Quotulatiousness

August 17, 2012

Even Guardianistas are puzzled by Assange’s Ecuador gambit

Filed under: Europe, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

There are few newspapers who have been as supportive of Julian Assange in his legal plight than the Guardian. When even Guardian columns find it difficult to figure out why he turned to Ecuador, we’ve moved into a different universe:

Julian Assange’s circus has pulled off another breathtaking stunt: he has won political asylum in Ecuador. Assange’s flight from Sweden, a decent democracy with a largely excellent justice system, takes ever more absurd forms. After the decision of Ecuador’s foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, the Swedish Twitterverse filled with mocking jokes.

Assange has few fans left here. On the contrary, his unholy alliance with Ecuador’s political leadership casts a shadow over what was, despite everything, his real achievement: to reveal shattering news through the revolutionary medium of WikiLeaks.

Patiño praised Assange as a fighter for free expression, and explained that they had to protect his human rights. But Ecuador is a country with a dreadful record when it comes to freedom of expression and of the press. Inconvenient journalists are put on trial. Private media companies may not operate freely.

President Rafael Correa is patently unable to tolerate any truths that he does not own. Reporters Without Borders has strongly and often criticised the way that media freedoms are limited in Ecuador. Assange is a plaything for the president’s megalomania.

The police war on photographers and videographers: the Canadian front

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:44

Karen Selick in the National Post confirming that Canadian police are also under the impression that their work cannot legally be photographed:

What have cops got against cameras these days? Increasingly, people are getting arrested, charged or even assaulted by police officers, merely for attempting to take photos or videos of officers at work. Often, police simply command people to stop photographing. Scared into thinking they must be breaking some law, citizens comply.

When Polish visitor Robert Dziekanski died after being tasered at the Vancouver airport in 2007, police seized the now famous video made by witness Paul Pritchard, who had to hire a lawyer and threaten court proceedings to get it back.

[. . .]

There is no law in Canada that prohibits people from openly photographing police. Section 129 of the Criminal Code prohibits “wilfully obstructing” police in the execution of their duty, but it is hard to imagine how standing by peacefully and videotaping as police searched the premises and piled up items for seizure could be considered obstructing. After all, the police themselves were videotaping on Ms. Jones’ premises — but selectively. They probably didn’t capture themselves ordering her friend to refrain from taking the pictures she was legally entitled to take.

That same day, three other search warrants were executed at the homes of other individuals the CFIA suspects of conspiring with Ms. Jones to save her healthy sheep. At Michael Schmidt’s residence, all cell phones were immediately confiscated. When a visitor from outside arrived with his cell phone, Schmidt’s wife borrowed it and took photos of police inside her home. Officers seized the phone even though it was clearly outside the scope of the warrant. They returned it three hours later, with the photos erased. When the victim of this apparently illegal seizure objected, police responded, “We can do whatever we want.” But of course, that arrogant response was not permitted to be recorded.

[. . .]

Police must be made to understand that being on duty or executing a search warrant does not transform an officer into a petty dictator with carte blanche to issue arbitrary orders to everyone in sight. Police cannot do “whatever they want.” Citizens have the right to hold them accountable for their actions. Personal cameras are important tools in implementing that right. Bullying people out of using them must cease.

August 16, 2012

Kheiriddin: Quebec xenophobia on display in election campaign

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:56

In her National Post column, Tasha Kheiriddin discusses the topic that most of the Canadian media is being ultra-careful about:

Racist or not? When it comes to the Quebec election campaign, remarks made this week by a variety of politicians provided considerable fodder for debate, and considerable distraction from the real issues — health, taxes and corruption — that voters actually want their elected officials to talk about.

First, Coalition Avenir Québec leader François Legault lambasted young Quebecers for being interested in living “the good life,” unlike children in Asia whose parents all want them to become engineers, and have to stop them from studying lest they make themselves sick. When he was attacked for this remarks, he retorted that the fault lies with Quebec parents, and that they should review the values they are transmitting to their children.

[. . .]

His remarks pale in comparison, however, to the xenophobic tone of those made by Parti Québécois ledaer Pauline Marois, and worse yet, the mayor of Saguenay, Jean Tremblay.

