Quotulatiousness

March 10, 2011

“An opportunity to stop English libel law chilling free speech around the world”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:43

Simon Singh at the Guardian‘s “Comment is Free” site explains just how much the chilling effect of English libel law can obstruct free speech:

. . . it is important to remember that for every case of a scientist or journal who dares to face the ordeal of a libel trial, there are dozens of (or probably hundreds of) others who immediately apologise and retract after a libel threat, or who self-censor in order avoid any risk of libel, which is the so-called chilling effect of libel.

For example, I gave an interview to an Australian medical correspondent at the Melbourne Age about the lack of evidence surrounding homeopathy, but he was unable to quote me in detail because his in-house lawyer was frightened of being sued for libel in London. The only reason this came to light was because the journalist in question wrote a blog describing how tough it was to be a health journalist in Australia when the vulture of English libel law was always circling above.

More worryingly, I recently received an email from an American researcher (whose name I cannot mention) who had worked with a librarian (whose name I cannot mention) to write a paper on the subject of impact factors, the scoring system often used by librarians and others to assess the quality of a research journal. The anonymous researchers cited one journal (whose name I cannot mention) which may be using certain techniques to boost its own impact factor. Impact factors are an important issue, so the paper was sent to a respected British journal (which I shall not name in order to avoid embarrassment) with an international readership. The journal replied: “We regret that we are unable to publish after all because unfortunately it has potential legal implications under UK libel law.”

The anonymous researchers then sent the paper to an American journal (which I shall not name), which also had an international readership and which did agree to publish the paper. Initially, there seemed to be no problem, because the in-house lawyer agreed that the paper did not breach US libel law. However, the lawyer went on to demand that edits were necessary or there would be a serious risk of being sued in London according to English libel law.

The British government is to introduce a new bill to (one hopes) address some of these concerns soon. Let’s hope that they’re paying attention.

March 9, 2011

“It’s the libertarians who push this crap”

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:22

Dave Weigel tries to find the answer to the burning question “Why do conservatives hate trains so much?”:

But it could hardly make less sense to liberals. What, exactly, do Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians have against trains? Seriously, what? Why did President George W. Bush try to zero out Amtrak funding in 2005? Why is the conservative Republican Study Committee suggesting that we do so now? Why does George Will think “the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism”?

“You need to distinguish between Republicans and conservatives and libertarians when you look at this,” says William Lind, the director of the American Conservative Center for Public Transportation. “It’s the libertarians who push this crap.”

Libertarians, of course, have no problem with trains (see, e.g., Atlas Shrugged). They do have a problem with federal spending on transportation, as do many Republicans. Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957; Amtrak took over the rails in 1971. Since then, conservatives will sing the praises of private rail projects but criticize federally funded projects that don’t meet the ideal. Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., for example, pushed a high-speed rail initiative through Congress in 2008. By 2010, he was denouncing “the Soviet-style Amtrak operation” that had “trumped true high-speed service” in Florida. In 2011, as the chairman of the House Transportation Committee, he is interested in saving the Orlando-Tampa project by building 21 miles between the airport and Disney World. This is about 21 miles farther than local Republicans want to go.

March 8, 2011

“El Neil” goes to town on the United Nations

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:07

L. Neil Smith isn’t fond of the UN. I mean really not fond of them:

The UN was conceived in 1939, a brain-child of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his buddies, who had failed to understand the lesson to be learned from the collapse of its ludicrous predecessor, the League of Nations, that the people of a war-weary planet, fed up to here with self-important bloviating cretins in funny hats ordering them around, were not interested in a world government, or anything even resembling one.

Instead, all the really important people — the equivalents, in 1945, of Barack and Michelle Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank — got together in one meeting after another, and without so much as a nod at voters and taxpayers forced at gunpoint to support this gaggle of worthless preening parasites, established the UN in its now-crumbling headquarters on the Hudson River.

Its single all-important mission? To succeed where Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler had all failed: at the involuntary expense of individuals who actually worked for a living, try to take over the world.

