Quotulatiousness

June 29, 2024

“So, as the pundits say, everywhere is warming faster than everywhere else”

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

Terry Etam on the totalitarian controls being imposed on citizens in Canada where under yet another censorship bill being pushed out to ensure that nobody says anything that contravenes some yet-to-be-determined “internationally recognized methodology”:

And then, as a final but impressive gasp of inept state control, witness Canada’s frantic flailing to control the situation by …

Send in the goons: Canada cracks down on any speech it doesn’t like, with sweeping rules measured against undefined regulations, and enters the historical pantheon of legendarily badly run states

We’ve all heard about bill C-59 by now, the government of Canada’s crackdown on any comments related to emissions reduction mitigation efforts that do not adhere to “internationally recognized methodology”. It’s a Soviet-style attempt to crack down on any talk about what companies are doing to reduce emissions, or anything they do that is an attempt to reduce “the environmental, social and ecological causes or effects of climate change”.

The apes in charge, and their sycophants, say hey, it’s not censorship at all, you can talk about emissions reduction all day long, so long as it meets some undefined international standard, and the onus of proof is on anyone making the statement to show that they are not violating some “internationally recognized methodology” that does not exist.

This whole fiasco is of course a one way street; the freedom to say anything that cements the climate emergency narrative remains gloriously unchecked. For example, energy commentator David Blackmon recently catalogued on LinkedIn the number of countries/regions that claim to be warming faster than the global average: Canada, Mexico, Latin America and Caribbean, Arctic, Asia, Africa, the US, Europe, Russia, Australia, China, and Finland all claim to be warming faster than the global average. The high priest of modern politicized science, Scientific American, says that oceans are also warming 40 percent faster than expected, and that oceans absorb up to 90 percent of the warming caused by human carbon emissions, and SA also notes that the South Pole is warming “three times faster than the global average”. So, as the pundits say, everywhere is warming faster than everywhere else.

Extrapolating from this, in keeping with necessary mathematical precedents such as how averages work, then the few remaining regions not mentioned must be plummeting in temperature, because that’s how averages work. And I mean plummeting, if it alone is offsetting the above-average gains in the rest of the world. Strange indeed how not a single headline can be found to that effect.

The speech police have no problem with such math crimes, because the asinine claims are put forth under the banner of “science”. It must be concluded then that math is not one of the “internationally recognized methodologies”.

No matter. The point is, as always, to silence discussions and ram through whatever ideological junk they can while still clinging to power like a bee holding onto an accelerating windshield.

Welcome to Canada, where if global embarrassment were an Olympic sport we’d be wearing perma-gold. Joke’s on us though; we elected these people. We should now clearly understand why Canada’s status as an investment haven is plummeting like a shot duck. (Do not point me towards legendary genius Warren Buffett who says he is comfortable investing in Canada; Buffett buys existing businesses, with moats, and the government of Canada is working to build those moats as fast as it can. Remember this investing rule for the foreseeable future: existing infrastructure is getting more valuable, because building anything gets harder by the day.)

It is probably unfair to single out Canada for such withering criticism when other western countries are on similar energy suicide missions. Australia, England, Germany … all under the spell of radicals that will accept nothing other than total nihilistic energy “victory”, a crown that seems to mean de-industrialization and subjugation of citizens in autos they don’t want, doing things they don’t want to, and not being permitted to say what they want to. (New Zealand was in that club as well, but has recently repealed a ban on oil & gas exploration when it dawned on them that fields decline, and do not produce at flat levels in perpetuity without investment. Yes, western governments really have enacted such legislation while simultaneously holding an astonishing ignorance about how energy really works.)

As far as Canada’s hydrocarbon sector goes, the most important thing to do at this stage is to keep our heads [down] and carry on providing the energy the world desperately needs. And that means every single person, right down to Guilbeault’s Greenpeace and the soup throwing fools of Just Stop Oil. If the feds are going to outlaw emissions talk, let them … the rotten foundations of their world can’t stand for much longer.

No one should stand taller than one that provides reliable and affordable energy for the globe’s citizens. Go back to work, and patiently wait until the inevitable happens, the day when governments are no longer able to pretend they can’t see reality. It’s going to be epic.

June 27, 2024

The Toronto Star wants Ontario to adopt Scottish booze regulation (but ignore the failure)

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Wine — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Toronto Star always loves a good moral crusade, and if it also happens to fly in the face of whatever Premier Ford wants to do, then so much the better:

The Toronto Star is looking to Scotland to teach it how to reduce alcohol-related deaths. In an article titled “How Scotland started to kick its alcohol problem — and what Ontario could learn from it“, it pushes back on plans to liberalise Ontario’s state monopoly on alcohol retail, saying:

    Ontario officials say they are fulfilling a 2018 election promise to increase “choice and convenience for shoppers and support Ontario retailers, domestic producers and workers in the alcohol industry”.

    But Scotland has cut alcohol-related hospital admissions by 40 per cent and deaths by almost half. While in Ontario, alcohol-related admissions have risen by a third and deaths by almost half, according to the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction.

How did Scotland supposedly achieve this public health miracle?

    The key part of Scotland’s landmark policy was aimed at reducing drinking by introducing minimum unit prices to make drinking more expensive.,/p>

Ontario already has minimum pricing and Scotland doesn’t have a state alcohol monopoly, so it is not obvious what lessons Ontarians are supposed to be learning, but put that to one side for a moment and consider the main claim.