On Tuesday, Ms. Marois unveiled her party’s desire to implement a “Secular Charter” which would ban the wearing of any religious symbols by government employees. With, as my colleague Chris Selley tartly notes on these pages, one notable exception: Symbols of Christian faith, such as the cross which hangs over the Speakers’ Chair in the National Assembly. In other words, a crucifix necklace, good: hijabs and yarmulkes, bad.

[. . .]

Then on Wednesday, Mr. Tremblay took xenophobia one step further, when he launched a tirade against Djemila Benhabib, the Parti Québécois candidate in Trois Rivières. On a popular radio show, Mr. Tremblay let loose: “I am shocked that we, the softies, the French Canadians, will be told how to behave, how to respect our culture by a person who comes from Algeria, and we can’t even pronounce her name.”

Update: Convenient timing suspects Don Macpherson.

https://twitter.com/MacphersonGaz/statuses/236059349817122816

August 15, 2012

Canadian liberty, 1776-2012

Filed under: Cancon, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

F.H. Buckley has an interesting article in the National Post, comparing the American and Canadian “flavours” of liberty from the American Revolution down to today:

The Fathers of Confederation had seen the American constitution close up and didn’t want any part of it. They didn’t foresee just how we’d turn out. Overall, however, our good fortune would not have surprised them, for they knew that they were founding a free country.

On reading the Confederation debates, one is struck by how the Fathers insisted that we had real liberty in Canada, more so even than Americans. That comes as a bit of a shock, as we had thought that Americans had property rights in liberty. They owned it, and on occasion were kind enough to try to export it to lesser countries, as they did 200 years ago in the War of 1812 (where they came in a very strong second).

[. . .]

When McGee and the other Fathers looked south, they saw a country with more of Constant’s liberty of the ancients but less of the liberty of the moderns. Moreover, of the former, the right of self-government had been corrupted by political machines and trivialized by elections for dogcatchers. The high ideals of the American Founders had been forgotten, and their republican virtue was now, in the era of Boss Tweed and Jay Gould, little more than American braggadocio. As for the liberty of the moderns, there was that little matter of slavery and its aftermath. True, Americans could express themselves through lynch-parties, but that was the kind of liberty the Canadians did not want.

Many of the differences between the two countries remain, but Canadians no longer have more of the liberty of the moderns than Americans. In both countries, benign neglect has been replaced by the bureaucrat’s officious nudges, giving us ugly light bulbs, toilets that don’t flush and idiotic playground rules. Could one have predicted this 25 years ago? I think not. Back then I had legal scholar Cass Sunstein over for dinner. Until a few days ago he was Obama’s regulatory czar, and over dinner in 1987 he predicted how the regulatory state would expand, in the name of risk reduction. “Americans won’t stand for this,” my wife told him. They prize their freedom too much. “Ah, but we’ll change their preferences,” he replied. And he was right.

August 14, 2012

Brian Doherty on the Ron Paul Revolution

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:36

An excerpt from Brian Doherty’s new book Ron Paul’s Revolution in the National Post:

Paul is a remarkably successful politician made of contradictions. Though a longtime Republican congressman, he’s built his reputation on such wildly liberal stances as ending the drug war, halting wars in the Middle East and scuttling the Patriot Act. Despite this, in 2010 and 2011 he’s won the presidential straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the seedbed of young right-wing activists.

He’s got traditional conservative bona fides, too. He’s for ending the income tax and killing the Internal Revenue Service, and for stopping illegal immigration; he also thinks abortion should be illegal. Despite this, right-wing politicians and thought leaders from Giuliani to Bill O’Reilly to the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol deride and despise him.

Paul’s appeal is a curious mixture of populist and intellectual. He attacks the elite masters of money, banking and high finance at the Federal Reserve and Wall Street. But his philosophy on politics and economics was forged through decades of self-driven study of abstruse libertarian economists such as Ludwig von Mises and the Nobel Prize–winning F. A. Hayek.

He’s a staggeringly successful politician by some measures — the only congressman to win a seat as a nonincumbent three separate times. He continues to be re-elected to the House election after election, almost always by a higher margin than the time before. He does this while violating most traditional rules of politics. He doesn’t strive to bring home the bacon. His 14th District in Texas is highly agricultural, rife with rice and cattle farmers, but he always votes against federal agriculture subsidies. In a district with 675 miles of coastline, struck violently in 2008 by Hurricane Ike, he votes against flood aid and the Federal Emergency Management Agency — even calling for the latter’s abolition on national TV. He vows to never vote for any bill for which he doesn’t see clear constitutional justification. Yet by some people’s standards of a “successful legislator” he’s a bust — nearly every bill he introduces never even makes it out of committee.

