[. . .] isn’t it just the slightest bit embarrassing for a government whose leader has trashed libertarians for their ethical myopia to have minions and media partisans present a libertarian pretext for an action that is not literally among the first 200 policy changes that would be implemented by an intelligent libertarian given plenary power?
Colby Cosh, “Census squabble: weak arguments shouldn’t have even worse foundations”, Maclean’s, 2010-07-12
July 12, 2010
QotD: Silly census fuss
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Another ploy to save the British ID card system
Even though they’re no longer in government, Labour is still trying to save their ID card system:
The latest group lucky enough to enter their sights just happens to be the transgendered. The Identity Documents Bill, which is intended to assert the Coalition’s new position vis-à-vis matters like identity cards is currently at the Committee stage in the House of Commons.
On Tuesday, Labour MP and one-time Identity Minister Meg Hillier was on her feet proposing an amendment, which stated: “Any ID card issued to a transgendered person, which is valid immediately before the day on which this Act is passed, shall continue to be valid until the Secretary of State has laid before both Houses of Parliament a report to the effect that the Secretary of State is satisfied that an identity document in the assigned gender is available for issue to a transgendered person.”
And the down side for transitioning transsexuals?
While the amendment was intended to prevent a particular group being “outed”, the fact that this amendment would make the transgendered the only group of UK citizens in the country still carrying identity cards would be a de facto outing by the government.
He also introduced an intriguing notion and marker for future debate, suggesting that maybe the simplest solution was not more bureaucracy, but the removal of gender identity from any documents unless it was absolutely necessary.
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Remixed anti-Libertarian cartoon
A post at the Mises Economics blog remixes this anti-Libertarian cartoon from leftycartoons.com with equally amusing results:
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July 9, 2010
Poll numbers understate unhappiness with police over G20
Publius makes a very good point here:
The Greater Toronto Area holds a population of about 5.6 million, stretching from Burlington in the west to Oshawa in the East. The City of Toronto comprises less than half the total population, and less than one-tenth of the total land area. The summit, protests and general mayhem occurred in the downtown core, itself a small area of the City of Toronto. In the lands north of Bloor, west of Bathurst and East of the Don River, the summit meant traffic delays, not riot cops.
Travelling on the 400 series highways that weekend entailed some delays — much of the Gardiner Expressway was closed — and the most notable police presence was at highway interchanges and on / off ramps. Even for those who live in the City of Toronto itself, the vast majority saw the violence of the summit weekend on television. A large number of Torontonians had simply evacuated the City altogether, either to the suburbs to stay with relatives, or to cottage country. As a result, the images fixed in most Torontonians minds are of police cruisers burning — played again and again — and not of officers dragging middle aged men with prosthetic legs across city streets. As the stories of that weekend seep out, expect those poll numbers to change.
I was one of those who chose not to hang around in the city for the entire week leading up to the summit: I didn’t see the point in putting up with the delay and hassle. I still think it was a remarkably stupid idea to hold the G20 meetings in downtown Toronto, and that the police were handed a duff hand to play. But even given that, the police played their hand very badly.
There may or may not be a serious inquiry into the affair, but the police lost a lot of support between Friday night and Saturday night: letting the geeky nihilists get away with dramatic street theatre on national TV, then turning around and arresting innocent bystanders. It took remarkable effort to squander public support, but the police or the politicians directing the police managed to do it. Bureaucratic bipolar disorder isn’t pretty.
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July 7, 2010
Delineating the “bounds of the central government’s Constitutional authority”
Art Carden reviews a new book by Thomas E. Woods:
In Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century, Professor Woods offers a thorough-but-compact discussion of the doctrine of nullification. As he writes, “(n)ullification begins with the axiomatic point that a federal law that violates the Constitution is no law at all” (p. 3). It is, according to the framework established by the Founders, an essential part of the system of checks and balances that defined the federal union. Even though they established federal-level checks and balances, the founders were troubled by the notion that the Federal government should be its own judge.