Anyone who has been following events in Scotland knows that alcohol-specific deaths have risen since minimum pricing was introduced in 2018 and have generally risen since 2012 following a significant downturn in the years prior.

It is that drop between 2006 and 2012 that the Toronto Star must be referring to when it claims that deaths fell by “almost half” (actually a third). But the Scottish government didn’t pass any anti-alcohol legislation in those six years and it certainly didn’t have minimum pricing. The newspaper mentions that the drink-drive limit was cut, but that didn’t happen until 2014 and the evidence is clear that it had no effect on road accidents.

Since the Toronto Star doesn’t mention when the decline in alcohol-specific deaths took place, it is leading its readers to believe that it coincided with the introduction of minimum pricing and the lowering of the drink-drive limit. I call that lying.

It is strangely fitting that Canadians are being lied to about the “success” of Scotland’s alcohol strategy since the Scottish public were conned into accepting minimum pricing, in part, on the basis of lies told about the “success” of minimum pricing in Canada. The neo-temperance academic Tim Stockwell, who is quoted in the Star article, published a series of studies in the 2010s making some absurd claims about minimum pricing that were parroted by campaigners in the UK.

June 24, 2024

Justin Trudeau’s Ominous Online Harms Act: Minority Report Comes to Canada: Conor Friedersdorf

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

Quillette
Published Jun 19, 2024

Jonathan Kay talks to Atlantic Magazine staff writer Conor Friedersdorf about a censorious government bill that would allow officials to investigate Canadians for things they haven’t done yet.

https://quillette.com/2024/06/19/just…

——

Quillette is an Australian-based online magazine that focuses on long-form analysis and cultural commentary. It is politically non-partisan, but relies on reason, science, and humanism as its guiding values.

Quillette was founded in 2015 by Australian writer Claire Lehmann. It is a platform for free thought and a space for open discussion and debate on a wide range of topics, including politics, culture, science, and technology.

Quillette has gained attention for publishing articles and essays that challenge modern heterodoxy on a variety of topics, including gender and sexuality, race and identity politics, and free speech and censorship.
(more…)

June 23, 2024

California has “a governing class that wants you to give them power, then shut up and go away”

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

Chris Bray illustrates some of the many ways that California’s elected politicians are working to ensure that mere voters won’t interrupt their urgent and necessary work:

The Taxpayer Protection Act, a proposed referendum that got enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot, would have required voter approval for all new state and local taxes. State election officials agreed that it met the qualification threshold, and planned to put it before the voters. Democratic officeholders sued, with considerable support from public employee unions and interest groups, and the California Supreme Court ruled this week that the measure may not be placed on the ballot — because it improperly proposes to revise the state constitution, rather than merely amending it. You can watch them try to parse that distinction here, for seventy murky pages. You can change the state constitution through the referendum process, but you can’t change the state constitution through the referendum process. See, totally clear.

At the same time, California Governor Patrick Bateman is telling the organizers of a ballot measure that would increase penalties for drug and theft crimes — after a decade of sharply reduced penalties — that he’ll punish them by blocking criminal justice reform measures in the legislature unless they pull their measure from the ballot. The intended message is a very clear threat: If you insist on your ballot measure and lose at the polls, you’ll be punished with a complete blockade on your agenda through legislative means, for as long as we can manage it.

And a parental rights proposition that aimed for a place on the November ballot — falling short in its efforts to gather enough signatures — ran into a wall when the attorney general’s office assigned it a misleading label that would have described it to voters as a repressive measure that was intended to hurt children.

So a Progressive reform, the great 20th-century transition to direct democracy, is running into a progressive wall of resistance in the 21st century. California Democrats are fighting to limit the likelihood that voters will interfere with their agenda.

People outside California often shrug at the decline of the state, because Californians are just getting what they voted for. But that view misses a bunch of strangeness and ambiguity in a place that has tended to put Democrats in office, then limit their efforts with an ideologically inconsistent hodgepodge of conservative and libertarian ballot measures. The governor and the state legislature just sued to prevent their own voters, the people who sent them to public office, from voting on the new taxes they create. Democrats against direct democracy — a governing class that wants you to give them power, then shut up and go away.

This is not merely a California problem. I wrote a few days ago about the scumbag Robert Kagan and his idiotic book warning that America is facing a rebellion. Here’s the back cover of the book, and I’ve used sophisticated media software to circle the important part:

“The problem is and has always been the people and their beliefs.” This is what the American governing class believes, now. See also the pro-democracy warrior Tom Nichols and his recurring theme about the repulsive people of an ignorant country. We need to protect democracy by getting all the trash that makes up the population to somehow go away and stop bothering their wise and benevolent betters.

The great point of cognitive slippage in American governance has been the degree to which Americans have been willing to vote for officeholders whose agendas they then try to block through lawsuits, referendums, and popular resistance. We’ve voted for shit sandwich over and over again, then declined to eat the whole sandwich. The governing class is now announcing that we’re no longer allowed to refuse the complete meal. You may not have a ballot measure on that.