August 13, 2012

PQ promises to “strengthen” language laws in Quebec

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 14:31

It’s mind-blowing that a minority in Canada are legally oppressed by their provincial government, but in Quebec, it’s just language business as usual. The opposition Parti Quebecois, who brought in the language law in question, are promising to make it even more oppressive to non-French-speaking Quebecers:

It’s an easy political move for Marois. It will appeal to her separatist base and thoroughly annoy the anglophones … which will also appeal to the base. And given that the stated intention of her party is to go pick fights with Ottawa and drive a wedge between Quebec and the Rest of Canada, it’s a good plan. Language politics are always hot-button issues in Quebec, and Marois is pushing those buttons gleefully.

But it is interesting to note her position on the issue. Marois holds that the Liberals, under Premier Jean Charest, have not done enough to promote the French language in Quebec. From the perspective of the PQ, that’s almost certainly true. But Bill 101 is a creation of the Parti Quebecois. The provincial Liberals have certainly left it intact and haven’t dared to try and strengthen it, but fundamentally, Bill 101 is a PQ law. If it isn’t working, that’s not Premier Charest’s fault.

The bigger issue, of course, is that such a law already exists. Uninformed citizens in the Rest of Canada would be rightly horrified to learn that such a bizarre, anti-democratic law exists in their country at all. Bill 101′s intrusions into the private interactions of businesses and the decisions of individual families are justified as being necessary by Quebec nationalists to preserve the primacy of French in Quebec, but to anyone who is not a language warrior, seem more like a cross between a French tutor and a Orwellian nightmare.

Of course, tougher laws will still not accomplish the intended task: forcing everyone in Quebec to speak French at all times.

August 12, 2012

Wendy McElroy on the Myth of the Greater Good

Filed under: Liberty, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:12

Have you been punked by your philosophy professor?

In entry-level philosophy class, a professor will often present a scenario that seems to challenge the students’ perspective on morality.

The argument runs something as follows: “The entire nation of France will drop dead tomorrow unless you kill your neighbor who has only one day to live. What do you do?”

Or “You could eliminate cancer by pressing a button that also kills one healthy person. Do you do so?”

The purpose is to create a moral dilemma. The questions pit your moral rejection of murder against your moral guilt for not acting to save millions of lives.

In reality, the questions are a sham that cannot be honestly answered. They postulate a parallel world in which the rules of reality, like cause and effect, have been dramatically changed so that pushing a button cures cancer. The postulated world seems to operate more on magic than reality.

Because my moral code is based on the reality of the existing world, I don’t know what I would do if those rules no longer operated. I presume my morality would be different, so my actions would be as well.

As absurd as they are, these are considered to be the “tough” moral questions. In grappling with them, some students come to believe that being true to morality requires the violation of morality in a profound manner; after all, there is no greater violation than the deliberate murder of another human being.

But how can the life of one outweigh those of millions in your hands? At this point, morality becomes a numbers game, a matter of cost-benefit analysis, rather than of principle. This is not an expansion of morality, as the professor claims, but the manufacture of a conflict that destroys morality. In its place is left a moral gray zone, a vacuum into which utilitarianism rushes.

August 10, 2012

Justification for Thomas Szasz?

Filed under: Health, Liberty, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:54

An interesting post at the Hit and Run blog by Jacob Sullum:

Last year, I was surprised to see Allen Frances, who headed the panel that produced the current edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, tell Gary Greenberg: “There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.” This week Frances surprised me again, declaring in his contribution to a Cato Unbound debate about psychiatric coercion that “mental disorders most certainly are not diseases.” Rather, he says, they are “constructs” that may justify treating people against their will as “a last resort.” Go here for my response. But start with Jeffrey Schaler’s opening essay, where he lays out the Szaszian position on mental illness, which Frances, the lead editor of psychiatry’s bible, says he basically agrees with, although “Schaler and Szasz go way too far in their total rejection of any need ever for involuntary treatment.”

Drink some rainwater, go to jail

Filed under: Environment, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

A 1925 law still applies in Oregon:

You just can’t make this stuff up. A man in Oregon is currently in jail serving a thirty day term – along with a $1500 fine – for collecting rainwater and snow melt on his own property for drinking and household use. You think I’m kidding? I’m not.

