Quotulatiousness

December 7, 2010

Cool idea . . . don’t expect it to be allowed

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:24

This is a cool idea:

I am building a radar detector that plugs into your iPhone. When RadarLoc detects radar, it notifies other drivers in the area, making radar effectively visible for miles. I think of it as transparency in government. To the extent that visible traffic enforcement slows traffic, RadarLoc encourages law-abiding behavior.

RadarLoc is open source, open hardware and open data. My plan is to make the radar data available on RadarLoc.org, so anyone can build on it. If you don’t like my app, you can build your own–I tell you how to talk to the hardware and how to use the data service. Information wants to be free.

Unfortunately, radar traps are not actually there to encourage safer driving: they’re there as revenue sources. This is why (at least in some jurisdictions) you’re not supposed to warn other drivers of radar traps, even though by doing so you’re encouraging other drivers to drive more slowly (therefore making the road safer). Radar detectors of any kind are illegal in Ontario, for example.

H/T to Chris Anderson for the link.

December 6, 2010

QotD: Ignorance of the law is overwhelmingly common, and getting worse

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:07

The maxim “Ignorance of the law is no excuse” made sense back in the days when the only kind of acts that were illegal were genuine crimes that caused palpable harm to innocent victims: murder, rape, theft, etc.

But with the growth of the regulatory state, every individual is now subject to thousands of pages of densely written federal, provincial and municipal statutes and regulations. The law is also embodied in innumerable judicial decisions. And it’s all in continual flux: Regulations are passed without parliamentary debate, and courts release new judgments daily.

There is probably not a single law professor, judge or legislator in Canada who has even a passing familiarity with, let alone full comprehension of, all the laws we are required to obey. The average joe doesn’t stand a chance. We are all potential offenders every day, no matter how law-abiding we might wish to be.

Given this welter of law, how should those responsible for enforcing it conduct themselves?

Karen Selick, “Drop that pig and put your hands in the air”, National Post, 2010-12-06

December 5, 2010

“People talk about how knives are dangerous, and then they go in the kitchen and they have 50 of them”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:54

Marc Lacey looks at the non-firearm right-to-carry movement:

Arizona used to be a knife carrier’s nightmare, with a patchwork of local laws that forced those inclined to strap Buck knives or other sharp objects to their belts to tread carefully as they moved from Phoenix (no knives except pocketknives) to Tempe (no knives at all) to Tucson (no knives on library grounds).

But that changed earlier this year when Arizona made its Legislature the sole arbiter of knife regulations. And because of loose restrictions on weapons here, Arizona is now considered a knife carrier’s dream, a place where everything from a samurai sword to a switchblade can be carried without a quibble.

Arizona’s transformation, and the recent lifting of a ban on switchblades, stilettos, dirks and daggers in New Hampshire, has given new life to the knife rights lobby, the little-known cousin of the more politically potent gun rights movement. Its vision is a knife-friendly America, where blades are viewed not as ominous but as tools — the equivalent of sharp-edged screw drivers or hammers — that serve useful purposes and can save lives as well as take them.

[. . .]

“People talk about how knives are dangerous, and then they go in the kitchen and they have 50 of them,” said D’Alton Holder, a veteran knife maker who lives in Wickenberg, Ariz. “It’s ridiculous to talk about the size of the knife as if that makes a difference. If you carry a machete that’s three feet long, it’s no more dangerous than any knife. You can do just as much damage with an inch-long blade, even a box cutter.”

[. . .]

“We had certain knives that were illegal, but I could walk down the street with a kitchen knife that I used to carve a turkey and that would be legal,” Ms. Coffey said. “I’d be more scared of a kitchen knife than a switchblade.”

She said switchblade bans were passed in the 1950s because of the menacing use of the knives in movies like “West Side Story” and “Rebel Without a Cause.”

Police complaint filed after Tom Flanagan’s “fatwa”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:41

Consistency, people! If we condemn Islamic leaders who call for the death of people who “offend” Islam, we should also condemn Canadian political operatives who call for the assassination of Julian Assange:

Vancouver lawyer Gail Davidson filed a written complaint today (December 4) with Vancouver police and the RCMP against Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s former campaign manager, Tom Flanagan.

Davidson alleged that on a November 30 CBC television broadcast, Flanagan “counselled and/or incited the assassination of Julian Assange contrary to the Criminal Code of Canada”.