In the near term, and in the medium term, that pivot leads to greater friction and accelerated decline. In the longer term, preventing people from limiting the aggressive failure of the governing class can only make that failure more apparent. Geological faults that have a lot of small movements release tension in a series of minor earthquakes; faults that can’t release tension through small movements eventually have one big one. We’ll eventually recognize the California Supreme Court’s decision this week as a Pyrrhic victory. There will be more of these, in a political system of increasing brittleness.

June 21, 2024

“Neoliberal ideology is antidemocratic at its very core. Its aim is to give free-reign over our societies to corporations, not citizens”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall responds to a recent Medium essay by Julia Steinberger which illustrates that “neoliberal” has joined “fascist” as a generic term to indicate strong disapproval of a person, organization, or idea:

The idea that an adult woman can believe these things is just amazeballs. But here we are. A tweet from Julia Steinberger leads to her Medium essay about what’s wrong with the world.

An upheaval in 10 chapters:

    1. The cause. We know the climate crisis is brought to us by highly unequal and undemocratic economic systems.

Err, no? Emissions are emissions. 100 people emitting one tonne each is exactly the same as 1 person emitting 100 tonnes. Sure, it’s true that a more unequal society will have more people emitting those 100 tonne personal amounts. But a more equal society will have more people able to emit another 1 tonne each. For, more equality is by definition the movement of some of those assets of the richer to those poorer — the economic assets which either allow or do the emitting. Sure, Jim Ratcliffe’s £50,000 private jet flight emits more than my £100 Easyjet one. But if we take the £50k off Jim and give it to 500 folk like me then all 500 of us might spend the marginal income on an Easyjet flight each — which would be more emissions than Jim’s spending of the money.

It simply is not true that economic inequality is the heart, the core or the cause of climate change. It’s idiocy to think it is too.

Of course, we know what’s happening here. Climate Change is Bad, M’Kay? Which it is, obviously. Economic inequality is Bad, M’Kay? Well, there the evidence is a great deal more mixed but whatever. But in the minds of the stupid all bad things have the same cause. So, if inequality is bad, climate change is bad, then they must be the same thing because they’re Bad, M’Kay?

    2. The rise. The recent history of these economic systems, in the Americas and Eurasia, is dominated by the ascendance of neoliberal ideology.

Oh, that is good. Given that I am a neoliberal — a fully paid up one, Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute and all — that’s very good. Given HS2, looming wealth taxation, the increased bite of idiot regulation and all that I can’t say that I see neoliberalism as winning right now but that might depend upon your starting point. If you’re a socialist — or an idiot but I repeat myself — you might well regard the plenitude of bananas in the supermarket as neoliberal. After all, that is something that socialism never did achieve.

    3. The threat. Neoliberal ideology is antidemocratic at its very core. Its aim is to give free-reign over our societies to corporations, not citizens.

And, well, you know, bollocks. The very beating heart of neoliberalism is that corporations need to be controlled and they’re best controlled by the citizens. In the form of free markets rather than voting on which bureaucrats get the gold plated pension, true. But neoliberals are between indifferent and actually against capitalist power. The whole nub of the idea is that markets do the job of controlling capitalists better than bureaucrats, politicians or, obviously, capitalists.

There’s not really any way for her thesis to survive after getting so much of the basics wrong, is there?

But just one more tidbit:

    Hayek and his neoliberal colleagues now needed another, antidemocratic way, to organise society. They didn’t want democracy, but they wanted some kind of self-maintaining organisation — by which they meant hierarchy. Organisation was supposed to be supplied by the market, and hierarchy by competition within markets. (It’s worth noting that neoliberals in the 1950s did not, although they should have, predict that unfettered markets lead to concentrations in monopolies or cartels. They would arguably disapprove of the vast corporations running our current economies, even though their market-above-democracy policies predictably brought them into being.)

Well, that wasn’t actually the last tidbit. But the idea that Friedman, Mises, Menger, Hayek and the rest didn’t worry about monopolies? Jesu C is really bouncin’ on that pogo stick right now. And then the idea that democracy will be better bulwark against monopolies than markets? Can you actually do backflips on a pogo stick?

June 8, 2024

El Loco, Argentina’s “skunk at the garden party”

Filed under: Americas, Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Free Press, Bari Weiss talks to Argentinian President Javier Milei (through a translator) about his first six months in office:

At the start of the twentieth century, Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in the world. The capital, Buenos Aires, was known as “the Paris of South America”.

A lot can happen in a hundred years.

Argentina today is in grave crisis. It has defaulted on its sovereign debt three times since 2001, and a few months ago, it faced an annualized inflation rate of over 200 percent — one of the highest in the world.

Why? What happened?

Argentina’s new president says it’s simple: socialism.

When Javier Milei took office in December 2023, he became the world’s first libertarian head of state. During his campaign, he made his views clear: “Let it all blow up, let the economy blow up, and take this entire garbage political caste down with it”. In case the chainsaw he wielded on the campaign trail left any question about his intentions, during his victory speech last year, he reiterated his vision: “Argentina’s situation is critical. The changes our country needs are drastic. There is no room for gradualism, no room for lukewarm measures.”

There is nothing gradual about what Milei is now doing.

He’s eliminating government ministries and services, cutting regulations, privatizing state-run companies, and purposely creating a recession to curb the out-of-control inflation.

This is why people voted for him: change. They saw someone who could shake things up in a way that could turn out to be lifesaving for the country — even if it meant short-term economic pain.