Since the ignominious collapse of the Soviet Union, the new world nerve center for socialism is the UN, which is no less an enemy of everything worthwhile in the western world than Hitler and Stalin were. The UN has been at the very hub of the global warming hoax since the conspiracy began. It has done everything it can to limit American industrial technology and reduce us all to a prehistoric standard of living. It demands the authority to reach into otherwise sovereign countries and extract and punish those who fail to comply with its edicts. The UN admits openly that it wishes to obliterate the American Constitution — especially the Bill of Rights — with an hysterical emphasis on the Second Amendment. And now we’re beginning to have a clearer idea what it wants to substitute in place of those ideas and institutions.

[. . .]

The nearest equivalent to what the UN has in mind for all of us is the infamous Highland Clearances” of the 18th and 19th centuries, when English “landowners” evicted the Scots they had conquered, by the hundreds of thousands, burning whole villages and forcing the Scots to leave their crops rotting in the ground, compelling a people who had been cattlemen for generations to harvest seaweed on the cold and rocky coast — or emigrate to the Americas — so aristocrats could “ride to hounds” and replace their displaced victims on the land with sheep.

March 5, 2011

xkcd re-interprets the Nolan Chart

Filed under: Humour, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:36

Nolan Chart

Robert Fulford on feminism

Filed under: History, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:10

Coming up on the 100th observance of International Women’s Day, Robert Fulford takes a step back to view the feminist movement:

Some organized attempts to improve the lot of humanity claim limited victories; others do more harm than good. Only feminism can claim to have broadened, permanently, the lives of half the humans in the West. Its success, based on earnest arguments and improvised political strategies, is without parallel in the last century. Nothing since the Industrial Revolution has done so much to expand opportunity.

Feminism has altered a whole culture’s ideal version of sexual roles. It has changed the professions, most strikingly medicine and law. It has affected how children are raised, how the law deals with domestic life, how corporations and public institutions are staffed.

Like all revolutions, feminism is at war with itself. Many one-time feminists have quietly abandoned that term after watching former comrades flock behind every dubious new faction in the grievance culture. Radical feminists consider feminism a failure because it has not wiped out poverty, which should have been its goal. Events have so addled the radicals that they believe anyone who calls feminism a success is a covert enemy. Radicals believe we are living through a long dark night of conservatism and therefore have a right to be miserable, indefinitely. Celebrating anything, even the success of a movement they helped start, would rob them of their bitterness.

The world still needs the feminist spirit. It should shine a consistent light on the many millions of women who are caged by misogynistic religions and male-made dictatorships. Freeing them should become the central feminist project.

March 2, 2011

Why “Buy American” or “Buy Canadian” campaigns are bad economics

Filed under: Economics, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:26

Daniel Ikenson takes ABC to task for their misleading propaganda against international trade:

Back in the “golden age” of 1960, when imports were oddities to marvel over in a disdainful way, the per-capita U.S. income was $2,914. In 2009, with imports ubiquitous, per-capita income was $46,411. (Economic Report of the President, 2010, Tables B-1 and B-34). In real, inflation-adjusted terms, even with a U.S. population increase from 181 million to 307 million, per-capita incomes in 2009 were almost triple what they were in 1960 ($42,277 vs. $15,669 in 2005 dollars — ERP, 2010, Tables B-2 and B-34). Oh, if only we could replicate the relative poverty, the limited consumer choices, the inefficient production processes, the massive trade barriers that compelled Americans to buy American, and the uneconomic work rules and wages commanded by once-powerful private sector labor unions. In 1960, before real economic liberalization spawned cultural and social liberalization, Diane Sawyer would never have dreamed of being a network news anchor, if she even dared to entertain the concept of working outside of the home. How can she pine for such an era?

It’s frustrating that so much research refuting the myth of manufacturing decline and supporting the conclusion that U.S. manufacturing is thriving — and is in fact leading the world in terms of value of output — is simply neglected by a media that is more committed to scaring than informing. Today Americans are less likely to find in their homes products manufactured in the United States because U.S. manufacturers have moved on to producing higher value products. American manufacturing isn’t focused on products that consumers find in retail stores, like furniture, hand tools, sporting goods, flatware, draperies, carpeting and clothes. American factories produce more value than any other country’s factories by focusing on producing the highest value products: pharmaceuticals, chemicals, airplanes, sophisticated componentry, technical textiles, and other items often sold directly to other businesses.