Nullification was formalized in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, and it essentially says that the states are not bound to enforce federal laws that step outside the bounds of the central government’s Constitutional authority. That raises two obvious questions. First, what are “the bounds of the central government’s Constitutional authority”? Second, what is the Constitutional relationship between the states and the central government? Woods discusses the three provisions that have been used to justify expansion of federal power — the “general welfare” clause, the commerce clause, and the “necessary and proper” clause — and argues convincingly that these were largely clauses of convenience that empowered the government to do the things necessary to fulfill their constitutional mandate. In Woods’s interpretation, this meant that the government had the constitutional authority to do mundane tasks in pursuit of their constitutional goals. They could buy lumber to build “needful buildings” and paper on which to print government documents without explicit permission, for example (p. 29). As Woods interprets it, the interstate commerce clause establishes the United States as a free trade zone. It does not give the government carte blanche to do as it pleases as long as it can cook up an “interstate commerce” rationale. Citing James Madison, Woods asks an important question: if the general welfare clause is sufficient to justify pretty much anything the Federal government wants to do, why bother with enumerated powers? Indeed, why even bother with a constitution?
Unfortunately, sympathy for nullification and states’ rights has been smeared by the association of these ideas with slavery. This is most unfortunate because it conflates a question of unambiguous moral evil (slavery) with a legitimate and difficult constitutional question.
June 30, 2010
The CCLA weighs in
Clive sent me an email this morning, with a link to the preliminary report from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, saying:
The fourth paragraph of the Executive summary ends with a cautionary note about the police chasing after 100-150 protester and in the process disregarding the rights of thousands.
My thought was, what do you expect. In Ontario we let the police do this ALL the time. We encourage it. We even applaud it. It is called RIDE.
This is just the next logical step.
The police demonstrated a bipolar attitude to the disturbances, with the “good cop” sitting back on Saturday and letting the nihilists get away with all sorts of property damage (including three police cruisers), while the “bad cop” showed up later on, like the punchline to a Monty Python skit, to arrest the bystanders (“Society is to blame.” “Right, we’ll arrest them instead!”).
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Questionable police tactics at the G20 protests
Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent me a link to this video, saying “My support for the police evaporates with [this] video. What the hell were the police thinking?”:
He then suggested that this is a Toronto Police Services training video:
Update: Even better than the ragged charge shown in the first video, now the police are showing off some of the “weapons” they collected during the G20, including LARP (Live Action Role Playing) gear confiscated from a gamer:
Toronto Police are on the defensive this week as they attempt to defend their heavy-handed tactics during the G20. To prove the seriousness of the threat to public security, they took police on a tour of weapons confiscated from activists.
Only there’s a problem: some of these weapons were taken from people who weren’t demonstrators. And some of them weren’t weapons — the police proudly displayed the blunt arrows and chainmail they confiscated from a live-action role-player who was taking the train to a game
If they’d found a random SCA heavy fighter to take the armour and weapons from, they might have a slightly better case: SCA heavy combat gear would be comparable to (in many cases better than) police riot gear. SCA weapons are solid rattan covered with silver duct tape to make them appear to be metal — LARP weapons are non-functional foam or other light material (similar “weapons” are called “boffers” and are used as safe toys for kids). SCA shields are fully functional as protection — LARPers generally carry lightweight shields that just look like protection but would not do much in a real confrontation.
I liked this comment to the BoingBoing post:
I remember seeing this same police press conference, only it was in Miami in 2004 during the FTAA summit. Among the items they presented as having seized from activists:
– Tire iron
– Gas can
– A map of Miami (see, they could use it to plan out their terrorist strike!)It took me a minute to realize they had just pulled all this stuff out of the trunk of some unfortunate activists’ car, where you’d totally expect to find it.