But will it work? Not all Argentines think so. And not everyone is willing or able to wait for things to improve. In April, with food prices rising and poverty up 10 percent, tens of thousands of Argentines took to the streets to protest Milei’s aggressive austerity measures.

Milei is a strange and idiosyncratic creature. There are the obvious things: He says he doesn’t comb his hair (and he doesn’t appear to). He has four cloned mastiffs that he refers to as his “four-legged children“, and which he’s named for his favorite free-market economists. He was raised Catholic, but studies the Torah. (He even quoted a Midrash during our conversation.) He used to play in a Rolling Stones cover band. And he has been known since grade school in the ’80s as El Loco, on account of his animated outbursts, which would later bring him stardom as a TV, radio, and social media celebrity.

But that’s all the superficial stuff. What really makes Milei unusual is that he is the ultimate skunk at the garden party. In a world of liberals and conservatives, he doesn’t represent either side. He is ultra-liberal on economics, but right-wing and populist on rhetoric. He is anti-abortion, but favors the legalization of prostitution. He wants to deregulate the gun market and legalize the organ trade.

He calls himself an anarcho-capitalist, which basically means he believes the state, as he told me, is “a violent organization that lives from a coercive source which is taxes”. Essentially, he’s a head of state who really doesn’t believe in states. Or at least, not theoretically.

In January, Milei showed up at Davos, the Alpine mountain resort that hosts the annual World Economic Forum. This is traditionally a place where people who all think the same way go to drink champagne and tell each other how smart they are. Milei arrived, flying commercial, and blew up that comfortable consensus: “Today, I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have defended the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.”

All of this is why I was eager to talk to Milei and put some of these questions to him: How long will it take for things to improve in Argentina? Why does he believe the Western world is in danger? What’s the difference between social justice and socialism? Can the free market really solve all of our civic problems? And how does he feel about being the skunk at the garden party? (Spoiler: He loves it.)

And despite having called journalists “extortionists”, “liars”, “imbeciles”, “freeloaders”, and “donkeys”, for some reason, he agreed to sit down with me.

June 1, 2024

From Sic semper tyrannis to the “Non-Aggression Principle”

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Government, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On Substack Notes, kulak points out that the beliefs that led to the American colonists taking up arms against King George’s government don’t expire:

A statue idealizing the individual minutemen who would compose the militia of the United States.
Postcard image of French’s Concord Minuteman statue via Wikimedia Commons.

One of the things that drives me nuts about people who claim to subscribe to modern libertarianism (as opposed to the American Revolutionary ideology) is the claim to be “peaceful” and “antiwar”

Libertarianism isn’t antiwar. The American founding values aren’t antiwar. They never have been. It is a permanent declaration of war.

Live Free or Die

Sic Semper Tyrannis.

“Thus always to tyrants”

When does “always” end? NEVER

If those values succeed then 10,000 years from after your descendants have forgotten the name of America itself, they will be killing tyrants and carving their hearts from their chest.

Libertarianism is not “peaceful” it is a declaration that no peace shall ever exist again. That a free people will never have peace with any who’d seek to rule them. Eternal civil war against all would-be tyrants from the pettiest to the most grandiose.

The “non-aggression principle” does not state that the libertarian my never aggress against another … It states only that he may not aggress FIRST, afterwards any and all aggression, even the most disproportionate, is permitted.

“Taxation is Theft” is the claim that a tax collector or government agent paid out of taxes has the same moral status as burglar/home invader caught in your child’s bedroom. It is the claim that that those who benefit and enable the welfare programs paid out of your taxes have the same moral protection from your wrath should you gain the upper hand as a mugger actively threatening you with a gun lest you hand over your wallet.

“Taxation is Theft” necessarily justifies just as revolutionary and total a upset in the political order as “Property is Theft” did … because theft inherently is a violation of your extended person to be resisted without restriction. And just as the Communist claim of “property is theft” justified the most total and brutal wars in human history to destroy the social order (and social classes) who made “property” possible. Libertarianism and “Taxation is Theft” must necessarily justify just as extreme a charnel house to render “Taxation” impossible.

“Live Free or Die” is necessarily, and has always been a declaration of war upon those who would choose not to “live free”, or remain loyal to a tyrant or master.

The founding fathers didn’t make nice with the Loyalists who remained faithful the crown: They ethnically cleansed large portions of them equal to 4% the US population (notably the Loyalist Dutch of New York), confiscated their lands, and drove them into Canada, several mothers with babes nearly starving. Then they invaded them again in 1812. (Read Tigre Dunlop’s interviews with the survivors in Canada in “Recollections on the War of 1812”).

What Loyalists who managed to remain in the US did not regain full rights as citizens until after the war of 1812, almost 40 years after the revolution.

So if you claimed to believe in “Libertarianism” or the American Revolution, ask yourself: “Do I really believe in Liberty and the American Revolution? Or am I a just a flavor of Progressive Democrat who thinks the income tax should be slightly lower?”

Signed,
A Canadian Descended from Loyalists

May 31, 2024

“You only support that because it’s in your self-interest to do so”

Filed under: Economics, Education, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Helen Dale considers the painful notion that political ideas that work for the “elite” (defined in various ways) may not work at all for people unlike members of any given “elite”:

When I reviewed Rob Henderson’s Troubled for Law & Liberty at Liberty Fund, I made this observation:

    The reality that classical liberalism — the closest to my own political views, I admit — has at least a whiff of the luxury belief around it stings. It’s discomforting to acknowledge that what goes by the name of paternalism has its own intellectual pedigree, while liberalism can be a system developed by the clever, for the clever. “Highly educated and affluent people are more economically conservative and socially liberal,” Henderson says. “This doesn’t make sense. The position is roughly that people shouldn’t have to adhere to norms and if/when they inevitably hurt themselves or others, then there should be no safety net available. It’s a luxury belief.”