I and others have been making these points for several years, as U.S. manufacturing continues to thrive in every metric . . . except employment. Manufacturing employment peaked in 1979 and has been on a downward trajectory ever since. But that is the point that eludes ABC and everyone else who thinks U.S. manufacturing’s best days are in the past. Making more with less is the goal! That’s how an economy grows! The political imperative of “putting people back to work” regardless of the economic value of that work — remember the so-called stimulus? — spits in the face of economics. The fact that Americans are unemployed speaks to a mismatch of skills demanded and skills available, as well as to a business and regulatory environment that dissuades investment and hiring.

March 1, 2011

CBC posts G20 mini-documentary

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:48

I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, but Cory Doctorow says “This video makes me ashamed to be a Canadian”. You Should Have Stayed At Home:

It’s been eight months since the G20 and the iconic images are still with us — burning police cars, rampaging mobs, the massive security presence that according to the official story is all that stood between Canada’s largest city and chaos. But that’s not the whole story of Toronto’s G20. Astonishing new images caught on camera are now emerging and they expose a troubling new picture of what happened to hundreds of ordinary citizens caught in the huge police dragnet during those three highly-charged days last June.

Gillian Findlay presents a revealing new street-level perspective of what happened when thousands of police were deployed in downtown Toronto and instructed to do what was necessary to ensure the wall around the G20 Conference Centre was never breached. Exclusive eyewitness video obtained by the fifth estate brings to light startling images captured on cellphones and minicams by the innocent bystanders who found themselves on the wrong side of all that G20 “order.” In a rare television interview, Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair explains why police took the actions they did.

I was critical of the G20 even before things went off the rails. It was a stupid idea to hold it in the middle of Canada’s biggest city, and the police reaction to provocation was worthy of any rag-tag third world dictatorship.

February 26, 2011

Arrested, beaten, tortured, and charged with treason . . . for watching viral videos

Filed under: Africa, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

No matter how you say it, Zimbabwe is seriously screwed up:

Munyaradzi Gwisai, a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe’s law school, was showing internet videos about the tumult sweeping across North Africa to students and activists last Saturday, when state security agents burst into his office.

The agents seized laptop computers, DVD discs and a video projector before arresting 45 people, including Gwisai, who runs the Labor Law Center at the University of Zimbabwe. All 45 have been charged with treason — which can carry a sentence of life imprisonment or death — for, in essence, watching viral videos.

Gwisai and five others were brutally tortured during the next 72 hours, he testified Thursday at an initial hearing.

There were “assaults all over the detainees’ bodies, under their feet and buttocks through the use of broomsticks, metal rods, pieces of timber, open palms and some blunt objects,” The Zimbabwean newspaper reports, in an account of the court proceedings.

Under dictator Robert Mugabe, watching internet videos in Zimbabwe can be a capital offense, it would seem. The videos included BBC World News and Al-Jazeera clips, which Gwisai had downloaded from Kubatana, a web-based activist group in Zimbabwe.

February 22, 2011

Former UK Home Secretary shocked to discover the internet awash in porn

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:52

The amusing thing is that she lead a major effort to suppress “extreme porn” while in office:

Former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has professed herself “shocked” at the availability of porn on the internet after investigating the issue for a radio documentary.

Which raises the question of what exactly she thought she was cracking down on during her time in charge of law and order.

[. . .]

Smith told the Radio Times that during her research for the documentary, she had been “shocked” to discover how much hard-core material was washing around the net. And so much of it for absolutely no cost at all.

She admitted that after the pay-per-view smut scandal had broken, her son had said: “Dad, haven’t you heard of the internet?” Smith was also shocked by a visit to the Erotica exhibition, where confronted by the likes of the Monkey Spanker and artisan-built bondage furniture, “I felt completely innocent.

That Smith was ignorant of the amount of porn available on the internet seems incredible, given that during her time in government Labour cracked down hard on “extreme porn”. Smith’s Home Office also sought to clamp down on extremism on the internet, and to track all the UK’s browsing habits via a vast uber-database, the Interception Modernisation Programme. Surely some her staff might have noticed there’s lots of smut out there as well?

February 21, 2011

Facebook? Inconsistent enforcement of terms and conditions? Say it ain’t so!

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

Facebook is having another of its periodic mood swings on just what exactly their terms and conditions really mean:

Facebook has announced it is actively reviewing its policy of a total ban on all content relating to sexual activities.