This kind of press conference is a standard component in the “new model” of protest suppression. It gives the police the hilarious task of taking a whole bunch of mostly innocuous stuff they seized and making up stories about how it could be used to maim, kill, and generally cause mass destruction.
I mean srsly – an empty water bottle could be used to fill with gasoline and throw at cops?
Bruce Schneier would be proud.
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June 26, 2010
What other “secret laws” did they pass?
Much noise and confusion over the discovery of a recently passed law allowing police to arrest anyone who fails to show ID within 5 metres of a “public work”. The law itself isn’t new, but the secret was the silent addition of the area of the G20 meetings as a “public work” for the definition of that law. Hijinks ensue:
Police are now able to jail anyone who refuses to furnish identification and submit to a search while within five metres of a designated security zone in downtown Toronto.
Critics reacted furiously to the new rules, which remained unpublicized until Thursday when a 32 year-old man was arrested in Toronto for refusing to show ID to police.
New Democrat MPP Peter Kormos said Friday the provincial Liberals created a “Kafka-esque” situation where people could be arrested for violating rules they didn’t know existed.
“This is very very repugnant stuff and should be troubling to everybody,” he said.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) said it was “extremely concerned” that the new measures violate constitutional safeguards.
I’m not a fan of violent protests, but I don’t believe the police need this additional tool in order to arrest people who attempt to breach the barricades or attack other people: this is granting too much arbitrary power to police officers. The way the power was granted is even more disturbing . . . it shows that the government knew there’d be an outcry if they did it in the public view, so they arranged it so that nobody would know about it in time to do anything about it. Nice work, Ontario, got any other nasty legal surprises you want to spring on us?
Update, 29 June: According to a report in the National Post, the Ontario government denies that there was any such regulatory change and that no arrests were made using the authority of this act.
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Texas conservatives want to take you back
Take you back to the middle of the last century, or even further:
Texas Republicans are a conservative lot. Still, it’s difficult to imagine mainstream GOP voters demanding their neighbors be jailed for engaging in a little hanky-panky behind closed doors.
Nevertheless, the state’s Republican party has voted on a platform by which their candidates will stand, and it includes the reinstatement of laws banning sodomy: otherwise known as oral and anal sex.
The party’s platform also seeks to make gay marriage a felony offense, which may be confusing to most given that the state does not sanction or recognize same sex marriages, meaning any such ceremony conducted does not bear the weight of law. Whether this means the GOP wants gay couples married in other states to be pursued through Texas as dangerous criminals, the party did not specify.
“We oppose the legalization of sodomy,” the platform states. “We demand that Congress exercise its authority granted by the U.S. Constitution to withhold jurisdiction from the federal courts from cases involving sodomy.”
Texas Republicans must be a much more sexually repressed bunch if all of this managed to pass muster with the party faithful. They also appear to be in an anti-immigrant frenzy, with measures custom-designed to alienate Spanish-speaking voters also passed as part of the platform.
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June 25, 2010
QotD: The danger of electing real libertarians
I don’t know what it is, but when you go all the way down the libertarian path, it leads to complete insanity. Just look at Ron Paul followers — they’re pretend-to-be-Spock-and-bite-each-other crazy. The libertarian philosophy seems reasonable enough, but it somehow always leads to candidates who accidentally dye themselves blue or carry around a pet ferret named Gustav.
So anyway, let’s definitely get someone in 2012 sympathetic to libertarian ideals who is adamantly against fiscal irresponsibility and government expansion — and for individualism — but if any candidates start foaming at the mouth, screaming “FIAT MONEY!!!!!”, back away and don’t make eye contact. Still, pure libertarians have a place in the GOP, but they’re sort of like Murdoch to the Republican A-Team: They keep breaking him out of the insane asylum because he’s useful for certain situations, but they’re not going to put him in charge of anything. Or there will be much fool pitying.
Frank J. Fleming, “Libertarians and the Republican Party”, IMAO 2010-06-25
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Ghost town T.O.