[…]

Joseph Heath […] uses the phrase “self-control aristocracy” to describe those who really do benefit from maximal freedom. These are people who can make better choices for themselves than any authority could make on their behalf. When the state or large corporates boss them (us) around, they (we) get really bloody annoyed. They (we) know better!

Heath’s phrase is simply a layman’s term for the personality trait various formal tests measure, and which overlaps with executive function to a considerable but as yet unknown degree.

    Because I am self-conscious about my membership in the self-control aristocracy, I am acutely aware of the fact that, when I think about questions of “individual liberty” in society, I come to it with a particular set of class interests. That is because I stand to benefit much more from an expansion of the space of individual liberty than the average person does – because I have greater self-control. So I recognize that, while a 24-hour beer store would be great for me, it would be a mixed blessing for others […]

    What does this have to do with libertarianism? It is important because every academic proponent of libertarianism – understood loosely, as any doctrine that assigns individual liberty priority over other political values – is a member of the self-control aristocracy. As a result, they are advancing a political ideal that benefits themselves to a much greater extent than it benefits other people. In most cases, however, they do so naively, because they do not recognize themselves as members of an elite, socially-dominant group, that stands to benefit disproportionately. They think of liberty as something that creates an equal benefit for all.

My response to reading Professor Heath’s piece was simplicity itself: I feel seen. I’ve even done the night school thing while working full-time. I’ve written books and chosen to play sports that require a long time and lots of skill to master. I retired at 45.

Politically, I’m not a libertarian. Libertarianism is a distinctive and largely American ideology (as the recent and bonkers fracas at its US Convention indicates) with philosophically unusual deontological roots. I am, however, within the British and French tradition of classical liberalism (which does assign individual liberty priority over other political values). And like many classical liberals I’ve been blind to problems of laws and governance for people unlike me.

I disclose this because I’ve worked in policy development in both devolved and national parliaments. I’ve probably given politicians and civil servants alike dud advice. There is almost certainly a shit policy out there (in either Scotland or Australia) with my name on it. However, this mind-blindness doesn’t only apply to people who advocate libertarian politics. I think it applies to a significant number of political ideologies just as strongly as it does to libertarianism.

That is, the ideology serves the inherited personality traits of those who promote it. “You only support that because it’s in your self-interest to do so” always struck me as a genuinely mean criticism of people who were involved in politics and policy (I may have been one of those people, natch). The problem — as I’ve been forced to accept — is that it’s true.

May 26, 2024

QotD: Ever-expanding government

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

Where government advances — and it advances relentlessly — freedom is imperiled; community impoverished; religion marginalized and civilization itself jeopardized … When did government cease to be a necessary evil and become a goody bag to solve our private problems?

Janice Rogers Brown, “Hyphenasia: the Mercy Killing of the American Dream,” Speech at Claremont-McKenna College (Sept. 16, 1999).

May 20, 2024

The first post-privacy generation in human history

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

You may have mixed feelings about the Zoomers — even if you happen to be a Zoomer — but it’s beyond argument that they are the first generation who have grown up in a zero-privacy world:

“Privacy” by g4ll4is is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Zoomers are the first post-privacy generation in human existence. They will never know a world in which they can try to lose themselves without somehow being tracked. Roughly three years ago, I was speaking with the CEO and founder of a commercial digital advertising company from NYC. He told me that their technology was so powerful that they were able to figure out when people were getting up from their couches to go into another room simply via their own digital advertising software.

It’s very tough to wrap our heads around the complete loss of privacy. For me, I have trouble remembering how it was to be out of instantaneous reach via mobile phone. Pre-mass adoption of cell phones, people would effectively be out of reach i.e. disappear for hours at a time, as the only way to contact them was to call them at home (inb4 beepers, as I never had one). We are constantly tracked and monitored, and our personal data is sold by data brokers all over the globe. One customer of personal ad tracking data is the CIA, as Matthew Petti explains:

    For years, the U.S. government has bought information on private citizens from commercial data brokers. Now, for the first time ever, American spymasters are admitting that this data is sensitive—but they’re leaving it up to the spy agencies on how to use it.

    Last week, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines released a “Policy Framework for Commercially Available Information.” Her office oversees 18 agencies in the “intelligence community“, including the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA), and all military intelligence branches.

    In the 2018 case Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that police need a warrant to obtain mobile phone location data from phone companies. (During the case, the Reason Foundation filed an amicus brief against warrantless snooping.) As a workaround, the feds instead started buying data from third-party brokers.

    Haines’ new framework claims that “additional clarity” on the government’s policies will help protect Americans’ privacy. Yet the document is vague about the specific limits. It orders the agencies themselves to come up with “safeguards that are tailored to the sensitivity of the information” and write an annual report on how they use this data.

more:

    As national security journalist Spencer Ackerman points out in his Forever Wars newsletter, the framework doesn’t require the feds to delete old purchased data. Earlier this year, Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) called on the NSA to purge all data that it bought without a warrant and without following the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy policies.

