Quotulatiousness

June 24, 2023

Canada’s Online News Act already impacting news delivery for smaller outlets

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

A local site I use regularly has already begun to feel the negative effects of the federal government’s Online News Act (aka Bill C-18):

Durham Radio News (DRN) doesn’t normally post editorial content, but when local news is being attacked we refuse to stay silent.

Bill C-18 is now law and will have a very negative impact on local independent newsrooms such as DRN.

The bill forces major tech companies such as Google and Meta to pay news outlets for content.

The vast majority of referrals to our DRN site come from Facebook and Google.

Both platforms have been instrumental in growing our audience.

Despite multiple warnings from Meta and Google that they would block news, the Liberal government proceeded with Bill C-18.

It’s now law and in a statement Meta says news will no longer be available on Facebook and Instagram.

Google is expected to follow suit.

Both tech giants have publicly said they don’t make much money off links to news stories so it doesn’t make financial sense for them to pay news providers.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called their threats to remove news a bullying tactic and said it will not work with his government.

It really appears the Liberals thought they were bluffing, we now know they were not.

DRN has been trying to get our voices heard for months on the negative impact this bill would have on our business.

We were drowned out by larger media outlets who would stand to benefit from this bill.

We will not be naming other outlets and we don’t begrudge the financial help they are already receiving.

Meta provides funding through fellowships with some media partners, and it is these outlets that became greedy and were asking for more.

For them it doesn’t matter if they get kicked off social media platforms.

For us it will make a huge impact.

June 20, 2023

“Mendicino is a dead minister walking, and we suspect he knows it”

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

Belated (from me, not from them) section from this weekend’s update from the editors at The Line:

Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka

Though you may find this hard to believe, based on what’s above, we were paying attention to some other things this week. The Ottawa vortex of ridiculousness continued at its usual clip. The government continues to try and find a defensible position on Paul Bernardo’s prison transfer to a medium-security prison. Alas for Mr. Trudeau, he’s been hit by a double-whammy of bad luck. Bernardo is an emotional trigger point with probably no rival across Canada. And the PM’s point man on this file is the hapless (!) Marco Mendicino, minister of Public Safety.

Let’s be clear: your Line editors are far too Vulcan-like to possess strong feelings about the transfer of Bernardo. We are of the right age to have grown up during the era of the Bernardo rapes, murders and eventual trial. He was the boogeyman of our youth. That being said, the important thing is that he dies miserable and alone behind bars. We aren’t particularly invested in which particular prison this happens. If there was a sensible reason for him to be moved to the Quebec facility, hey, whatever. He can rot in any suitable prison as far as we’re concerned.

The issue here, and it’s ridiculous that we have to spell this out, isn’t the transfer itself. Nor are we calling upon Trudeau or the federal government to become intimately involved in decision-making for prisoners, even high-profile ones. The only thing that turned this into a huge story was the latest peek it gave us into the Trudeau government. We have been confronted with — surprise! — more incompetence and dysfunction.

Mendicino’s staff had been repeatedly told about the pending transfer; no one told the boss. The PMO had been told, too. No one told that boss, either. Why tell the boss? So that they don’t get caught flatfooted by a scandal. This is basic issues management and internal communications, and we’re being shown, yet again, that the government is terrible at this. And, absurdly, Mendicino apparently has some of the best and brightest providing the adult supervision he so clearly needs: veteran political staffers were sent to his office after he beclowned himself during the gun-control fiasco a few months ago.

And this is the problem. We don’t care which cell holds Bernardo as he slides closer to hell. We do care about yet another data point in a pattern that has emerged with this government: they aren’t on top of their files, their offices aren’t well run, ministers aren’t properly briefed, and there seems to be zero accountability anywhere in this process. It was left to the Ottawa Parliamentary Press Gallery to hunt down Mendicino like ravenous cheetahs on a wayward gazelle after Mendicino had promised to brief them, and then no-showed. He also promised to brief them again later on Thursday, and failed to show up that time, too.

We know, we know. It’s hard to believe he’d lie. Marco Mendicino? An incompetent bullshitter? Say it ain’t so.

Mendicino is a dead minister walking, and we suspect he knows it. The government is obviously hell bent on getting to the summer break without sacking the minister, because to sack him, despite his manifest and repeated failings, would be to admit said failings, and this government will never do that. If they can get to the break, they can shuffle him off to the sweet oblivion of an obscure ministry, or even the back benches later on this summer. This is just the latest example of what Line editor Gerson has observed about these guys: tactically smart, but strategically dumb.