    Gary Harrington, the Oregon man convicted of collecting rainwater and snow runoff on his rural property surrendered Wednesday morning to begin serving his 30-day, jail sentence in Medford, Ore.

    “I’m sacrificing my liberty so we can stand up as a country and stand for our liberty,” Harrington told a small crowd of people gathered outside of the Jackson County (Ore.) Jail.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, who said “This is just a little weird […] But does the fact that I can see the point of the law — preventing people from messing with a watershed area, I guess — mean that I’ve consumed the nanny state kool-aid?”.

August 9, 2012

Reason.tv: The Quebec student protests

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

August 5, 2012

Tolerance Is Different From Approval

Filed under: Business, Food, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

In his Forbes column, Tim Worstall explains his puzzlement over the ongoing Chick-Fil-A uproar in the US and why tolerance is not the same as approval:

As to the basic point about gay marriage I can only offer my personal opinion: all for it. On the grounds that everyone’s going to understand the miserableness of us middle aged heteros a great deal better after 20 odd years of societally enforced monogamy. Slightly more seriously gay marriage or not gay marriage has little to do with a business column.

What does have to do with a business column is that this whole idea of a market means that we don’t have to care about the personal beliefs of either those who supply us or whom we supply. It’s the very impersonality of market exchange that means that it just doesn’t matter a darn what anyone’s sexual (or indeed any other) preference is. We get to care only about whether it’s a good chicken sandwich or whether the customer has enough money for one.

[. . .]

The other point that occurs to me is that we seem to be separating tolerance from approval in a way that some in the US are not.

Just as background, in the country I live in, Portugal, there is as far as a legal marriage ceremony goes, only civil marriage. Any two consenting adults, in whatever mixture of genders and sexes makes sense to those two individuals, can be married by the State. Religion doesn’t even get a look in.

If you do want a religious marriage, according to the rites of a church, then off you go after your civil marriage and have one. That marriage will be limited by whatever that church decides the limitations upon marriage are. It has no legal effect at all.

At which point everyone tolerates gay marriage but no one demands approval of it. For the two are different. Tolerance being the necessary requirement for a free and liberal society: that you get to do what you want to do as long as everyone else is also given the same freedom to follow their path from cradle to grave. Approval is something else again. I, to take a very trivial example, certainly tolerate the existence of Simon Cowell and his shows but that doesn’t mean that anyone can demand that I approve of them.

August 3, 2012

How “you didn’t build that” strikes at “Bourgeois Dignity”

Filed under: Books, Business, Economics, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:05

Virginia Postrel explains why President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” gaffe has lasted so long when usually politicians’ gaffes barely last a single news cycle, by outlining the arguments of a recent book by Dierdre N. McCloskey:

The president’s sermon struck a nerve in part because it marked a sharp departure from the traditional Democratic criticism of financiers and big corporations, instead hectoring the people who own dry cleaners and nail salons, car repair shops and restaurants — Main Street, not Wall Street. (Obama did work in a swipe at Internet businesses.) The president didn’t simply argue for higher taxes as a measure of fiscal responsibility or egalitarian fairness. He went after bourgeois dignity.

“Bourgeois Dignity” is both the title of a recent book by the economic historian Deirdre N. McCloskey and, she argues, the attitude that accounts for the biggest story in economic history: the explosion of growth that took northern Europeans and eventually the world from living on about $3 a day, give or take a dollar or two (in today’s buying power), to the current global average of $30 — and much higher in developed nations. (McCloskey’s touchstone is Norway’s $137 a day, second only to tiny Luxembourg’s.)

That change, she argues, is way too big to be explained by normal economic behavior, however rational, disciplined or efficient. Hence the book’s subtitle: “Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World.”

[. . .]

McCloskey’s explanation is that people changed the way they thought, wrote and spoke about economic activity. “In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” she writes, “a great shift occurred in what Alexis de Tocqueville called ‘habits of the mind’ — or more exactly, habits of the lip. People stopped sneering at market innovativeness and other bourgeois virtues.” As attitudes changed, so did behavior, leading to more than two centuries of constant innovation and rising living standards.

I’ve read McCloskey’s book and plan on reading the next one too. Earlier mentions of Bourgeois Dignity are here and here.