    “The framework’s absence of clear rules about what commercially available information can and cannot be purchased by the intelligence community reinforces the need for Congress to pass legislation protecting the rights of Americans,” Wyden tells Reason. “The DNI’s framework is nonetheless an important step forward in starting to bring the intelligence community under a set of principles and policies, and in documenting all the various programs so that they can be overseen.”

Case in point:

    Wyden has been aggressively pushing for transparency on data purchases over the past few years. In 2021, he uncovered that the Defense Intelligence Agency was buying Americans’ smartphone location data. That same year, he sent a letter to Haines and CIA Director Bill Burns complaining about a secretive CIA data collection program. (In an Orwellian turn, the letter itself was classified until 2022.) This year, Wyden revealed more details on NSA data purchases.

    Some of this data is collected and sold directly by the apps. For example, an intelligence company called X-Mode once paid MuslimPro, an app that offers a daily prayer calendar and a compass pointing towards Mecca, to include a few lines of location tracking code. X-Mode then sold the data to U.S. government agencies. MuslimPro claims that it did not intend to sell the data to the government and ended the arrangement after the story broke.

So, yeah … app maker will sell your personal data to a buyer like the CIA.

    In other cases, the data is siphoned from advertising markets. Every time a user opens a website with paid advertisements, their location and attributes appear on a real-time bidding (RTB) exchange, a virtual auction where companies buy ad space. Data brokers posing as advertisers scrape the listings for information on users.

    “Any government with a halfway decent cyber intelligence program is participating in these RTB exchanges, because it’s such an immensely valuable source of data,” says Byron Tau, author of Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State.

    As a demonstration of how powerful RTB data is, an intelligence contractor used data from the dating app Grindr to track gay government employees from their offices to their homes, Tau reported in his book.

The IRS is in on it too:

    Lawyers for the Internal Revenue Service, on the other hand, have argued that users voluntarily handed over the information, so the government is free to use it. Tau points out that users don’t really know how their data is being resold, and even the RTB exchanges themselves aren’t supposed to be used for data scraping.

    “A lot of these companies that are collecting data from the global population don’t have a real consumer relationship” with the people they’re spying on, Tau says. “Unless you know how to decompile software and you’re technically savvy, you can’t even make informed choices.”

In an increasingly digitized world, the right to privacy becomes wholly unworkable. Think digital payments by way of credit and debit cards vs. cash.

May 1, 2024

The Supreme Court of Canada has created “Charter-free zones” in Canada

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

A recent Supreme Court of Canada decision to allow the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to be overridden in cases where First Nations’ laws conflict with the rights guaranteed to all Canadians by the Charter:

Governments of the over 600 First Nations bands and self-governing Indigenous communities across Canada have been given the green light by the Supreme Court to, in their laws, legally abrogate and override the civil liberties of their band members and citizens.

In its Dickson v. Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation decision the Court ruled that so long as an Indigenous government law “protects Indigenous difference — understood by the collective as interests connected to Aboriginal cultural difference, Aboriginal prior occupancy, Aboriginal prior sovereignty or Aboriginal participation in the treaty process” — then, despite the fact that the law infringes the Charter rights of its citizens, those Charter rights cannot have any application or be given any effect to.

Four of the seven Judges who ruled on the case ruled that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms prima facie applies to Indigenous government laws, but notwithstanding that, if the law is to “protect Indigenous difference”, and the exercise of a Charter right would have the effect of diminishing that “Indigenous difference”, then section 25 of the Constitution Act “shields” the law from Charter application.

A fifth Judge ruled that section 25 meant that the Charter didn’t apply at all to Indigenous government laws, not even prima facie.

Two of the seven judges dissented, one of whom very significantly was Madame Justice O’Bonsawin, the Indigenous person appointed to the Supreme Court supposedly to import an “Indigenous perspective” into its judgments. These two dissenting Justices wrote correctly that the majority opinion creates “Charter-free zones” in Canada. They further wrote:

    Minorities with Indigenous communities (will) not be protected from the actions of their own governments. All Canadians, including Indigenous people, need constitutional tools to hold their governments accountable for breaches of their entrenched rights and freedoms. It is against the purposes of the Charter and s. 25, as well as being profoundly inequitable, to deny members of self-governing Indigenous nations similar, rights, remedies and recourse.

There are more than 1.8 million Indigenous Canadians, two-thirds of whom live “off-reserve” in Canada’s towns and cities. The Supreme Court of Canada has deprived all these Canadians of the protections afforded by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms on their home reserves and territories.

The Court employed cloud castle reasoning to bring about this illiberal and un-Canadian result, heavy on empty verbal assertions and abstractions with little relation to practical life.

Cloud castles are pleasant and charming to conjure up, even more so because they have no foundations.

The factual foundations of the Court’s decision, such as they, like those of cloud castles, are mainly imaginary. To the extent that may exist in reality, they are wrong.

In an earlier article the writer wrote on this case Cindy Dickson discussed the discriminatory, black sheep treatment she faced when trying to run for office in Vuntut Gwitchin.

The article pointed out other negative, First Nations realities ignored by the majority of the Supreme Court of Canada in its judgement: the “banana republic” nature of small Indigenous governments, and alpha-type band chiefs and councils — “colonizers of their own people” — overseeing a conflicted, family-based system of self-dealing and crony capitalism.