And, ahem, call us hopelessly naïve, but maybe the politics isn’t the point here? Canadians ought to have someone in the job of Public Safety minister — kind of an important role, you’ll agree — who is competent and well-supported by excellent staff. Instead we get this shitshow and frantic politicking to avoid handing the opposition a one-day media-cycle victory. It’s a bad look on the government. But it’s nothing we didn’t already know, we guess. They aren’t here to serve Canadians. They’re here to save themselves.

June 19, 2023

Patterns of incompetence

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

In Palladium, Harold Robertson says that complex systems that we all depend on will not have the resilience to survive our society-wide failure of competence:

Graphic for Rhode Island College’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen.

While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.

The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.

By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws — most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.

The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.

H/T to Theophilus Chilton for the link.

June 6, 2023

Australia’s “teen smoking rates rose sixfold between 2018 and 2023”

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

Christopher Snowdon on Australia’s determination to stamp out vaping … even at the cost of vastly increasing the number of tobacco smokers:

More bad news from the supposed world leader in tobacco control. Official figures show that teen smoking rates rose sixfold between 2018 and 2023, from 2% to 12.8%.

It’s been over a decade since Australia introduced plain packaging, a policy that the Southern hemisphere’s wrongest man, Simon Chapman, likened to a vaccine for lung cancer. Australia has had the highest cigarette taxes in the world for ages, the sale of nicotine e-cigarettes has always been illegal, and all they have to show for it is an insanely big black market for both tobacco and e-cigarettes, more children smoking and a whole bunch of people using unregulated vapes. The wowsers just can’t stop winning, can they?

Naturally, this has led to much soul searching among the tobacco control elite who are having to reassess their assumptions in the face of this overwhelming evidence of policy failure.

I’m joking, of course. They are doubling down again.

If you spoke to someone from the reality-based community, they would tell you that children find it easier to access a product when the market is in the hands of illicit traders because illicit traders don’t care who they sell to. They might also point out that the Australian government has gone out of its way to portray vaping as being at least as bad as smoking. School children in Australia are taught that vaping causes brain damage. Public health agencies produce websites that purport to tell people the facts about vaping but actually tell them lies and misleading half-truths.

June 5, 2023

The poster child for truly antisocial behaviour

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Not following the news closely, I don’t think I’d heard of “Mizzy” until perhaps a week or two back, but if he’d tried pulling this kind of behaviour in the US, his career would likely have been a lot shorter and much more violent:

Screen capture from a YouTube video

What’s the big deal about Mizzy? Surely one idiot 18 year old doesn’t merit the full glare of the British media, you may be thinking (at least if you haven’t been paying attention). Certainly the Guardian didn’t seem to think so — lagging two days behind reporting of the story in the Daily Mail, Telegraph, Independent and BBC. We at the Critic were kind enough to point this out and the Guardian have since seen fit to lower themselves to the story — an unhelpful distraction no doubt from more serious stories their exhaustive coverage of Philip Schofield’s departure from British breakfast TV.

One reason to care, is that despite claims to be a mere prankster, Mizzy’s actions are profoundly serious, terrifying to his victims, and suggest an escalating pattern of behaviour that could very plausibly lead to greater crimes. In a series of videos clearly intended to menace his targets, he decided to steal a dog from an old lady, burst into the home of a young family, and, in one truly shocking incident, comes up to a woman alone at night and asks her if she wants to die. It’s obvious, taken together, that these incidents are not pranks taken too far, but deliberate and calculated attempts to terrify and intimidate innocent people, often women, children or the elderly.

Anyone who has been subject to what we often euphemistically call “anti-social behaviour” and middle class columnists like to frame as teenagers with “too little to do” (blame the closed youth centre or something), knows all too well what Mizzy is up to. It’s the local drug addict who always follows you late at night, leering. It’s the teenagers who let their pitbull bark and snarl at you, smirking all the while. It’s the men who sit outside your house drinking, and stare at you as you walk down the road. Men and boys who take pleasure in the fear of others, often to compensate for absences in their own life — a job, a father, a girlfriend, a future. And sometimes the absence has no obvious explanation — there’s just something missing inside, a hole that demands to be filled, an appetite for brutality and cruelty muzzled but not tamed by modern society.

So what’s so special about Mizzy? He’s got a TikTok channel, on which he proudly posts these petty acts of barbarity for the pleasure of his thousands of followers. And this fact tells a story, an important story, about both the present and future of British society.

In the present, it’s a tale of an unpoliced and anti-social public realm; an increasingly familiar and despairing story of police and judicial passivity in the face of open criminality. Under Blair we reclassified petty crime as “anti-social behaviour” and instead of prison, or a suspended sentence and an ankle monitor, judges handed down things along the lines of “you must not be in the East Shield shopping centre after 10pm”. ASBO recipients, having been briefly hauled up, generally swiftly resume their trajectory towards criminality, creating more victims in the process.