Assange is the founder of Wikileaks, which is releasing 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables.

On the Power and Politics program hosted by Evan Solomon, Flanagan said: “Well, I think [Julian] Assange should be assassinated, actually. I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something.”

I doubt that the case will go very far, and it may not be meant to: it’s communicating a message.

December 2, 2010

It’s apparently not “wrong touching” when the TSA does it

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:21

Daniel Tencer says that the TSA’s guidelines for calming children are the same things sexual predators use:

An expert in the fight against child sexual abuse is raising the alarm about a technique the TSA is reportedly using to get children to co-operate with airport pat-downs: calling it a “game”.

Ken Wooden, founder of Child Lures Prevention, says the TSA’s recommendation that children be told the pat-down is a “game” is potentially putting children in danger.

Telling a child that they are engaging in a game is “one of the most common ways” that sexual predators use to convince children to engage in inappropriate contact, Wooden told Raw Story.

Children “don’t have the sophistication” to distinguish between a pat-down carried out by an airport security officer and an assault by a sexual predator, he said.

The TSA policy could “desensitize children to inappropriate touch and ultimately make it easier for sexual offenders to prey on our children,” Wooden added.

H/T to Cory Doctorow for the link.

December 1, 2010

Five Books interview with P.J. O’Rourke

Filed under: Books, Economics, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

P.J. O’Rourke is asked to talk about five books from the field of political satire:

P J O’Rourke talks Swift, Huxley, Orwell and Waugh and says we now live in the world of 1984 but, instead of being a horror show, a television that looks back at you is just a pain in the ass. It’s 1984-Lite. Sad in one way, but a relief in another.

The category of political satire books is simply closed. The top five are so good that in order to make any surprising choices one has to go a long way down to the next level.

[. . .]

I’ll be careful. Animal Farm and 1984.

Yes. One is comic satire and the other is tragicomic satire.

Let’s start with the comic.

Well, Animal Farm sticks in everybody’s mind. All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. Again, something read twice. I read it for the first time when I was 14 or 15 and it was a funny story about badly behaved animals and then I read it again at college and someone pointed out to me that this was sharp social satire. I thought it was an animal story, a kids’ book, but when I took another look at it I realised what he was getting at. The Soviet leadership was pretty well represented there. But one of the things that’s interesting to me about both Animal Farm and 1984 is that they are warnings against collectivism from a man of the left. Sure, any old Tory or Republican might be likely to make this point, though not so well, perhaps, nor so amusingly, but the fact that it comes from a man of the left is interesting. It seems to me to be something Orwell never fully came to grips with. Maybe if he’d lived longer…

What do you mean?

The necessity for collectivism under his leftist ideals and yet the danger of collectivism no matter who it’s done by seems like something he really wrestled with. I think we all buy the necessity for collectivism in a way.

[. . .]

Have you actually been to Sweden? I’ve never been, but I find myself constantly holding it up as the pinnacle of socialist marvellousness. It could be a complete shit-hole for all I know.

I have been and you know what it is? It’s very foreign. It’s full of Swedes. I mean, there are a few immigrants, and it has more now than it did 15 years ago when I was there, but Swedes are really Swedish. They are just remarkably alike. So, when you have a country of only eight and a half million people and they’re very like each other and you take 80 per cent of their income away and redistribute it through political means and they go: ‘Ya, ya, dat’s vot I vonted! Abba records! Herring and a PhD!’ And it’s all okey-dokey. But if you take a country as diverse as the United States and you take everything away from everybody and redistribute it — oh my God, there’d be hell to pay! I mean, some people would want guns, and some people… I wouldn’t even want to ask what some people would want.

[. . .]

1984.

That’s satire more in the Roman mode. The usual definition of satire is humour used to a moral end for a moral purpose, and there’s certainly a moral purpose to 1984 but it’s not funny really. I mean there is a certain dark humour to rewriting history and things going down a memory hole.

It’s funny in the Russian sense of the word.

I like that. Believe me, I’ll steal that phrase.

I’ll see you in court.

It’s sort of like being popular in Japan.