The review follows the deletion on 4 February of Collared Events page following a complaint from a site user. This deletion angered and mystified many members and supporters of Collared, which operates Slaves and Masters Club Nights and which identifies itself as a community non-profit organisation with a focus on safety and socialization. It used the Facebook page merely as a means to communicate.

There was no explicit imagery or sexual content of any kind and the page was set to “secret”. The page strictly followed the Facebook Terms. Facebook initially cited its user condition (3.7) that: “You will not post content that: is hateful, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.”

However, following extensive dialogue with senior staff at the company, including Richard Allan, Facebook’s Head of Policy for Europe, Collared has apparently stirred Facebook into reviewing not just this ban but its entire policy. A wide ranging “internal dialogue” is now under way.

Simon, who runs Collared, told the Reg: “I feel that Facebook are in complete confusion on this issue. The problem is that their policy is inconsistent and whether a site survives or not depends on whether a site is able to lobby the right person in the company — and not offend the wrong one.

Last time it was non-pornographic breastfeeding information groups being banned, and now gay, lesbian, and transgender groups are worried that this new interpretation will have their Facebook pages banned without warning, too. Makes you wonder if there’s been a silent take-over by the religious right, doesn’t it?

February 15, 2011

QotD: Don’t trust your government

Filed under: Britain, Government, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

Last week’s civil liberties bill was hardly perfect but it’s still a step in the right direction. And, frankly, it’s bonny and startling in equal measure to have a Deputy Prime Minister who says things like this:

“I need to say this — you shouldn’t trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government — full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good.”

I’m quite happy to oblige Mr Clegg. I don’t trust this government either. I think it’s intentions are often fine but I doubt whether it has the courage of those convictions. Government necessitates trimming and compromising but the troubling ease with which this crew can be blown off course does not bode well for stormier times ahead. It needs to make a proper — muscular, you might say — defence of its liberalism. Thus far it has been too wimpy by far and, for that matter, too content to try and blame everything on its predecessor. That dog won’t hunt anymore.

Cameron, Clegg, Clarke, Grieve, Gove, Alexander, IDS and so on are, on the whole, decent men with decent ideas. Their government still has a surprising amount of potential and the ability to do some good. But that doesn’t mean they can be trusted.

Alex Massie, “Nick Clegg is Right. Again.”, The Spectator, 2011-02-14

February 14, 2011

The plod may not get around to protecting you, but you’ll be charged if the burglar is hurt while stealing your stuff

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:04

Ah, England. Land of green hills, picturesque village pubs, and absolutely daft law enforcement priorities:

A spate of thefts in several towns and villages in Kent and Surrey over the past few months led to many householders taking action to protect their property.

Some have been warned by police that using wire mesh to reinforce shed windows was ”dangerous’’ and could lead to criminals claiming compensation if they ”hurt themselves’’.

Thieves target sheds to steal lawnmowers, power drills, bicycles and a variety of DIY tools.

Thomas Cooper, of Tatsfield, Surrey, used wire mesh to protect three of his garden sheds after two break-ins over the past four years. He decided to take action after reports of a rise in garden raids in the area.

Mr Cooper said: “I reinforced my shed windows with wire mesh, but was told by the police I had to be very careful because thieves can actually sue you if they get hurt.

”It is ridiculous that the law protects them even though they are breaking it.”

It’s getting to the stage that I’m expecting to hear the police in some English town declare that locking your doors and windows will no longer be allowed because of the risks to burglars. That’s only a tiny bit more ridiculous than what they’re already saying.

H/T to Damian Penny for the link.

Update, 2 March: Eugene Volokh does a bit more digging on the original story:

Some readers expressed doubt about the accuracy of the news stories on which I relied, so I e-mailed the Surrey Police Department for more information. Here’s what I learned.

February 12, 2011

First Tunisia, then Egypt: is Algeria next?

Filed under: Africa, Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:41

The Algerian government is taking a more vigorous approach to protests, by sending in the riot police early:

Thousands of riot police have been deployed in the capital of Algeria to stop an anti-government demonstration from gathering the momentum of the protests that forced out the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak.

About 50 protesters managed to reach the square in Algiers where the protest was due to take place but they were surrounded by hundreds of police and some were arrested, the Reuters news agency reported.