Mizzy, having spent months openly terrorising people, was, amidst national attention and outrage, given the successor to the ASBO — a CBO (Criminal Behaviour Order). Shortly after appearing on national TV and complaining that he was the victim of racism, and only two days after receiving his CBO, Mizzy had already breached its terms, having posted yet more videos.

So much for the present — but what does the tiresome tale of narcissism and cruelty tell us about our future? Nothing good. Mizzy has blended street thuggery with online harassment, creating entertainment out of fear and pain. He’s part of a new flamboyant and triumphalist form of bullying and criminality, which finds an enthusiastic audience online.

Joe Baron instantly recognized Mizzy’s type from his own experiences as a teacher:

Piers Morgan is right. Mizzy is a moron. For those of you unfamiliar with the story, “Mizzy” is 18-year-old Bacari-Bronze O’Garro, who attracts followers on TikTok by filming himself engaged in criminal activity. He terrifies families by invading their homes, steals the dogs of elderly women, physically assaults unsuspecting commuters, and threateningly asks random people if they’d like to die.

[…]

As a teacher I recognised him immediately. So many youngsters betray the same peculiarities: entitled, self-satisfied and utterly irresponsible.

Why are these traits so commonplace among our young people? There are several reasons, bad parenting being the most notable. Either through fear or convenience, parents no longer discipline their children. If a teacher attempts to do so, the parents often complain, presumably in a bid to appease their volatile offspring and maintain a quiet life at home.

This month, I had a furious encounter with a parent who could only be described as deranged. My crime: issuing her daughter with a 30-minute detention for forgetting her exercise book. In an earlier incident, another parent physically assaulted a colleague, attempting to strangle him for disciplining his daughter. She had slapped a book out of his hand during classroom changeover. Anxious and stressed, my colleague left the school soon after, and several weeks later, his attacker’s daughter viciously assaulted another pupil, who then needed hospital treatment.

Parents also have to take responsibility for the devastating effects of divorce on their children. Nearly half of all marriages end in failure. That’s a huge number of broken homes and broken children. And it often leads to poor behaviour. Fecklessness begets fecklessness. When will we wake up to this reality and encourage prospective parents to take their vows more seriously? That’s if there is a marriage in the first place. Or even a father present in the home.

Furthermore, adults have surrendered their authority to children. For example, recalcitrant pupils are not effectively disciplined because, contrary to the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, children are now seen as pure, infallible and morally unimpeachable, and adults as iniquitous and corrupting influences. Consequently, a child’s misbehaviour must be the fault of the adult or teacher. In addition, if a child should make a statement concerning an incident, and the statement contradicts his or her teacher’s version of events, the child’s claims must take precedence, even if they’re completely bogus.

May 31, 2023

The War Against The Patriarchy, updated

Filed under: Economics, Education, Government, Health, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Janice Fiamengo responds to a recent Joel Kotkin op-ed in the National Post discussing the “war of the sexes” and the long, long string of victories chalked up by the “weaker sex”:

    The war between the sexes has ended, and rather than a co-operative future that could benefit all, it has turned out to be more like a lopsided win for the female side.

So begins Joel Kotkin’s National Post op/ed “Women have won the ‘war between the sexes’, but at what cost?” It is a welcome but disappointing analysis that starts with a show of defiance and ends in quiet desperation. Of course, it’s good to find anyone in a major newspaper willing to cast a less-than-adulatory eye on “The Future [that] is Female” or to write sympathetically about men, and Kotkin, a prolific author on cities and technocracy, proves his good faith on the strength of that opening statement alone. Aside from the wishful thinking of believing feminism to be winding down (was #MeToo a prelude to ceasefire?) or ever having envisioned a co-operative future (he should take a look at Kate Millett’s incendiary “Theory of Sexual Politics“), Kotkin is to be commended for daring to name as a war the decades of post-1960s activism, in which all the decisive victories have been claimed by feminists against men.

Kotkin, however, isn’t able to continue in the take-no-prisoners style he chose for his opening salvo. He is prevented, either by his own prudence, his lack of deep knowledge, or the paper’s editorial insistence, from targeting feminist ideology and policies in the rest of the article. In fact, the article doesn’t name a single piece of debilitating feminist legislation or even make one reference to the many expressions of anti-male contempt that are now deeply embedded in our public culture. The result is a curiously disembodied discussion in which serious social problems linked to male decline are pointed to without any attempt made to say exactly how they came about or how they might be reversed.

“The crux of the problem,” Kotkin tells us to start off, “lies in the fact that as women rise, men seem to be falling.” Here we see him start to draw back from the attack, as if afraid to say what he really thinks. His phrasing makes male decline sound like a natural phenomenon, an illustration of the primordial principle of Yin and Yang. Or perhaps it is simply that men, with their allegedly fragile egos and hegemonic masculinity, haven’t been able to compete against all that female ability, once dammed up by the patriarchy, now finally being let loose on the world (though always with calls for more to be done to assist women).