Scott Stinson finds that the constant warnings about disruptions, delays, closures, and protests has had a positive effect: anyone who can avoid downtown Toronto is avoiding the place.
We were to be besieged by The Man, and those who would shake their fists at The Man.
So it was more than a little surprising to find the commute on Thursday morning not one of snarled traffic and honking horns, but one of fast-moving, wide-open freeways. Given the number of vehicles on Toronto’s normally packed roads, you’d think the area had been hit a day earlier not by a mild earthquake, but by a nuclear bomb. From northeast of the city to the western waterfront in 40 minutes? If this is nuclear winter, then sign me up for Armageddon!
I’ve certainly been avoiding going into downtown since the barricades started to go up. I’m apparently one of the majority following the same basic script.
And why wouldn’t residents have made alternate plans? Consider this traffic advisory, issued on Tuesday: “Expect closures and restrictions in and around Toronto resulting in significant delays on major highways such as the 427, 401, Queen Elizabeth Way, Gardiner Expressway, the Don Valley Parkway and connecting roads.”
If you are unfamiliar with Toronto’s highways, a little background about those mentioned in that advisory: That’s pretty much all of them. Other than one highly expensive toll road across the north of the city, there’s no way to cover much ground in this place without traversing those highways that officialdom warns will have “significant delays.” Due to the prevailing security-first practice of releasing as little information as possible — which is to say, nothing — that road closure advisory doesn’t say which highways will be closed when, either. If we knew that, at least we could plan around the delays. Instead we get travel warnings that boil down to this: Seriously, stay away.
Update: Don Martin thinks it’s like a scene from a post-apocalyptic movie:
This is what a billion-dollar security net buys you. Canada’s largest city as a post-apocalyptic movie set. Massive worker inconvenience. Horrific productivity losses. Legions of bored cops on overtime. And a tourist scare-off that makes SARS look like a Halloween prank.
Everywhere in a city core swept clean of garbage collection bins and newspaper boxes, a fence runs through it.
The notorious barricade has gaps too small even for a child’s fingers to grasp and that makes it impossible to scale although, protesters take note, at three metres high it’s only half the world pole vault record so there’s at least one way to leap over it into the waiting hands of riot police.
Speaking of police, they already gather in jawdropping numbers as omnipresent clusters at every intersection or wander aimlessly as enforcement groups around buildings and down streets, wearing bulletproof vests with helmets dangling from their belts and earpieces connected to voices of undetermined origin.
At least there’s the scene set for some great TV and photography moments later in the weekend, when the massed forces of global anarchism (plus every other disgruntled group with both an axe to grind and physically active membership) look for their golden opportunities to induce police over-reaction. The only tourists in town aren’t interested in the sights or the shopping: they’re here for media appearances, protest marching, and (hopefully a tiny minority) a taste of violence.
Update, the second: Kelly McParland points out that the massive security precautions have actually made the protesters redundant:
[. . .] The [Toronto] Star edited out Dave and dwelt instead on the new law, which wasn’t debated in the legislature and resulted from an ‘extraordinary request’ by Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair, who wanted additional policing powers shortly after learning the G20 was coming to Toronto.” Evidently it didn’t occur to Premier Dalton McGuinty that he could say no. And why should he? It’s pretty clear that no one in any government — municipal, provincial or federal — has said no to anything dreamed up by any level of the national security apparatus since the day Stephen Harper told them he’d agreed to hold two summits at once. A billion dollar budget? You got it. New sound blasters for Toronto cops? You got it. An asinine fence snaking through the centre of the city? Done. The country’s financial centre brought to a screeching halt . . . all the major tourist spots closed . . . restaurants emptied . . . hotels commandeered . . . the waterfront shut down on a hot summer weekend . . . a million or so people kept from earning a living? Done, done and done.