November 26, 2010

Marni Soupcoff says get the government out of the marriage business

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:18

Although the column was prompted by the attention-whoring actions of a British couple, the basic principle still applies in Canada:

It really doesn’t make sense for the government to be divvying up rights and benefits based on the sexual orientation of its citizens. Yes, marriage has an undeniably rich history in our cultural and serves very useful societal purposes — I don’t buy into the arguments that marriage is dead. But it’s ultimately a moral and, in some cases, religious matter that should be sanctioned (or not) by a couple’s peer group, religious group and family. It’s not rightfully a spot for government to be sticking its nose, and the fact that it does so puts it in charge of decisions it has no business making — like who is fit to be called a married couple and who should get special tax treatment based on the status relationship.

The preferable scenario, and the one which would forestall lawsuits like the Goggin/Skarsholt one, would be for the government to remove itself from the marriage business altogether.

That would mean no more government-sanctioned civil unions or marriages or references thereto in the law. Yes, that would also mean massive revisions to the tax code, family law, criminal law — really reams and reams of laws from which the government would have to extricate its judgments about couples’ legal standing.

It would also nicely short-circuit the ongoing debate on polygamy (currently active in BC, but due in your local courtroom very soon too).

“[T]he anti-TSA movement … is really a front for the Koch brothers”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

Justin Raimondo pours scorn on the recent anti-libertarian hit piece in The Nation:

Speaking of implausible fiction, The Nation recently ran a piece by Mark “I spit on libertarians” Ames and Yasha Levine, which determined that the anti-TSA movement — that seems to have sprung up like a last gasp of life from the old America — is really a front for the Koch brothers, two formerly libertarian billionaires who have become the deus ex machina of clueless “progressive” commentators who cannot otherwise explain the explosion of anti-government anti-authoritarian populism currently upending politics. Glenn Greenwald seems to have taken care of the Ames-Levine fantasists, putting them in their proper place as apologists for the Obama regime and all its works, but one more thing needs to be said:

If Ames and Levine are going to become the “go to” team for the dirt on libertarians, such as it is, they ought to learn their subject. Because the very idea of Charles and David Koch leading a national resistance movement involving civil disobedience on a massive scale is laughable: to anyone who knows them, or knows of them in more than a glancing way, this can only provoke gales of unrestrained laughter. It is sheer laziness to believe this. Indeed, if only the Brothers Koch, and the plethora of organizations their money has funded, were that radical! Unfortunately, they are not: a stodgy, boring conservatism marks their both their methods and their politics, and always has.

Ames and Levine need to do some real research. It was the anti-Koch wing of the libertarian movement, centered around LewRockwell.com, that first gave John Tyner’s act of defiance the publicity and velocity that made it go viral. And if LRC is a front for the Koch brothers, then we have truly entered Bizarro World. In that case, so too is Antiwar.com a Koch front — and so why have we been doing this fundraising campaign for the past two weeks, begging our readers to save us from oblivion?

Gee, it seems like that check from the Kochs got lost in the mail! Charles, could you please look into that? Thanks.

H/T to Matt Welch for the link.

November 24, 2010

Kuwait has a problem with some cameras

Filed under: Liberty, Middle East, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:16

Cell phone cameras and compact cameras are okay, but DSLR cameras are not:

Kuwait has banned DSLR cameras in public places — except if you are a journalist.

But the ban does not apply to compact cameras or cameras in smart phones. Eccentric or what? And what about camcorders?

Majed Al-Saqer told the English-language Kuwait Times, which broke the news of the DSLR ban, that “sometimes people stop him while he is in his car with his camera, as if he were planning to kill someone with it. He said that he isn’t sure what the real problem is, whether it is people taking photos of each other or the size of the camera”.

There must be a reason, but it’s not immediately apparent.

November 23, 2010

QotD: “Shut up and be scanned”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

More on your authoritarian media . . .

Earlier today, my colleague Matt Welch ran off a list of newspaper editorial boards who are lining up behind TSA. The headline to this post is the actual headline from the L. A. Times’ editorial. Given such cowardice about defending civil liberties in the face of hysterical hand-wringing about national security, I was going to post a snarky comment about how the L.A. Times would probably have told Japanese-Americans to “shut up and report to your internment camp” back in 1942, too.

Then I did some Googling, and discovered that the paper pretty much did exactly that. As did a number of other papers.

Radley Balko, “Shut Up and Be Scanned”, The Agitator, 2010-11-22

Wendy McElroy: This rumour has “legs but no body”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:19

After reading one of the several stories about the TSA considering (or already having) an exemption from the invasive “pat-down” for Muslim women, Wendy McElroy tried to find the truth of the matter:

“Sexual assault” and “child molestation” are just some of the accusations leveled at the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) revealing scanners and full-body pat-down procedures, which were introduced on November 1.

