting of everyone who tried to defend my mother getting shouted down. Some people read my mother’s appallingly callous court testimony and pronounced her guilty from her own words. Other people saw themselves in my poetry, in the flatness and horror so familiar to the trauma patient. Still others recognized things in my mother’s books about incest and sexual abuse which had never quite seemed right to them.

I was astonished at the volume of response, and at the many, many, MANY letters addressed directly to me. Most of the letters included both sympathy for me and my brother, but nearly all contained reports of the letter writer’s own abuse, many containing the words “I never told anyone this before.”

I was asked to fill in the rest of my story, and I did so, in a blog post called “The Story of Moira Greyland,” hosted on the blog of Katy Faust, another child of gays and lesbians as I am. My blog post was nominated for a Hugo in 2015, and I was offered a book contract by Vox Day of Castalia House.

The only concern I had about writing my book was that my late brother Mark was having a very hard time with the unplanned public exposure. He was having flashbacks about our father, and beginning to have a lot more trouble managing his health. The reason that was so problematic for him was that we both identified our mother as being the scary, dangerous one, where our father was comparatively gentle and loving. Having to deal with his history meant that there was no even remotely good parent left for him, even as a matter of memory.

His distress predated the book, though, and I did not think that it would be relieved by my silence.

I was given a year to complete the book, and I beat my deadline. It would do no good to mention the particular kind of hell it was to tell the story, and I credit my beloved late husband with sticking by my side through the entire process. Anyone with a trauma history can imagine that all of my trauma symptoms from flashbacks to ataxia got worse. It became very clear to me while writing exactly why it was that so few people talk about their injuries.

July 25, 2019

In British Columbia, “butthurt” damages can exceed $75,000 under Human Rights legislation

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the Post Millennial, Jordan Schroeder illustrates how BC human rights rules have created a new class of tort:

I would argue that the issue is not with the BC Human Rights Tribunal itself, but with the perverse incentive of litigating for profit that is created by the BC Human Rights Code. The BC Human Rights Code creates this incentive through a type of damages called “injury to dignity, feelings, and self-respect.”

This head of damages is harmful to human rights law in BC. It is unfair to the defendants, and it incentivizes predatory litigation. All of this causes British Columbians to lose trust in the important role that the tribunal can play in redressing wrongs.

Section 37 of the BC Human Rights Code allows the tribunal to make an award of damages to a complainant for “injury to dignity, feelings, and self-respect”. The tribunal is permitted to award any amount for this that it sees fit.

By the admission of the Human Rights Tribunal [PDF], the awards for this type of damages is high and is “trending upwards.” For example, in the Oger v Whatcott case, Whatcott was ordered to pay $35,000 for discriminatory speech against Morgane Oger. Whatcott had made critical comments about Oger based Oger’s transgender identity. In the same case, the tribunal cited $5,000 awards as “lower” awards. Other cases have seen awards of up to $75,000.

Awards for hurt feelings are unique to human rights law. Damages awarded in every other area of law are based on the principle that the award should only make the complainant whole. A complainant should never be better off after receiving the damages award.

For example, consider if a company leased a concert hall to a business that wanted to use the space to put on a production. Imagine that business stood to make $50,000 in profit from a sold-out production.

If the rental was cancelled by the company leasing the concert hall in breach of the contract, that company would have to pay the other party $50,000, representing all of the profit the other party could have made. The other party is not better off after the award. They are only made whole.

In contrast, awards for hurt feelings undoubtedly put the complainant better off than they would have been had the human rights violation not occurred in the first place. It is self-evident that an award in the tens of thousands of dollars outweighs any injury to feelings caused by the discriminatory speech or action.

Why is it a problem to have an award that amounts to more than what the complainant actually lost? Obviously, there is the problem that it saddles a defendant with a massive financial burden that doesn’t reflect the damage that they caused. A woman starting a small business who is ordered to pay a “small” award of $5,000 dollars would likely find it ruinous.

July 24, 2019

Wait, you mean there might be a downside to cannabis legalization?