[…]

Kotkin refers to men “left behind” in the economy, but he keeps mum about the decades of affirmative action in higher education and hiring (detailed by Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young in Legalizing Misandry, pp. 81-124) as well as draconian sexual harassment legislation that have made work life unrewarding and often punitive for men.

He stresses the loss of sexual amity and of willingness to marry, but avoids discussing the nightmare of family law that has made marriage or even cohabitation perilous for many men.

The sins of omission do not end there. Perhaps working on the assumption — not without basis — that any discussion of social problems will need to focus on women at least as much as on men, Kotkin proceeds to backtrack on his earlier claim about women’s victory in the sex war, outlining instead a downbeat portrait of women’s troubles. Citing research by Jonathan Haidt, he tells us that adolescent girls have been severely affected by depression and self-harm, that many young women, without reliable men to support them, have had to fend for themselves in a difficult economic climate, and that single mothers, left with few options, are unable to offer stability to their children. It looks as if the decline of men mentioned early in the article has mainly hurt women and their children.

What Kotkin neglects to mention — surely deliberately — is that adolescent boys commit suicide at 4 X the rate of girls, resolving their depression decisively enough that Haidt seems not to have felt the need to account for them; that women are the ones who choose divorce in approximately 70% of cases; and that divorced fathers are too often denied a real role in their children’s lives while being burdened past endurance by exorbitant support payments. In other words, for every sad woman held up for our concern, there is a plurality of equally sad men rendered invisible in the conventional reporting. The staggering statistics on male suicide provide a stark illustration of Kotkin’s initial contention about the casualties of the sex war — yet he leaves these aside, choosing instead to voice the now-obligatory concern about the trans threat to women’s sports.

Perhaps most importantly, Kotkin suggests through his word choice that the data he cites are simply “trends”, occurrences that came about through economic and demographic factors independent of the sex war initially evoked. But they aren’t. They flow directly from a feminist vision in which the family — explicitly understood by feminist leaders to be a source of abuse and oppression — must be transformed and women liberated from reliance on the fathers of their children. Under this vision, a more just and equitable world will be ushered in by women’s superior leadership once they are freed from their unpaid labor in the home and the many sexist barriers that hold them back. That freedom must be aided, according to conventional wisdom, through abundant contraception, unfettered abortion, collectivized child care, no-fault divorce, programs and propaganda to urge men to do more housework, and non-stop encouragement to women — in movies, sit-coms, advertising, articles, and government equity programs — to give up on their men.

May 30, 2023

Ban all the words!

Filed under: Books, History, Law, Liberty, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray reflects on the historical context of literature bans:

Before the Civil War, Southern states banned abolitionist literature. That ban meant that postmasters (illegally!) searched the mail, seized anti-slavery tracts, and burned them. And it meant that people caught with abolitionist pamphlets faced the likelihood of arrest. The District of Columbia considered a ban, then didn’t pass the thing, but Reuben Crandall was still arrested and tried for seditious libel in 1833 when he was caught with abolitionist literature. He was acquitted, then died of illness from a brutal pre-trial detention. Seizure, destruction, arrest: abolitionist literature was banned.

The Soviet writer Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote a 1924 novel, We, depicting a world in which an all-powerful government minutely controlled every aspect of life for an enervated population, finding as an endpoint for their ideological project a surgery that destroyed the centers of the brain that allowed ordinary people to have will and imagination. The Soviet government banned Zamyatin’s work: They seized and destroyed all known copies, told editors and publishers the author was no longer to allowed to publish, and sent Zamyatin into exile, where he died without ever seeing his own country again. Seizure, destruction, exile: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s work was banned.

During World War I, the federal government banned literature that discouraged military service, including tracts that criticized conscription. Subsequently, “socialists Charles Schenck and Elizabeth Baer distributed leaflets declaring that the draft violated the Thirteenth Amendment prohibition against involuntary servitude”. They were arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction. Anti-conscription literature was banned: It was seized and destroyed, and people caught distributing it were sent to prison.

In 2023, the tedious midwit poet Amanda Gorman posted on Twitter that she was “gutted” — the standard emotion for tedious midwits — to discover that one of her poems had been “banned” by a school in Florida. The news media raced to proclaim that Florida schools are banning books, the leading edge of the Ron DeSantis fascist wave.