August 2, 2012

The real reason behind the war on the humble plastic bag

Filed under: Environment, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:54

Tom Bailey explains that the reasons we’ve been given for the renewed attacks on plastic bags are not the real reason for the ongoing struggle:

Individually, a plastic bag weighs about eight grams. In total, we use about 10 billion of them a year, adding up to around 80,000 tonnes of plastic bags. A large number, perhaps, but not when compared with total municipal waste. The total amount of household waste produced each year is 29.6million tonnes. This means that plastic bags make up a mere 0.27 per cent of what we all throw away every year. This percentage would become even smaller if we were to include commercial and industrial waste in our calculations.

The total amount of oil used to produce plastic bags is also exaggerated, considering that most plastic bags are made using naphtha, a part of crude oil that isn’t used for much else and would probably be burnt away otherwise.

So what’s going on here? Why the panic about a simple little bag? The assault on plastic bags is really an assault on consumerism. There is a prevailing view among the green and mighty that consumerism is bad. It is portrayed as being a modern-day vice, devoid of meaning, something which atomises society, corrupting us through crude materialism and distracting us from more important issues.

Plastic bags are an outward reflection of the ease with which people can buy goods and take them home. People now have the disposable income to enter a shop unexpectedly and buy a load of stuff, and plastic bags mean they can rest assured they they will have the means to carry their purchases. How often do people returning home from work decide, on a whim, to make a quick stop at Tesco Express to buy a few items of food? How frequently, perhaps on a journey past Oxford Street, are we drawn into a sale by a piece of attractive clobber? Such nonchalant consumption would be made more difficult, perhaps more expensive, without shops’ provision of handy, free plastic bags.

I guess I must be a puppet of “Big Plastic”, as I’ve posted about this issue a few times already.

July 31, 2012

New British tolerance: it’s still conform or be cast out

Filed under: Britain, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:01

Brendan O’Neill on the dangers of dissenting from the cult of tolerance:

Did you enjoy the Olympics opening ceremony? If you didn’t, it’s probably wise to keep it to yourself. After all, you don’t want to end up like Tory MP Aidan Burley, who has been denounced as “reprehensible”, “offensive” and even “incompatible with modern Britain” — wow — for having the temerity to tweet that he thought the ceremony was “leftie multicultural crap”. There is a profound irony at work here. The ceremony celebrated the openness and diversity of modern Britain and has been hailed as a wonderful spectacle of “inclusion”. Yet it seems our celebration of diversity does not extend to allowing any criticism of the ceremony itself; our inclusiveness does not mean we will include dissenting views on Danny Boyle’s vision of the New Britain. When it comes to the opening ceremony, you must conform and celebrate, or risk being cast out (of polite society).

The opening ceremony is speedily morphing into another “Diana moment”, into another instance when everyone is expected to kowtow before a new, unstuffy vision of Britain, and heaven help those who don’t. Following the death of Princess Diana, we were told that we had entered a post-traditional, emotionally-aware New Britain, and yet the expression of certain emotions — such as criticism of the cult of public mourning outside the various royal palaces — was frowned upon and censured.

July 27, 2012

Twitter joke trial comes to the correct result, eventually

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

Kelly Fiveash at The Register on the Twitter “bomb threat” case:

A bloke found guilty of tweeting a “menacing” joke about blowing up a UK airport has had his conviction quashed by the High Court today. A collective sigh of relief was heard moments later from comedians addicted to the micro-blogging website.

Paul Chambers, 28, was waiting to fly from Doncaster’s Robin Hood airport to Belfast to see his girlfriend, whom he met on the social networking site, when snow closed the airfield and delayed his flight.

He vented his frustration in a series of tweets to his squeeze Sarah Tonner, now his fiancee, including a suggestion that he had considered “resorting to terrorism” to ensure he could visit her.

[. . .]

Mr Justice Owen and Mr Justice Griffith Williams said in the High Court today that the facts needed to be considered in context, pointing out that the tweets had clearly appeared to be a reference to the airport closing due to adverse weather conditions.

“There was no evidence before the Crown Court to suggest that any of the followers of the appellant’s ‘tweet’, or indeed anyone else who may have seen the ‘tweet’ posted on the appellant’s time line, found it to be of a menacing character or, at a time when the threat of terrorism is real, even minimally alarming,” the High Court heard.

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