Quotulatiousness

June 28, 2011

The Daily Mail tries to drum up moral outrage (again)

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

Patrick Hayes views with disdain the latest Freedom of Information trolling exercise performed by the Daily Mail in an attempt to spice up their “news” coverage:

Is Britain in the grip of a hidden crimewave? Are thousands of crimes being committed each year by feral youths, which the police know about but are powerless to prevent? Is Britain being stalked by troublemaking toddlers, committing vandalism with no comeuppance for their ‘crimes’ because of their tender age?

In a word, no. Though you’d never know that by reading yesterday’s hysterical news reports. ‘As many as 3,000 criminals, including rapists, robbers and burglars, escaped punishment last year because they were too young to be prosecuted’, declared the Daily Mail. The paper published the results of a pretty shameless trawling exercise, having placed Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to police forces around Britain about underage crime. It managed to dredge up various accounts of childish ‘criminal’ activity, including a ‘rape’ in Levenmouth committed by two eight-year-old boys, a ‘kidnapping’ in Rochdale also carried out by an eight-year-old, and a ‘spate of vandalism’ conducted by a three-year-old boy and four-year-old girl.

The Mail received responses to its FOI request from 30 out of 52 police forces, discovering that ‘1,605 crimes were blamed on someone aged under 10 in the last financial year’. Guestimating how many crimes might have been committed by kids in those parts of Britain policed by the 22 forces that did not respond to its requests, it came up with a total of 3,000 offences. And rather than caution its readers that these figures only cover accusations of a crime, rather than guilt having been proven, the Mail implies its findings could be the tip of the iceberg: ‘Many police forces do not even record crimes where they believe youngsters under 10 have been responsible.’

June 27, 2011

A review of The Declaration of Independents

Filed under: Books, Economics, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:33

Timothy P. Carney talks about the new book by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch:

Libertarians today are mostly considered a variety of conservative — Ronald Reagan with fewer bombs and more pot. But Welch and Gillespie don’t cast libertarianism as one of many political ideolgies. Instead, they portray it as a truce. It’s unpolitics. The authors see evidence of a “libertarian moment,” not so much in public opinion on policy matters (though outrage about bailouts helps), but in cultural trends that spill over into politics.

Younger Americans don’t like being told what to think. Gone is the voice-of-God Walter Cronkite figure. Younger adults assemble their own news feeds a la carte, following trusted voices on Twitter and RSS feeds. Even walking through a shopping mall, the authors argue, shows how we’re much more individualistic as a culture than we used to be. The authors say there’s a proliferation of cliques and types in high schools and among adults, too. The Internet has helped people find kindred spirits both near and far, making it less necessary to modify your interests to match an existing group. Americans, increasingly, choose their own way.

And there, in a nutshell, is the traditionalist’s core argument against the internet (grounded in their remembered high school experience): it allows geeks and nerds and other unpopular kids to find solace, support and fellow feeling outside their immediate physical surroundings. That undermines the traditional rule of the jocks and the beautiful people.

Welch and Gillespie see our cultural trends as evidence that “decentralization and democratization” are taking territory from “the forces of control and centralization.” The political corollary, naturally, would be a movement that creates more space for individuality. It would be almost an anti-political movement.

But this is where every dream of an independent or libertarian uprising crashes into reality. You don’t win at politics without being good at politics. The people who are best at politics are the people who stand to gain a lot from it — special interests and people who get like to play the political game. Neither group is likely to include many anti-political decentralizers.

What about the libertarians who are already caught up in politics? The think-tankers, the activists, the journalists? Well, they’re another obstacle to a libertarian revolution. For one thing, this is a group famous for infighting. The Libertarian Party has been racked with strife, splits and feuds for its entire existence. Welch and Gillespie want to pitch a big tent, but Beltway libertarians are famous for imposing “purity tests.” (Q: Should vending machines marketing heroin to children be allowed on public sidewalks? A: There shouldn’t be public sidewalks.)

That last quip is quite true: the very first time I walked in to a libertarian gathering, I was besieged with purity testing of that sort. I nearly walked right back out without a backward glance.