As others have already said, Gorman’s boring poem was moved from an elementary school library shelf to a middle school library shelf, without leaving the library

May 28, 2023

Musical copyrights – crazy as they are now – were far worse in history

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, France, History, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia outlines just how the concept of musical copyrights produced even more distortions in the past than they do today:

Assignments of copyrights photostat copies by mollyali (CC BY-NC 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/5JbsPE

People tell me it was never this bad before. But they’re wrong. The music copyright situation was even crazier 500 years ago.

The Italians took the lead in this, and it all started with Ottaviano Petrucci gaining a patent from the Venetian Senate for publishing polyphonic music with a printing press back in 1498. Andrea Antico secured a similar privilege from Pope Leo X, which covered the Papal States.

It’s hard to imagine a Pope making decisions on music IP, but that was how the game was played back then. In 1516, Pope Leo actually took away Petrucci’s monopoly on organ music, and gave it to Antico instead. You had to please the pontiff to publish pieces for the pipes.

Over time, this practice spread elsewhere. In a famous case, the composer Lully was granted total control over all operas performed in France. He died a very wealthy man — with five houses in Paris and two in the country. His estate was valued at 800,000 livres—some 500 times the salary of a typical court musician.

But the most extreme case of music copyright comes from Elizabethan England. Here the Queen gave William Byrd and Thomas Tallis a patent covering all music publishing for a period of 21 years. Not only did the two composers secure a monopoly over English music, but they also could prevent retailers or other entrepreneurs in the country from selling “songs made and printed in any foreign country.”

If anybody violated this patent, the fine was 40 shillings. And the music itself was seized and given to Tallis and Byrd. They probably had quite a nice private library of scores by the time the patent expired.

But that’s not all. Byrd and Tallis’s stranglehold on music was so extreme it even covered the printing of blank music paper. That meant that other composers had to pay Tallis and Byrd even before they had written down a single note. Not even the Marvin Gaye estate makes those kinds of demands.

Tallis died a decade after the patent was granted—putting Byrd in sole charge of English music. I’d like to tell you that he exercised his monopoly with a fair and open mind—especially because I so greatly esteem Byrd’s music, and also I’d like to think that composers are better at arts management than profit-driven businesses. But the flourishing of music publishing in England after the expiration of the patent — when, for a brief spell, anybody could issue scores — makes clear that Byrd did more to constrain than empower other composers.

May 16, 2023

Hope for sensible reform to US Civil Asset Forfeiture?

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

J.D. Tuccille on the latest bipartisan attempt to at least somewhat rein in the Civil Asset Forfeiture abuse allowed under current rules:

Years after “civil asset forfeiture” became synonymous in many minds with legalized theft, the practice of seizing money and property merely suspected of a connection to a crime remains a boil on the ass of American jurisprudence. Now, in a rare demonstration of cooperation across political divides, Democratic and Republican lawmakers have joined together to introduce legislation to reform the practice of civil forfeiture at the federal level. They are supported by a coalition of organizations that put aside ideological differences in an attempt to curb the dangerous practice. As encouraging as the bill’s prospects appear, that this is not the first attempt to pass this legislation underlines the challenge of correcting government abuses.

“Today, U.S. Representatives Tim Walberg (R-MI) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD) reintroduced the Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration Act (FAIR Act), a comprehensive reform to our nation’s civil asset forfeiture laws,” the two lawmakers announced in March. “The FAIR Act raises the level of proof necessary for the federal government to seize property, reforms the IRS structuring statute to protect innocent small business owners, and increases transparency and congressional oversight.”

The FAIR Act sets a higher bar for seizing private property, but still allows for civil forfeiture in the absence of a criminal conviction. The legislation requires:

“If the Government’s theory of forfeiture is that the property was used to commit or facilitate the commission of a criminal offense, or was involved in the commission of a criminal offense, the Government shall establish, by clear and convincing evidence, that … there was a substantial connection between the property and the offense; and the owner of any interest in the seized property — (i) used the property with intent to facilitate the offense; or knowingly consented or was willfully blind to the use of the property by another in connection with the offense.”

The bill requires that seizures be conducted in court rather than through administrative processes and also guarantees legal representation for federal forfeiture targets.

The FAIR Act isn’t a perfect bill. Many reformers will object that forfeiture should require the criminal conviction of the person whose money and property is being taken. Draining somebody’s bank account and nabbing their car keys may not be as dramatic as throwing them in a prison cell, but it’s a harsh punishment all the same and should require full due process. Still, some improvement is better than none for a practice that has largely served as an exercise in legalized highway robbery.

May 14, 2023

Garbage data informs the Canadian government’s approach to gun control issues

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

In The Line, Tim Thurley points out the (totally expected) bias of the data being considered by the federal government:

A selection of weapons (mostly restricted or prohibited in the hands of most Canadians) displayed by Toronto police after confiscation.
Screencap from a CTV News report in 2018.