This is what happens when you give security people a blank cheque and let them impose whatever paranoid restrictions they can dream up at their most fevered moments. Hey, let’s rip the saplings out of the ground! Let’s get a fork lift and move that three-ton elephant sculpture someplace where less ‘dangerous’! What’s dangerous about a three-ton elephant sculpture? Who knows, but we can do whatever we want! It’s about security!
What the protesters have missed is that they weren’t needed. The government’s done a fine job of making itself look foolish without any help from them. They could have stayed home for the weekend and watched the Michael Jackson testimonials. They sure wouldn’t have missed anything important.
June 22, 2010
UK photographers might want to pick up this magazine
BoingBoing advises that the July issue of Amateur Photographer is doing something to assist innocent photographers who are still encountering police and rent-a-cop harassment in public spaces:
The UK Amateur Photographer magazine is giving away free lenscloths silk-screened with the Photographers’ Bill of Rights with its July issue. UK anti-terror legislation gave the police sweeping powers to harass photographers for shooting in public places, and to compound matters, tabloid-driven hysteria over paedophilia has seen many photographers accused to paedophilia for taking pictures of (for example) public busses and empty playgrounds.
Between the anti-terror laws, the anti-pedophilia panic in the newspapers, and the general busy-bodiness of security guards, photographers in the UK are being treated like criminals. More on the anti-harassment campaign here.
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June 19, 2010
Penn still waiting for that call from Hitler’s booking agent
An amusing interview in Vanity Fair points out that Penn Jillette would even go on Hitler’s talk show:
Is that why you don’t have a problem going on Glenn Beck’s show, because he doesn’t pretend to be objective?
Well, it’s complicated. Tommy Smothers, who’s one of my heroes, got really angry at me about it. We actually had this argument in public, on another show that’s going to be on Showtime this summer called The Green Room With Paul Provenza. Tommy attacked me for being on Glenn Beck, and he ended up saying, and I don’t think this part made it on the air, “If Hitler had a talk show, you’d probably do that too.”
And your retort?
I said yes, I would, and I would tell the truth.
Wow. O.K. then.
I’m not kidding.
Just don’t mention the part about telling the truth to Hitler’s talent bookers, and I’m pretty sure you’ll get a guest slot.
Oh, I won’t say a word. But you know what I mean, right? It does have an effect. I go on Glenn Beck as an atheist and talk about atheism. And I have people come up to me and say, “You know, until I saw you on Glenn Beck, speaking so passionately about atheism, I’d never considered that as a moral decision.” That’s incredibly powerful. These are people watching a hardcore Christian show and being exposed to an atheist point of view.
Your intentions seem genuine, but I can’t help myself, Penn. Every time I hear you’ve been on Glenn Beck, it makes me a little sick.
It makes me sick too! When people come up to me and say they love the show, I feel sick. Because I do disagree with a lot of what he says. But I also feel a little sick whenever people say they saw me on Keith Olbermann.
And yet you continue to do it. You know, there’s an easy way to stop making yourself sick.
But I think it’s important. I may be the only person who goes on Keith Olbermann and Glenn Beck and says the exact same shit. I am so much more socially liberal than Olbermann will ever be. You can’t believe how pro gay and pro freedom of speech I am. I’m way out beyond anyone on the Left. And as for fiscal conservatism and small government, I’m so much further to the right than Glenn Beck. Nobody is further left and further right than me. As I’m fond of saying, if you want to find utopia, take a sharp right on money and a sharp left on sex and it’s straight ahead.
And I love Penn’s suggestion for the Obama re-election campaign in 2012 at the end of the article.
June 18, 2010
EFF introduces “Encrypt the Web” Firefox plugin
A very interesting new project from Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Today EFF and the Tor Project are launching a public beta of a new Firefox extension called HTTPS Everywhere.
This Firefox extension was inspired by the launch of Google’s encrypted search option. We wanted a way to ensure that every search our browsers sent was encrypted.
H/T to BoingBoing for the link.
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