Indigenous Justice O’Bonsawin, as part of her “Indigenous perspective”, expressly acknowledged these entrenched negatives and listed other illiberal aspects of the “Indigenous difference” that the Charter exists to prevent or remedy: the unequal role given men in debating constitutional reforms, band membership rules that excluded some women and their children, election codes that prevent individuals from running for office on the basis of their gender, marital status or sexual orientation, and warrantless searches of homes.

April 30, 2024

The CDU’s “five-point plan to protect German democracy from … the free and open internet”

Filed under: Germany, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

German mainstream politicians are struggling to keep extreme right populist anti-democratic voices from being heard by innocent and trusting German voters, so the leader of the CDU in Thuringia has a master plan:

The duel between our leading Thuringian politicians was all but unwatchable, as indeed almost all political debates turn out to be. While [AfD leader Björn] Höcke could’ve acquitted himself better, [CDU leader Mario] Voigt’s performance was flat, uninspired and profoundly banal. Among other things, the man suffers from a peculiar rodentine aspect; he bites his way stiffly through bland preformulated arguments like a squirrel chewing a stale nut or a beaver gnawing through saplings. After the event, the CDU took to the press to declare victory, but polls showed that viewers found Höcke on balance more persuasive, which is of course the real reason that everybody told Voigt to avoid the confrontation. Voigt is intensely democratic and therefore extremely right about everything, but somehow – and this is very awkward to discuss – his being eminently righteous and correct in all things does not manifest in an ability to defeat the very wrong and evil arguments of his opponents. It’s very weird how that works, perhaps somebody should look into it.

Stung by this failure, Voigt has set off to find other means of defending democracy. This week, in the Thüringen state parliament, he gave an amazing speech outlining a five-point plan to protect German democracy from that other great menace, the free and open internet:

    So how do we protect democracy in the area of social media? There are five approaches:

    Ideally, we should agree to ban bots and to make the use of fake profiles a criminal offence.

    There is also the matter of requiring people to use their real names, because freedom of expression should not be hidden behind pseudonyms.

    Then there’s the question of whether we should create revocable social media licences for every user, so that dangerous people have no place online.

    We need to consider how we can regulate algorithms so that we can revitalise the diversity of opinions in social networks.

    And we also have to improve media skills.

For all that Björn Höcke is supposed to be a “populist authoritarian” opposed to representative government, I’ve never heard him say anything this crazy. Voigt, meanwhile, is a leading politician for the officially “democratic” Christian Democratic Union (you know they are democratic because the word is in their name), and he’s actually dreaming of requiring Germans to obtain state-issued licenses for permission to post their thoughts to the internet.

Because Voigt’s regulatory regime would entirely abolish online “freedom of expression”, it is unclear how banning bots and pseudonymity could ever defend it. Generally speaking, for a thing to be defended, it must first exist. Equally curious is Voigt’s belief that any “diversity of opinion” will survive his social media license scheme to benefit from the regulation of social media algorithms.

April 24, 2024

Australia cribs from Trudeau’s notes and tries to censor the internet outside their borders

Filed under: Australia, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall explains to the Australian federal government why their attempt to force Elon Musk to obey Australian diktats on Twit-, er, I mean “X” outside Australia is extreme over-reach and should be firmly rejected:

It’s entirely true that Elon Musk is a centibillionaire currently telling the Australian Government that they can fuck off. It’s also true that if Elon Musk were of my level of wealth — or perhaps above it and into positive territory — he should be telling the Australian Government to fuck off.

This also applies to the European Union and that idiocy called the right to be forgotten which they’ve been plaguing Google with. Also to any other such attempts at extraterritoriality. Governments do indeed get to govern the places they’re governments of. They do not get to rule everyone else — the correct response to attempts to do so is fuck off.

So, Musk is right here:

What this is about doesn’t really matter. But, v quickly, that attack on the Armenian Church bishop is online. It’s also, obviously, highly violent stuff. You’re not allowed to show highly violent stuff in Oz, so the Oz government insist it be taken down. Fair enough – they’re the government of that place. But they are then demanding further:

    On Monday evening in an urgent last-minute federal court hearing, the court ordered a two-day injunction against X to hide posts globally….

Oz is demanding that the imagery be scrubbed from the world, not just that part of it subject to the government of Oz. Leading to:

    Australia’s prime minister has labelled X’s owner, Elon Musk, an “arrogant billionaire who thinks he is above the law”

And

    Anthony Albanese on Tuesday said Musk was “a bloke who’s chosen ego and showing violence over common sense”.

    “Australians will shake their head when they think that this billionaire is prepared to go to court fighting for the right to sow division and to show violent videos,” he told Sky News. “He is in social media, but he has a social responsibility in order to have that social licence.”

To which the correct response is that “Fuck off”.

For example, I am a British citizen (and would also be an Irish one if that country ever managed to get up to speed on processing foreign birth certificates) and live within the EU. Australian law has no power over me — great great granny emigrated from Oz having experienced the place after all. It’s entirely sensible that I be governed by whatever fraction of EU law I submit to, there are aspects of British law I am subject to as well (not that I have any intention of shagging young birds — or likelihood — these days but how young they can be is determined not just by the local age of consent but also by British law, even obeying the local age where I am could still be an offence in British law). But Australian law? Well, you know, fu.. … .