June 25, 2011

“How very lucky we humans are in that all other animals are so goddamn stupid”

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:23

I think my niece mentioned this show over dinner the other night. Ilkka explains:

I recently watched two episodes of “Swamp People“, another low-budget realimentary that sets the camera to follow people with exciting and physical jobs and edits the result down to a highlights reel of action and drama with some narrative added on top. The show not only reminded me of the essay “Rednecks” by Fred Reed, but also of Tommi’s old observation of how very lucky we humans are in that all other animals are so goddamn stupid, really just simple and predictable automata. Armed with but a boat, a baited hook and a shotgun, these fellows hunt, kill and pile up 500-pound prehistoric monsters that will then be given a more useful and productive existence as delicious meat, suitcases and boots. Come on, you can’t tell me that this show doesn’t beat the initially amusing but then later just repetitive and a little bit too obviously scripted “Pawn Stars” any day…

Reason.TV reporter arrested for “disorderly conduct” and “trespassing”

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:15

QotD: The game marketing game

Filed under: Gaming, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

. . . here’s the long and short of it: A PR flack complaining about unfair representation of a videogame is like a mugger complaining about unsafe working conditions.

They say advertisers sell the sizzle, not the steak. Videogame companies regularly sell not the steak, not the sizzle, but a recording of the sizzle of aged Wagyū steak, the audio captured under ideal acoustic conditions and sweetened with frequencies proven to make people hungry. Then, often as not, they present you with a microwaved hamburger and a promise to remove the bugs — which in this metaphor are actual insects — just as soon as they can.

I don’t write many reviews these days, but as far as I’m concerned, eviscerating shitty games with snappy sarcasm is a public service. If 500 words of my resentment are more entertaining than 10 hours of your game, then you wrote a crappy game.

And let’s get this out of the way: Don’t come crying to me about the hard work of the developers and how they’re being abused by reviewers. You know what developers really hate? Working on crappy games. Nobody enjoys feeling like they’re being paid to tie ribbons on manure. You want happy developers? Let them make the best games they can and present them honestly.

So here’s the deal. I’m all for civility. In any future game reviews, I will completely do away with venom and mockery, but only if the ad agencies do away with exaggeration and hype. If you start lying, I start making vicious, spiteful fun of you.

Lore Sjöberg, “Alt Text: After Duke Nukem PR Fail, Terrible Games Are Fair Game”, Wired, 2011-06-24

June 24, 2011

Even with the Post Office on strike, deliveries must be made

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Media, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:07

Just before lunch, the UPS guy dropped off a couple of books from my latest Amazon.ca order:

That’s The Declaration of Independents: How libertarian politics can fix what’s wrong with America by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, and Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi. Now I’m just waiting for Rule 34 by Charles Stross to complete the order.

QotD: Defending the indefensible

Filed under: Books, Law, Liberty, Media, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:09

If you accept — and I do — that freedom of speech is important, then you are going to have to defend the indefensible. That means you are going to be defending the right of people to read, or to write, or to say, what you don’t say or like or want said.

The Law is a huge blunt weapon that does not and will not make distinctions between what you find acceptable and what you don’t. This is how the Law is made.

People making art find out where the limits of free expression are by going beyond them and getting into trouble.

Neil Gaiman, “Why defend freedom of icky speech?”, Neil Gaiman’s Journal, 2011-06-24

“Damn! Another cursed Mordecai!”

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:02

Barbara Kay takes issue with the token that Montreal has chosen to commemorate Mordecai Richler:

Mordecai Richler is Canada’s biggest claim to literary fame. If he had been born and lived in any other province but Quebec there would have been an outpouring of ideas on how to commemorate his life and achievements: perhaps renaming streets in his honour, building schools bearing his name, or erecting a statue featuring the disheveled genius wryly peering over his pince-nez at a smoked meat sandwich on wry…er, rye.

Instead Montreal’s political mandarins have decided he is getting a gazebo — a crummy little open pavilion at the foot of Mount Royal, with no known connection to the author. A place for people to come in out of the rain. Not quite a public toilet, but close.

That’s like naming the change house at an outdoor skating rink after Margaret Atwood, a pellet dispenser at the zoo after Yann Martel, or a maintenance shed after Margaret Laurence. But then, if Mordecai Richler had been born outside Quebec, maybe he wouldn’t have been inspired to the kind of savage indignation that made him such a household word (and often not in a good way) in his native Montreal.

She provides a rather more appropriate memorial gesture:

Here’s an idea: Montreal is riddled with potholes. The French for “pothole” is “nid-de-poule,” literally a chicken’s nest. How about if the word is officially changed to “mort-de-caille(ou)” which means “death of stone” (well, death of pebble, close enough). Henceforth let all Montreal potholes be called Mordecais. In this way, his name will forever be on every Montrealer’s lips, because Montreal potholes are ubiquitous and eternal, and yet not in a good way – “Damn! Another cursed Mordecai!” I think Richler himself would have appreciated the irony, and approved.

Newspapers still trying to adapt to a vastly changed world

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:04

In a blog post at the Guardian, Roy Greenslade puts the financial changes into a bit of perspective:

So prepare — if you’re of a certain age — for a warm nostalgic bath. In 1950, with TV sets in only 9% of homes, a British street of 100 houses could be relied on to buy 140 newspapers a day and 220 on Sunday.