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As a libertarian of long standing, I’m on the record as being in favour of legalizing cannabis since long before it was cool (geeky and perpetually uncool libertarians probably helped keep it from being cool for at least a few years longer). I’m not enthused to hear that we may have been undersold on the risks of cannabis use … not that the government didn’t try telling is it was deadly, deadly poison (they did, repeatedly, and at great length), but they institutionalized the role of the boy who cried wolf, and every illegal narcotic got basically the same description. I’m actually not kidding here: the first health class I got in middle school included a lecture and a pamphlet on the dangers of pot; the second class covered the dangers of cocaine; the third warned against LSD; and so on … but they used a copy/paste to discuss the physical and mental risks of the different drugs, and they all read the same way. All those evil drugs are evil, bad, and rot your brain. Knowing that the pothead (“Hi, Gary!”) at the back of the class hadn’t suddenly had a psychotic break and tried to fly off the top of the school was the first hint that we were being oversold on the real world risks of (some) illegal drug use. The declared fact that some illegal narcotics actually are deadly, deadly poison ran up against the observed fact that a significant majority of people over the age of fifteen had tried cannabis and found it somewhat less scary than advertised.

Along with the beginnings of doubt that the government was being honest with us, and the clear understanding that even if using drugs wasn’t as dangerous as we were told, we shared a growing awareness that being caught with drugs by the police was significantly more dangerous and possibly deadly. Officer Friendly would shoot you down like a mad dog if he thought you were one’o’them drug-crazed hippies. It certainly changed the social dynamics of any interaction with Officer Friendly’s fellow heavily armed co-workers…

In the National Post, Barbara Kay suggests that not all the dangers of cannabis use were mere government propaganda:

Some years ago, in conversation with his wife, a forensic psychiatrist specializing in mentally ill criminals, former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson observed that the perpetrator of a recent violent crime had been high at the time, and had smoked pot regularly all his life. Her response — “Yeah, they all do” — jolted him. The result was his book, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence.

Much of the referenced material in Berenson’s book had not yet been published a decade ago. But more recent studies only confirm what a few intrepid researchers were already warning about then.

Indeed, as I noted in a 2008 column, the head of the Medical research Council in the U.K., Professor Colin Blakemore, who in 1997 had been the moral authority behind a pot-legalization campaign, unequivocally reversed his pot-friendly stance in 2007, stating: “The link between cannabis and psychosis is quite clear now; it wasn’t 10 years ago.”

If you haven’t energy for a whole book, but would invest in 16 pages on the subject, you will be well rewarded by Steven Malanga’s in-depth article, “The Marijuana Delusion,” in City Journal‘s June issue. Here you will find debunked the blithe claim, still received as gospel by progressives and libertarians, that pot is virtually harmless and even therapeutic.

Unlike marijuana, real medications are deeply researched before coming on the market, and may attest to proven benefits, but are obligated to admit potential harms. Is pot a medicinal drug or a placebo? Nobody really knows. One may argue “who cares, as long as it works” (anecdotally I hear that pot works, and also that it doesn’t work), but that isn’t the point, since the legalization movement made medical claims for pot in order to bring the public onside politically. There was no will on the movement’s side to discover even radically fortified pot’s downsides.

The knowledge was out there for those interested. In 1987 a study of nearly 50,000 Swedish military conscripts followed for drug use over 15 years found that frequent pot use in teenhood was linked to a six-fold risk of schizophrenia as compared with non-usage. A 2004 meta-analysis of studies on pot use came to a similar conclusion. These studies, and others, are suggestive that heavy marijuana consumption, particularly in youth, may cause serious mental health problems. Yes, it is possible that the link isn’t entirely causal; people with mental health issues may be more likely to use marijuana heavily. But at the very least, this ought to be an issue of ongoing concern, particularly now that marijuana is legal in Canada and in an increasing number of U.S. states.

July 21, 2019

Debunking the “common wisdom” about the “Scopes Monkey Trial”

Filed under: Education, History, Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mark Pulliam explains what really caused the “Scopes Monkey Trial” and what was at stake … which doesn’t match up well at all against what little most people will remember about it today:

William Jennings Bryan (seated at left) being interrogated by Clarence Darrow, during the trial of the State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, July 20, 1925. That Monday afternoon, because of the extreme heat, Judge Raulston moved court proceedings outdoors. The session was held on a platform that had been erected at the front of the Rhea County Courthouse to accommodate ministers who wanted to preach during the time of the trial. Defense lawyers for Scopes (John R. Neal, Arthur Garfield Hays, and Dudley Field Malone) are visible seated to the extreme right. One of the men at left, with his back to the photographer, appears to be Scopes. The court reporters are seated at the table.
Photograph by Watson Davis via Wikimedia Commons.