April 20, 2024

How much of your language do you have to destroy to avoid the taint of historical fascist usage?

Filed under: Germany, History, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

For understandable reasons, German governments since the end of World War 2 have been twitchy about any symbols, songs, words and phrases that were used by Hitler’s various fascist organizations … to the point of making many things illegal. eugyppius outlines one particular case where the use of a simple German phrase by an AfD politician has landed him in court, facing a possible three-year prison sentence even though he denies that he knew the phrase had such connotations:

Today, the leader of the Alternative für Deutschland faction in the Thuringian state parliament, Björn Höcke, appeared before the district court in Halle for the first day of his long-awaited speech trial. He stands accused of having used a forbidden Nazi slogan favoured by the Sturmabteilung at a political rally in Merseburg on 29 May 2021. Höcke pleads that he used the three-word phrase in a moment of spontaneous elaboration at the end of his speech, without knowing its National Socialist associations. Out of an abundance of caution, I won’t quote the phrase here, even in translation, but I’ll provide it in context below; it begins with the words “Everything for” (“Alles für“) and concludes with the name of the Federal Republic. As slogans go, it is so seemingly banal that before the trial many Germans would have been surprised to know it had any Nazi associations at all.

For the moment, not much has happened. Höcke’s lawyers filed a variety of requests, among them that the Federal Constitutional Court answer a question surrounding the court’s jurisdiction. In consequence, it’s unclear whether the trial will continue as scheduled next week or whether it will have to be substantially delayed. The state prosecutor’s position is that Höcke’s background as a history teacher makes his claims of ignorance implausible. The prosecutors’ office have also added an additional charge for Höcke’s defiance at a rally in Gera last December, where he shouted the first two words of the slogan at the crowd, and invited them to supply the last one. I fear that this was a grave mistake, because as we will see, the original case against Höcke is laughably weak.

If found guilty, Höcke could be fined or sentenced to prison for up to three years. It is also conceivable that his right to vote and run for office could be suspended. Whatever you think of Höcke or his politics, the political dimensions of this trial are undeniable, as it is occurring mere months ahead of the Thuringian state elections, and as Alternative für Deutschland commands a solid plurality of polling numbers in that state.

[…]

That Höcke deliberately used the SA slogan as a subtle enticement to the extreme right is more than doubtful; that he also did so in hopes that he would be prosecuted and profit politically from his victimisation is so ridiculous, I can’t imagine that even Hillje really believes this. This obnoxious thesis nevertheless recurs whenever the German press report on the harassment of AfD politicians; it is somehow their fault, because they are held to benefit from it.

Der Spiegel, always a source of unintentional amusement, ran a headline today mocking Höcke as a “history teacher with no knowledge of history“. “He claims not to know it was an SA slogan”, they report, “but there are doubts about this”. Alas, the very same news magazine last September accidentally used the forbidden phrase to headline an approving article on Olaf Scholz’s proposed “Germany Pact”. They rapidly changed the headline, appending this brief and embarrassing correction to the bottom:

    An earlier version of the article was headed with a line that was used by the SA as a slogan. This was not intended by the author and editors and has now been changed.

April 19, 2024

Yet another unintended consequence of the Online Harms Act – easier deportation of non-citizens

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

In The Line, Kevin Wiener explains another of the hidden “gems” of the Trudeau government’s ill-considered and repressive Online Harms Act that at least will please a few anti-immigration activists:

According to the Trudeau government and its defenders, the Online Harms Act is nothing to worry about. This is supposed to be a bill that will protect equity-seeking groups like racial minorities — yet one little-discussed provision will make millions of permanent residents open to deportation for even the most minor criminal offences, as long as a prosecutor can show that the crime was hate-motivated.

The resulting power to turn any crime into a deportable offence will make non-citizens — many of whom are racial and religious minorities — even more vulnerable in the criminal justice system compared to citizens.

The main focus of the Online Harms Act is regulating online platforms, but it also makes major changes to the way the criminal justice system deals with hate-motivated crimes. Under current law, if a crime is motivated by hate based on a protected characteristic, that’s considered an aggravating factor at sentencing. That means the judge can impose a higher sentence than they normally would, although they can never exceed the maximum sentence for the underlying crime. For many minor crimes, that maximum sentence is two years less a day.

The Online Harms Act uses a totally different approach to hate crimes. Rather than just being a sentencing factor, the Act would create a brand-new hate crime offence. Committing any crime, if motivated by hatred, would make someone guilty of a second crime, with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. To counter public concern, the Trudeau government has recently sent one of its senior advisors, Supriya Dwivedi, to argue that critics of this provision are “engaging in bad faith tactics”, going so far as to make the absolutely false statement that the bill won’t allow an increased sentence unless the underlying crime already had that sentence.

That is an accurate description of the current sentencing regime, but the text and clear purpose of the new bill is to let judges go further: a serious aggravated assault that might normally attract the maximum 14-year sentence can lead to life imprisonment if the attack was hate-motivated.

Further, Dwivedi’s defence of the bill ignores that maximum sentences play an important role in Canada’s immigration policy. If someone is neither a citizen nor a permanent resident, they can only be deported if they commit a more serious (called an “indictable”) offence, or two separate less serious (or “summary”) offences.

The new hate crime provision would be an indictable offence.

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