In 2010, with each of those houses containing an average of 2.6 TVs, the same street bought just 40 papers a day, Monday to Sunday.

Some advertising revenues fled to TV as it developed in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, but not in such great numbers as to ruin newspapers, which could still rely on huge circulation sales income.

In 1966, the Daily Mirror sold 5.1m copies a day, the Daily Express 4m and the Daily Telegraph 1.4m. Last month, those titles had circulations of 1.2m, 631,000 and 635,000 respectively.

It was one of the things that struck me on my first trip back to England in 1979 — although not as badly as the bone-chilling damp — was the profusion of newspapers available. I was used to Toronto, where you could get the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, and the horrible little upstart pleb rag, the Toronto Sun. Seeing all the different papers was quite an eye-opener.

No wonder why he chose to title the post “Those were the days, my friends, we’d thought they’d never end…”

June 23, 2011

Your social media reputation and your future employment prospects

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:30

Chris Greaves posted this link, which should be a warning to everyone to be (even more) careful about your online reputation:

Camille Cacnio, a part-time receptionist at a car dealership, was caught in a 3-second video clip, stealing clothing from a looted store during the Stanley Cup riots.

She was fired.

Professional mountain biker Alex Prochazka posed in front of a burning car, while wearing a T-shirt from his sponsor Oakley.

The sunglass company promptly dropped him.

Carpenter Connor Mcilvenna declared the riots “awesome” on his Facebook page, and posted several pro-riot status updates, such as “atta boy vancity!!! show em how we do it!!!” and “vancouver needed remodeling anyway….”

RiteTech Construction was listed as his employer on his Facebook profile, and the next morning, Mcilvenna was fired.

His boss said he was flooded with emails and didn’t want the company’s reputation linked to the man.

“I think this will be a turning point in how employers look at social media,” said Peter Eastwood, a partner at Borden Ladner Gervais in Vancouver. “This is an extremely powerful tool that has potentially enormous and immediate consequences for a business.”

This is something the early bloggers had to face, that what you post online (or what is posted about you) will be there forever. No rational employer is going to offer you a job in future without at the very least running a Google search on you, and there’s already a niche market for employers to explore (doing a deeper search on prospective employees). Background check and personal references? I’m starting to wonder why employers even bother going through the motions any more.

Yahtzee reviews Duke Nukem Forever

Filed under: Gaming, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

June 22, 2011

“Medicalizing” bad behaviour to avoid guilt

Filed under: Health, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

Frank Furedi looks at a disturbing ongoing phenomenon in western society: the “medicalization” of bad behaviour:

The rebranding of promiscuity as sex addiction is not confined to Britain. Throughout Europe and the US the numbers of sex addicts is said to be on the rise. Anthony Weiner has recently been diagnosed — by the media and self-styled experts at least — as a ‘sex addict’. Following the revelation that he sent rude pictures of himself to various women online, Weiner has been widely depicted as a sick man. ‘He needs treatment’, one expert told the Associated Press, because apparently, without help, ‘sex addicts’ can go ‘completely out of control and destroy their lives’.

[. . .]

Lust, infidelity, betrayal and the drive for sexual domination have always presented a challenge to a society’s grammar of morality. However, the contemporary conflation of a bad habit with a medical problem is symptomatic of the difficulty that Western societies now have in making moral judgments about human behaviour. Sometimes, even people who claim to possess religious convictions find it difficult to ascribe guilt to immoral behaviour. That is why behaviour that was once denounced as sinful is now increasingly discussed through the language of therapy rather than the language of morality.

[. . .]

The problem with this recycling of bad habits and degrading behaviour as medical problems is not simply that it fails to hold people to account for the choices they make and the consequences that their actions have. Yes, a lot of people — including celebrities such as Keith Urban, Tiger Woods, Michael Douglas and Lindsay Lohan — can present themselves as victims of an addiction rather than as lecherous and self-regarding individuals.

But the real problem is the message that this diseasing of human behaviour sends to all of us. The fashionable label of ‘addictive personality’ encourages people to acquiesce to their worst instincts in a quite fatalistic way. Addicts are portrayed as victims of circumstances beyond their control: they are literally counselled to accept powerlessness as the defining feature of their existences. Sexaholics Anonymous mimics the 12-step approach of Alcoholics Anonymous. The first step that a sex addict takes on the road to sexual sobriety is to admit that ‘we were powerless over lust’.