The Mass Casualty Commission’s firearm recommendations were, rightly, overlooked in the initial phase after the report’s release. They have become relevant these past weeks as gun control groups, the NDP, the Bloc, and the Liberals used them to advocate for sweeping changes to Bill C-21, the government’s controversial gun-control proposals. The Liberals have thus far declined to adopt the MCC’s recommendations, at least in whole, and that’s encouraging. Our lawmakers should be careful. The Mass Casualty Commission’s concluding recommendations on guns and homicide share a problem common to any data analysis. If you use the wrong data, you get a bad output.

Or, to be blunt: garbage in, garbage out.

R. Blake Brown, a professor who contributed a commissioned report to the MCC, suggested that the MCC got all the best research together and simply found the arguments made by gun control groups to be more convincing.

He’s wrong. While the MCC could have been a completely neutral panel objectively weighing the evidence before it, the nakedly selective choice of data inputs and slanted interpretation meant that no unbiased outcome was possible. Indeed, the MCC inputs seem heavily weighed to advance a pro-control agenda, and do so in such an obvious way that the resulting flaws should be immediately clear to those with even a passing knowledge of the study of firearms and firearm homicide.

[…]

Dr. Caillin Langmann is a well-known name in Canadian firearms research, and by far the most prolific author using rigorous statistical methods to examine the effects of gun control on Canadian firearm mortality. No serious analysis of Canadian firearm mortality is possible without his work, and yet his work does not appear on its own and is not cited in the Negin Report. Indeed, his and other critical research does not seem to have informed the final Commission report or recommendations at all.

I asked Dr. Langmann about his exclusion. He told me he offered to appear to present his research but the Commission declined.

It may not be a coincidence that the exclusion of Langmann and other researchers without explicit gun-control agendas was due to the fact — the fact — that the Canadian and comparable research substantively contradicts the Negin Report and the MCC recommendations on firearms. An examination of already-implemented Canadian gun laws including various factors such as prohibition of “paramilitary style” rifles and magazine capacity restrictions all found no impact on mass shootings or mass homicide overall in Canada or on associated fatalities. Instead, mass homicide by both firearm and non-firearm causes gradually declined on its own. The lack of association between gun control and decreased mortality is replicated multiple times in Canadian research.

Guess what? It is also replicated in a detailed statistical analysis of Australian data not mentioned by the Negin Report.

The core research inputs to the Mass Casualty Commission were commissioned from parties with well-established and acknowledged positions on firearms. Written by literal gun control advocates without substantial input from other sources, the contrary research is either ignored or not treated with due academic respect. This damages the credibility of the Commission findings, giving the perception that they were gathering conclusions in search of evidence.

Again, it must be made clear that this wouldn’t have been a problem if the MCC had treated the Negin Report as just one part of the firearm policy research puzzle. It was their failure to do so and the consequent lack of neutrality, lack of engagement with solid research, and complete disregard for engagement with different academic perspectives despite obvious relevant expertise, that taints the Mass Casualty Commission firearm recommendations and severely limits any useful policy conclusions we can gather from their report.

May 10, 2023

QotD: The Deadly Force Paradigm

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

CAN – do I possess (to a reasonable certainty) the necessary equipment, skills, and mindset to accomplish the task (i.e., WIN)? This element should be addressed objectively, long before the moment-of-decision presents. Common sense in “equipment” selection, and repeated training and practice are essential. Being physically fit is definitely part of this element. Have you done all you can to be truly prepared to respond in a deadly force encounter? By the way, which is paramount — equipment, skill, or mindset? Always?

MAY – is the use of deadly force within the law (and in policy for the sworn acting in official capacity and/or within the scope of employment)? This element is also addressed objectively, long before the moment-of-decision presents. There are good books and lectures around for general information, and some for state specific analysis. The latter is very, very important. The legal concepts are not always the same for the LEO and non-sworn. When deadly force is used other than in defense of self, the legal issues become more complicated. Have you considered the legal and moral imperatives for having less-lethal equipment and skills? What about advance decision-making for the “aftermath”?

SHOULD – are the “rewards” significantly greater than the “risks”? Everything you are/have and ever will be/have are at stake. This element introduces subjectivity. Many firearms and “personal defense” trainers include this topic (one way or another) in their preset curriculum or address it by responding to questions and hypothetical scenarios. That’s fine, but their analysis cannot definitively answer much for you — you must have thought about and through “it” in advance. I stray away from providing others guidance on the SHOULD, other than to, in somewhat knee-jerk fashion, say sheepishly, “mind your own business”. But, I will note I am not the arbiter of what “your business” is, you are. Except, when something else is in play … or maybe not. Bottom line: It is your gunfight, your life, your future, etc., not the trainer’s. No matter how you stack up on the CAN, success in a deadly force encounter often includes some luck. A well-executed spin of the wheel can still produce varied results. Maybe it’s just a “crap shoot?”