Opposition groups have called for a march to demand democratic change and jobs, but it has been banned by government officials and most residents have so far stayed away.

“I am sorry to say the government has deployed a huge force to prevent a peaceful march. This is not good for Algeria’s image,” Mustafa Bouachichi, a leader of the League for Human Rights, said.

Protesters who managed to reach May 1 Square, where the march was due to begin at 11am (10am GMT) shouted “Bouteflika out!” — a reference to the Algerian president — before police arrested some of them.

Is it a movie or will it magically turn into a 14-hour monologue?

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Media, Railways, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:05

More information at http://www.atlasshruggedpart1.com/.

February 11, 2011

How “those evil speculators” actually provide a very useful public service

Filed under: Economics, Food, History, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:59

Tim Worstall has a very good summary of Adam Smith’s explanation of the very useful public service provided by speculators:

Back to food: this is exactly the argument that Adam Smith put forward to explain the activities of a wheat merchant (Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Chapter V, start at para 40, here, for a decent dose of 18th century prose). When wheat is plentiful (although he calls it corn — the English did not call maize corn until some time later), say after a harvest, the merchant buys it up and stores it. He then waits until prices have risen before he sells it. If his expected shortage in the future doesn’t arrive then he’s shit out of luck and loses money. If it does, then the happy populace now have wheat to eat. For, and here’s the crucial point: what our merchant, our speculator, has done is move prices through time.

If we all ate wheat like it was that bounteous time just after harvest all the time then we would run out of wheat entirely before the next harvest. Prices would, at that point, become really rather high. However, by buying in the time of plenty, he’s raised prices in that time of plenty: thus making everyone consume a little less in that Harvest Festival gluttony. He’s also lowered prices in the Hungry Time (in medieval times, the six weeks before the harvest was indeed known as this, it was the worst time of year for food supplies) because he has at least some grain available rather than none.

So we’ve reduced price volatility, stretched the available supply over more time, possibly even stopped some starvation, by someone being enough of a bastard to speculate on food prices.

Now note, this is physical speculation, actual purchase, taking delivery and storage.

Derivatives speculation, using futures and options, has less effect on prices. It gives us information about what people think prices might be in the future, for sure, but it will only affect today’s prices if high future prices lead to that actual physical storage and hoarding. Which could happen, to be sure, but won’t necessarily.

All of this leads us to what people like M Sarkozy are trying to say and what the WDM are screaming about. The latter, in their report linked above, come right out and say that as more people are playing with food derivatives, this is what has been pushing up food prices. This is nonsensical, in the absence of any physical hoarding. For a start, WDM seems not to realise than a futures market is zero sum: for any profit made by someone then someone else must have made an equal and opposite loss. For everyone going long (betting on a price rise) someone else must have made an equal and opposite bet going short (betting that prices will fall). That’s just how these markets are. It really doesn’t matter to spot (current) prices whether three people are betting £50 or 30,000 are betting $50bn: there will be an equal and opposite number of people long as there are short, by definition.

So it absolutely cannot be that “more people speculating increases food prices”.

WDM’s second point is that more speculation means more volatility in prices: something that almost all economists would regard with a very jaundiced eye. For the general assumption is that futures act upon prices as does Smith’s wheat merchant: they reduce price volatility. Fortunately, the WDM, in its own report, provide us with an example of this. In the 2006/8 price rises, it notes that there’s a deep and liquid speculative market for wheat and corn (maize), while there’s only a very thin one for rice. And yet it was rice that was vastly more volatile in price in this period: despite the fact that it was wheat and maize which people were turning into ethanol for cars (the true cause of the price rises) rather than rice.

The price of a good is also a signal of availability: the more scarce the item is, the higher the price will go. The higher the price goes, the greater the incentive to either limit the use of the item or to search for substitute goods. This is a key feature of free markets: without the price change signalling, consumers cannot accurately guage whether to increase or decrease their use of a particular good. This is why the worst possible reaction to a sudden price increase is price controls: remember the first oil crisis in the 1970s? Price controls meant that people could still buy gasoline at the “old” price . . . until there wasn’t enough to go around. Controlling the price creates artificial shortages and fails to rationally indicate to consumers to conserve or limit their consumption.

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