At long, long last, the public is saying no to the savaging of personal liberty.

But a bizarre attack from a different direction should cause concern for at least two reasons. First, the particular accusation against the TSA is almost certainly incorrect and could dilute the credibility of other criticisms. Second, the attack seems rooted in anti-Muslim fears and feeds back into them.

The rumor: The Department of Homeland Security may exempt Orthodox Muslim women from the sexually invasive scanners and physical exams that others must undergo as a prerequisite of air travel.

On what evidence is the rumor based?

Don’t print these off and attach them to your luggage

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

A few bumper stickers/luggage tags from Hit and Run:

November 22, 2010

David Nolan, co-founder of the US Libertarian Party

Filed under: History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:33

Dave Weigel has an appreciation of the late David Nolan:

The 66-year-old libertarian activist David Nolan died on Saturday; he had a stroke while driving, then crashed his car.

Some of the vital history of anti-statist politics dies with him. In the 1960s, Nolan was a YAF and Students for Goldwater activist. 1971, Nolan was watching Richard Nixon on TV with some like-minded friends when the president announced that he’d be introducing wage controls and price controls. The Libertarian Party was born in his living room; its first national convention was held months later, in Nolan’s Denver. He built it, according to Brian Doherty’s essential history Radicals for Capitalism, by tapping a list of disgruntled libertarian-minded YAFers for funds, and then relentlessly promoting the party with cast-aside libertarians around the country.

[. . .]

It’s unusually difficult to say what Nolan’s legacy will be. He leaves behind a small “l” libertarian movement that is more powerful, with greater control over the levers of the GOP and more footing in popular culture, than at any time in living memory. (Witness the current, libertarian-driven backlash against the TSA if you want proof.) He also leaves behind a Libertarian Party that, like almost every third party in American history, struggles for relevance and has its best ideas co-opted by major party politicians who go on to disappoint their supporters. But if the measure of an activist’s success is bringing attention to his ideas, and bringing them from the fringe of respectability to the center, David Nolan was a success. After all, in 1971, the “crazy” guy was the one who thought price controls were a bad idea.

The Register reports on Erotica 2010

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:38

If there was one trade show in Britain you’d be certain that The Register would cover, it would have to be Erotica 2010:

Whether it was the cold or the recession, Erotica 2010 – the 15th year of the international sex exposition – appears to have ever so slightly wilted.

It is not exactly shrivelled, but is a little smaller; not the proud, thrusting standard-bearer of the UK’s adult erotic industry it once was.

A quick totting up through the programme suggests around 20 fewer exhibitors than two years ago.

[. . .]

Yet again, a glittering procession of acts — from pole dancers to zentai dolls — took to the stage at the heart of the show, with pride of place for the inimitable Dita von Teese. Sadly, we are unable to bring you any pictures of her act, under pain of a penalty fee of $1m, which all journalists were required to agree to before entering the hall!

“Anti-racism” is not the same as being opposed to racism

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:33

Ed West responds to reader complaints about a recent column:

The conventional definition of racism is the belief that “race” (however one defines that) is a primary or significant cause of differences between men; that some of these races are superior to others; and that it is acceptable to discriminate on grounds of race, or to behave unpleasantly to someone because of their race. The term dates to the 1930s, although “racialist” and “racialism” go back to the Edwardian period.

“Anti-racism” means something altogether different, and is best explained by the Civitas book Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics, an account of the Salem-like events that gripped Britain in the 1990s. The authors cite the example of the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work (CCETSW), which in 1991 set out the implementation of its new Diploma in Social Work.

The first tenet was “the self-evident truth” that “racism is endemic in the values, attitudes and structures of British society”.

The training manual then stated “steps need to be taken to promote permeation of all aspects of the curriculum by an anti-racist analysis”. All “racist materials” had to be withdrawn from the syllabus and CCETSW would decide what was racist.

In the rules there would be no freedom of speech for opinions that can be constructed as “racist” or favourable to “racism”, and “anti-racist practice requires the adoption of explicit values”. The first value is that individual problems have roots in “political structures” and “not in individual or cultural pathology”. (In other words, if different groups have different outcomes in terms of education or crime levels, it is all the fault of British racism, not of individuals).

A second value is that racial oppression and discrimination are everywhere to be found in British society, even when invisible. In other words, impossible to disprove!

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