MUST – will you or someone you cannot live without die or suffer great bodily injury unless deadly force is applied? This element calls for application of objective and subjective reasoning, grounded in your knowledge bases of the CAN and MAY. You will be second guessed … by those who were not present and have not had a similar experience. Does that really matter? Pardon me for asking, but do you know what constitutes great bodily harm and what “weapons” can cause it? The applicable legal definition of deadly force?

What about the interrelationship of the elements? Something well north of most of the time, a green light on the CAN and MAY doesn’t compel a green on the SHOULD. (Never lose perspective, especially just because there is a stand your ground law applicable). Similarly, a green on the MAY and SHOULD doesn’t mean the MUST is invoked. There are alternatives to the use of deadly force: Avoidance, disengagement, de-escalation, non-deadly force. Does it “go without saying” that noble intention, green lights on the MAY and SHOULD, and application of the MUST, may not matter a whit if you don’t possess the CAN?

Steven Harris, “The Deadly Force Paradigm Revisited: Can – May – Should – Must”, Modern Service Weapons, 2015-04-28.

May 5, 2023

Canada’s new internet rules have become law. What now?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

J.J. McCullough
Published 4 May 2023

Bill C-11 has passed. But there’s still time.
(more…)

April 11, 2023

The end of single-sex spaces began in the 1970s, at least for men

Filed under: Business, Government, Law, Media, Politics, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Janice Fiamengo points out that the initial loss of single-sex spaces began a long time ago and for what — at the time — seemed sensible and egalitarian reasons:

Robin Herman of the New York Times was one of the first two female reporters ever allowed into NHL dressing rooms, starting with the 1975 NHL All-Star Game in Montreal.

There has been a good deal of talk lately about women’s spaces being invaded by biologically male persons identifying as women. Some women’s campaigners claim that the trans phenomenon constitutes an attack on womanhood itself, an attempt to “erase” women and replace them with men who perform womanhood. Some even call it a new form of patriarchy.

But well before women had their single-sex spaces threatened, something similar had already happened to men. Beginning in the 1970s, men’s spaces were usurped, their maleness was denigrated, and policies and laws forced changes in male behavior that turned many workplaces into feminized fiefdoms in which men held their jobs only so long as women allowed them to. The very idea of an exclusively male workspace or club — especially if it was a space for socializing (not so much if it was a sewer, oil field, or shop floor in which men did unpleasant, dangerous work) — came to be seen as dangerous. In light of the recent furor over single-sex spaces for women, it is useful to consider the source of some men’s justifiable apathy and resentment.

At my new academic job in the late 1990s, a woman who had been the first female historian hired into her department used to tell a story she’d had passed on to her from a male colleague. After the decision had been made to hire her, one of the historians said to another somewhat dolefully, “I guess that’s the end of our meetings in the urinal.” The joke ruefully acknowledged, and good-naturedly accepted, the end of their all-male work environment.

Though this woman didn’t have any trouble with her male colleagues, who welcomed her civilly, she told the story with an edge of contempt. Even thoroughly modern men, the story suggested, held a foolish nostalgia for pre-feminist days.

But was it foolish — or did the men recognize something real?

No one thought seriously, then, about the disappearance of men’s single-sex spaces. The idea that men and boys need places where they can be with other men (defended, for example, in Jack Donovan’s The Way of Men) would have been cause, amongst the women I knew, for scornful laughter. In 2018, anti-male assumptions had become so deeply entrenched that the female author of a Guardian article titled “Men-only clubs and menace: how the establishment maintains male power” simply could not believe that any decent man could legitimately seek out male-only company.

Under the circumstances of mixed groups of reporters crowding into team locker rooms after games, it’s rather surprising how few “towel malfunction” incidents have been reported.

QotD: Being the target of a death threat

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

It is now about fourteen months since, after receiving my second death threat, I started carrying a firearm almost constantly. This experience has taught me a few truths, some merely amusing but others with larger implications.

[…]

And about that security plan: carrying a firearm is nearly useless without very specific kinds of mental preparation. It’s not just that you have to think through large ethical issues about when to draw and when to fire (equivalently, when to threaten lethal force and when to use it). You also need good defensive habits of mind. Carrying a firearm is no good if an adversary wins the engagement before you have time to draw.

The most basic good habit of mind is maintaining awareness of your tactical environment. From what directions could you be attacked? Is there a way for an assailant to come up behind you for a hand-to-hand assault, or to line up a shooting position from beyond hand-to-hand range where you couldn’t see it? Are you exposed through nearby windows?