QotD: Who’s more smug than Bono? The “Bono Pay Up” protesters

Filed under: Africa, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

[T]he Bono Pay Up lobby, far from challenging Bono’s gobsmackingly paternalistic attitude towards Africa, is encouraging him to put his money where his mouth is. Its message is effectively: Stop talking about saving Africa and go out and actually save it! The campaign group claims that it is because of individuals like Bono, who export bits of their business overseas in order to avoid paying high taxes at home, that Africa is a mess. Some of that tax could be used for the foreign aid budget, you see. Not only is this a spectacularly naïve view of the massive structural problems facing underdeveloped nations in the Third World — as if their woes could be magically fixed by Bono and others stumping up a bit more tax — but it also suggests, explicitly, that it is up to rich white men to save downtrodden Africa.

According to Bono Pay Up, if Bono paid his taxes in a more “ethical” fashion, he could help to alleviate “suffering in the developing world”. Unless the protesters succeed in shifting Bono’s personal habits, “the poor will always be with us”, they claim. In short, all it takes for the poor to be lifted up from their empty-stomached, teary-eyed existences is for a few good men — white ones, naturally — to behave more ethically and caringly. It’s the White Tax Man’s Burden. In focusing on Bono’s alleged hypocrisy, the protesters are actually trying to bridge the gap between the Bono persona (saviour of Africa) and the Bono reality (he pays his taxes in a weird way). That is, they want him to become what he claims to be — the Moral Viceroy of Africa — and to show the Dark Continent how to reach the light. A plague on both their houses. If there are any African bands playing at Glastonbury I hope they lay into the Bono Pay Up lobby, and then use its silly placards to wallop Bono.

Brendan O’Neill, “The ‘Bono Pay Up’ protesters have achieved the remarkable feat of being even more smug than Bono”, The Telegraph, 2011-06-22

June 21, 2011

The Athens protests as a theatre for projection

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, Greece, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

Whatever may really be behind the protests, reporters are having a wonderful time using it as a blank canvas to project their own notions:

Some seriously overblown claims are being made about the anti-government, anti-EU, anti-IMF protests in Athens. ‘Syntagma Square has become the frontline of the battle against European austerity’, said one giddy British reporter, referring to the square where for the past three weeks Greek citizens, calling themselves ‘indignados’, have been protesting against the IMF/EU demand for further austerity measures before Greece can receive more aid. In truth, the most striking thing about the protests is their incoherence, even their childishness. Far from being the frontline of any kind of solid movement, the Syntagma camp-in is a confused, depoliticised, borderline petulant response to the economic crisis.

Some European journalists and activists have become so enamoured by the physicality of the protests that they seem not to have noticed the gaping political hole at the heart of them. BBC reporters, who normally spend most of their time in stuffy, smokeless offices, have written with undisguised glee of their sweaty experiences in Athens, where the ‘teargas hits us without warning’ and ‘we crush together, shoulder to shoulder’. A Guardian reporter describes being ‘jammed up against the railings’ in a ‘raucous’ atmosphere that is like ‘an open-air concert’. Hacks more used to writing about Vince Cable’s latest pronouncement on business law have leapt upon the opportunity to get stuck into a seemingly more thrilling economic story, in the process presenting the Syntagma stand-off as way more profound than it actually is.

Likewise, many amongst the European left are busily projecting their aspirations on to Athens. This is the ‘start of the European workers’ fightback’, they claim, describing the protests as the ‘beginning’ of an uprising against austerity that they knew would come. It is a feeling of profound disarray and disconnection amongst European left groups, their sensitivity to the political stasis that has largely greeted the economic crisis, which leads them to make excitable claims about Greece. Motivated by a determination to avoid having hard debates at home about the crisis, far less try to come up with any strategies for resolving it, they content themselves instead with celebrating the rowdy ‘indignation’ of Greek protesters and imagining that it represents the first stirrings of the return of traditional class politics.

A neologism? A crippling political setback? It’s both!

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:49

When you read the word “santorum”, what do you think of? A small minority of people apparently believe it refers to an obscure American politician:

The world’s Wikifiddlers are obsessed with santorum. Though they can’t agree on what that is.

For some, it’s a word. For others, it’s not: it’s the result of a campaign to create a word. The distinction — however subtle — has sparked weeks of controversy among the core contributors to Wikipedia, the “free encyclopedia anyone can edit”. If you find this hard to believe, you’ve never been to Wikiland — and you’ve never Googled “Rick Santorum”.

Famously, Rick Santorum — the former Pennsylvania Senator and a Republican candidate for president of the United States — has a Google problem. But he also has a Wikipedia problem. And the two go hand-in-hand.

If nothing else, the whole controversy has added another variant meaning to the term “to be savaged”.

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