We are again in another contentious period in America where battles over our culture and how we should live together are acrimonious. But there have been many points in our history that indicate we are only re-engaging a form of politics that is quintessentially American. One prominent past episode that occurred in Dayton, Tennessee during the summer of 1925 — the so-called “Scopes Monkey Trial” — has captured the American imagination like few legal proceedings ever have. Noted trial lawyer Clarence Darrow was part of the large legal team representing a 24-year-old substitute high school teacher, John Thomas Scopes, who was accused of violating the state’s Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in a state-funded school. The celebrity co-prosecutor was William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential nominee, former Nebraska congressman, and Secretary of State to President Woodrow Wilson. Both Darrow and Bryan were prominent Progressive figures. Bryan, a left-wing evangelical and a fiery orator, is best known for his “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic National Convention.

The trial provided an opportunity for Darrow, whose reputation had been sullied by questionable tactics employed in the defense of radical labor leaders, to vindicate himself before a national audience. Chicago’s WGN radio station broadcast the trial nationwide and hundreds of reporters, some of them from overseas, covered the case. Geoffrey Cowan, author of the exhaustively-researched book The People v. Clarence Darrow, notes that Darrow achieved national notoriety, “won the support of Eastern sophisticates,” and “found new acceptance” as a result of the widely-publicized trial, especially his alleged humiliation of Darrow’s “old hero,” Bryan. This canard, which formed the dramatic crux of the 1960 movie Inherit the Wind, a highly-fictionalized depiction of the trial adapted from the 1955 play written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, is just one aspect of the popular mythology that surrounds the case.

Almost all of the “conventional wisdom” concerning the Scopes trial is false. Contrary to the impression created by Inherit the Wind and other popular accounts (including the sensational reportage of H. L. Mencken of The Baltimore Sun, one of the leading journalists of his day), the trial was not a fundamentalist inquisition, but an ill-conceived publicity stunt by Dayton businessmen who were trying to attract tourists to the small town — to put Dayton on the map. To generate a test case challenging the statute, the American Civil Liberties Union had offered to defend any teacher charged with violating the Butler Act, gratis. Dayton businessmen recruited Scopes to agree to serve as the defendant, even though he was unsure he had actually taught evolution. Nonetheless, Scopes volunteered to be charged. The trial — for a misdemeanor offense — was staged. Celebrity lawyers were solicited to participate for the sole purpose of increasing public interest in the case. The Baltimore Sun paid part of the defense’s expenses because it knew that the spectacle would sell newspapers, and it did. A lot of them.

I think it would be fair to say that H.L. Mencken had a passionate dislike for William Jennings Bryan, even after Bryan’s death a few days later:

It is the national custom to sentimentalize the dead, as it is to sentimentalize men about to be hanged. Perhaps I fall into that weakness here. The Bryan I shall remember is the Bryan of his last weeks on earth — broken, furious, and infinitely pathetic. It was impossible to meet his hatred with hatred to match it. He was winning a battle that would make him forever infamous wherever enlightened men remembered it and him. Even his old enemy, Darrow, was gentle with him at the end. That cross-examination might have been ten times as devastating. It was plain to everyone that the old Berserker Bryan was gone — that all that remained of him was a pair of glaring and horrible eyes.

But what of his life? Did he accomplish any useful thing? Was he, in his day, of any dignity as a man, and of any value to his fellow-men? I doubt it. Bryan, at his best, was simply a magnificent job-seeker. The issues that he bawled about usually meant nothing to him. He was ready to abandon them whenever he could make votes by doing so, and to take up new ones at a moment’s notice. For years he evaded Prohibition as dangerous; then he embraced it as profitable. At the Democratic National Convention last year he was on both sides, and distrusted by both. In his last great battle there was only a baleful and ridiculous malignancy. If he was pathetic, he was also disgusting.

Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.

H/T to “WarEagle82” for the link.

July 17, 2019

QotD: “The United States government [became] the greatest and most potent maker of criminals in any recent century”

Filed under: Health, History, Law, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

For most of the history of the United States, drugs were legal. People could buy opiates and cocaine-based products from their local pharmacy. An opiate-laced brew called Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, for example, was particularly popular with housewives. One person who viewed this legal system with skepticism was a Los Angeles doctor named Henry Smith Williams. When a small number of his patients became addicted, he was disgusted, and he came to see them as despicable “weaklings.” So when opiates and cocaine were banned in 1914, he welcomed this first birth-pang of the drug war with glee.

But then he noticed what happened to his addicted patients. They didn’t stop using. Instead, “here were tens of thousands of people, in every walk of life, frantically craving drugs that they could in no legal way secure,” he wrote in one of his books. “They craved the drugs, as a man dying of thirst craves water. They must have the drugs at any hazard, at any cost.”

At the same time, Smith Williams realized that the drug war was “in effect ordering a company of drug smugglers into existence.” Because pharmacists could no longer sell these drugs, the Mafia and other criminal organizations stepped in, selling a vastly inferior product at extortionate prices. In the pharmacies, morphine had cost two or three cents a grain, but the criminal gangs charged a dollar.

The death rate among addicts rose, and those who survived began to behave very differently. An official government study had found that, before the drug war kicked in, three-quarters of self-described addicts had steady and respectable jobs: some 22% were wealthy, while only 6% were poor. They were more sedate as a result of their addiction, but they were rarely out of control or criminal. Yet faced with the need to meet these extortionate new prices, many of the men started to commit property crimes, and many of the women started to steal or prostitute themselves.

So Smith Williams watched as the drug war created two waves of crime: first a wave of violent criminal drug-dealers, and then a wave of criminality among addicts. “The United States government,” Henry wrote in shock, had become “the greatest and most potent maker of criminals in any recent century.”

Johann Hari, “A 1930s California story shows why the war on drugs is a failure”, Los Angeles Times, 2017-06-16.

July 14, 2019

The Epstein scandal is another example of the importance of accurate names

Filed under: Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

ESR has some concerns about the Epstein case, specifically on the correct terminology to use:

The sage Confucius was once asked what he would do if he was a governor. He said he would “rectify the names” to make words correspond to reality. He understood what General Semantics teaches; if your linguistic map is sufficiently confused, you will misunderstand the territory. And be readily outmaneuvered by those who are less confused.

Mug shot of Jeffrey Epstein made available by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department, taken following his indictment for soliciting a prostitute in 2006.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

And that brings us to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. In particular, the widespread tagging of Epstein as a pedophile.

No, Richard Epstein is not a pedophile. This is important. If conservatives keep misidentifying him as one, I fear some unfortunate consequences.

Pedophiles desire pre-pubertal children. This is not Epstein’s kink; he quite obviously likes his girls to be as young as possible but fully nubile. The correct term for this is “ephebophile”, and being clear about the distinction matters. I’ll explain why.

The Left has a long history of triggering conservatives into self-discrediting moral panics (“Rock and roll is the devil’s music”). It also has a strong internal contingent that would like to normalize pedophilia. I mean the real thing, not Epstein’s creepy ephebophilia.

Homosexual pedophiles have been biding their time in order to get adult-on-adult homosexuality fully normalized as battlespace prep, but you see a few trial balloons go up occasionally in places like Salon. The last round of this was interrupted by the need to take down Milo Yiannopolous, but the internal logic of left-wing sexual liberationism always demands new ways to freak out the normals, and the pedophiles are more than willing to be next up in satisfying that perpetual demand.

Liberals have proven themselves utterly useless at resisting the liberationist ratchet, so I’m not even bothering to address them. Conservatives, if you want to prevent the next turn, don’t give the pedophilia-normalizers maneuvering room. Rectify the names; make the distinctions that matter.

Epstein’s behavior is repulsive because we judge young postpubertal humans to be too psychologically immature to give adult consent, but it’s nowhere near the evil that is the sexual abuse of prepubertal children.

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