One advantage I had going in was reading Robert Heinlein as a child. This meant I soaked up some basic tactical doctrine through my pores. Like: when you go to a restaurant, sit with your back to a wall, preferably in a corner, in a place with good sightlines but not near a window. When you sit down, think about possible threat axes and which direction to bail out in if you have to.

Advice I’ve gotten from people with counterterrorism training includes this lesson: watch your environment and trust your instincts. Terrorists, criminals, and crazies don’t tend to blend in well even when they’re trying. If someone nearby looks or feels out of place in your surroundings, or behaves in a way not appropriate to the setting, pay attention to that; check your escape routes and make sure you can reach your weapons quickly.

How careful you have to be depends on the threat model you’re planning against. I’m not going to talk about mine in detail, because that might compromise my security by telling bad guys what expectations to game against. But I will say that it assigns a vanishingly small probability to professionals with scoped rifles; the background culture of both Iranian terrorists and their Arab proxies makes it extremely difficult for them to train or recruit snipers, and I am reliably informed that the Iranians couldn’t run professional hit teams in the U.S. anyway – too difficult to exfiltrate them, among other problems.

This, along with some other aspects of the threat model I won’t discuss, narrows the range of plausible threats to something an armed and trained individual with good backup from law enforcement has a reasonable hope to be able to counter. And the good backup from law enforcement is not a trivial detail; real life is not a Soldier of Fortune story or a running-man thriller, and a sane security plan uses all the resources available from your connections to the society around you.

Eric S. Raymond, “Fourteen months of carrying”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-09-21.

April 9, 2023

What’s the “exit strategy” from the Trump fiasco in NYC?

Filed under: Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Severian wonders how the deep state’s public muppets will manage now that former President Donald Trump has been brought to court:

Let us ask ourselves, then, what The Left‘s “exit strategy” could possibly be, for any of their outstandingly Juggalicious projects. They of course don’t actually have one — “grokking the skull-fuckingly obvious consequences of their actions” not being the Left’s long suit — but if they did, what would it be?

And I admit, I’m buffaloed. We’ve already talked about the Ukraine thing, so let’s contemplate how the BOM’s “indictment” ends.

One wonders what happens if they throw the book at him. What’s the max sentence? It’s important. Does he face actual jail time? How much? I’m assuming for the purposes of this exercise that the jury will not only convict him, but give him the max, because c’mon man, this is AINO — we live in a Prerogative State now; jaywalking is a federal pound me in the ass prison offense if you can be proven to have voted the wrong way. What can they give him?

[…]

Throw BOM in the slammer, and there you have it. Not even Toby fucking Keith could fail to conclude that we now live in a police state. They’re screwed …

But they’re equally screwed if he gets off, because then their guys will go nuts, and forget passive resistance, the Left gets to riot. And riot they shall, because they’ve got a real taste for it now. Even if everything breaks perfectly for the Juggs for the next few years, Antifa etc. will still be rioting whenever they feel aggrieved — and when do they not? — simply because they like it. And they never face any consequences, so why not flip cars and break shit and light buildings on fire every time Starbucks raises the price of a frappucino?

Same deal if the BOM gets a slap on the wrist. I think that was the original plan, insofar as they’re capable of planning — indict him, slap him on the wrist, and turn him loose. They didn’t think past “getting him off the 2024 ballot”. If they even thought that far … which I doubt, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. Even though they must know that 2024 will be Fortified for Democracy™, the BOM’s very existence terrifies them, because he shows that there’s a possible alternative. We see him for the ridiculous CivNat pussy he is, and we know full well we’re not voting ourselves out of what’s coming. But they see him as a real threat.

A Serious version of the BOM would be a very big deal indeed. They can’t allow that to happen. And so long as the BOM stays on this side of the grass, that seems to them to be a live possibility.

So what can they do? Seriously asking. How the hell do they get themselves out of this? If you were the Machiavelli behind Les Juggs, what would you tell them to do? I’m a Historian, so I can envision a lot more “worst case scenario” than most people, and all I can think of is “Roll the fucking tanks”. I don’t think even their total lock on the Media will work this time — you can instruct them to never speak of it again, but they don’t see themselves as your loyal stenographers anymore; they consider themselves news makers, not just news reporters.

Maybe … just maybe … you could sacrifice Alvin Bragg. Throw the case out for the obviously political hitjob it is, then keester Bragg with everything in the arsenal. Disbar him; haul him up on “prosecutorial misconduct” charges, and the throw the book at him. If I were trying to get Les Juggs out of it with the minimum of violence while maintaining the barest fig leaf of legitimacy for The System, that’s what I’d advise.

But they’re simply not psychologically capable of doing that. Admitting it’s a hitjob means admitting that the BOM was right about something, and that cannot stand.

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