Do we still have republicans in this country? Proper ones, I mean. Ones who care. I suppose we must, but I can’t imagine where you’d have to go to find them. They probably hold meetings in suburban church halls, rented on timeshare with other dimly remembered groups such as Mosleyites, and Flat-Earthers, and people still furious that the Jacobites got such a raw deal. Odd how republicanism isn’t even an esoteric political position in Britain these days. It’s barely even a political position at all.
Not so in Quebec. There, this week, 100 anti-monarchy protesters clashed with riot police when the Prince of Wales tried to visit a regimental hall. Imagine that. Imagine being that cross with Prince Charles. Not global capitalism, not the Afghanistan war, but him with the ears, who makes those biscuits.
I don’t really know where I am with the French Canadians, to be honest. Obviously one can only have the greatest of admiration for any group of people whose major cultural export throughout 300 years of history has been Céline Dion: The Essential Collection (disc one — disc two is kind of patchy) but still, I couldn’t pretend I know what makes them tick. I can understand, I suppose, how they might, on balance, reckon it’s a bit silly for them and us to still have the same monarch. But to actually riot about it? Baby, as Céline might say, this is getting serious.
Hugo Rifkind, “Protesting against Prince Charles? Bonkers: The people of Quebec must have something better to do”, The Times, 2009-11-13
November 13, 2009
QotD: Quebec’s anti-royalist protest
November 9, 2009
QotD: Society must be protected
I think this does not go nearly far enough. Clearly the company behind Red Bull should be closely regulated as it is only a matter of time before someone drinks one and jumps off a building and falls to their death because contrary to their claims, Red Bull does not in fact ‘give you wings’.
In short, as people who are not ‘experts’ are moronic halfwits incapable of telling reality from advertising hype, we must simply turn over all aspects of our life to government approved
self-important technocratic prigsqualified ‘experts’ who can determine what we are permitted to see.We must ‘do it for the children’ of course.
Perry de Havilland, “All your images belong to us”, Samizdata, 2009-11-09
November 4, 2009
No wonder it had to be kept a secret
Cory Doctorow looks at the “too sensitive to expose to public view” Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and finds it awful:
ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living — if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.
Clueless, but powerful . . . meet powerless, but distributed. Combatants, take your corners.
Update: Your kids could go to jail for non-commercial file sharing.
November 3, 2009
Being “a bit boring” is part of his shtick
Colby Cosh looks at “Frygate”:
I realize I’m late to the party, but I didn’t find out until today that the remark which made Stephen Fry melt down was that his tweets were “a bit boring.” Really? Look, we all adore Stephen Fry, especially those of us who are ungainly, neurotic, and a little old-fashioned, so I hope someone will explain to him gently that he is a bit boring — not only his tweets, but just all-around. QI wouldn’t have a premise in the first place if it weren’t somewhat difficult to be interesting; Kingdom was served with rather overgenerous lashings of scenery and mopeyness; and Fry’s impeccable gadget reviews, considered strictly as entertainment, would try the patience of anyone who doesn’t add up the grocery bill in hexadecimal. Being just a little boring — presenting the perpetual risk that he might go on just a little too long about number theory or the battle of Stamford Bridge — is essential to the unostentatious delightfulness of Stephen Fry, just as a soupçon of boringness is essential to the charm of a warm woollen sweater or a newspaper comic strip. (OK, bad example. No newspaper comic strips now being printed possess any charm at all.) Nobody needs Stephen Fry to be a source of unpredictability or chaos. I would argue that any institution whose merits are obvious and whose utility is uncompromised is, by definition, a bit boring. Volvos? Boring! Vin Scully? A little boring at times! Oatmeal cookies? Lovely, if they’re the sort of thing you’re into, but they don’t exactly send anybody’s pulse racing, do they?
October 30, 2009
Cory Doctorow on Britain’s ill-advised ‘3 strikes’ move
Cory Doctorow would have the British government do something other than their idiotic ill-advised move to enforce the “three strikes” rule:
Peter Mandelson’s proposal to disconnect the families of internet users who have been accused of file sharing will do great violence to British justice without delivering any reduction in copyright infringement. We’ve had 15 years of dotty entertainment industry proposals designed to make computers worse at copying. It’s time that we stopped listening to big content and started listening to reason.
Since 1995 — the year of the WIPO copyright treaties — the entertainment industry has won extrajudicial powers to enforce its rights without the need to prove a case in court. “Notice and takedown”, as the system was called, was supposed to stop copyright infringement on the web. It gave rights holders the power to compel internet service providers to take down material simply by stating that it infringed their rights, and obliged those providers to act or face liability.
A decade and a half later there is no indication that this has reduced copyright infringement online (certainly there is more today than there was in 1995). And, predictably, a system that allows for legalised censorship without penalties for abuse has itself been abused.
We are already at the point where it is a reasonable and sensible thing to say that access to the internet is a human right (at least in the west). Mandelson’s three strikes provision will deny innocent people access to the internet (for all it will take is accusations that do not need to have proof), which for more and more people will be the practical equivalent of being exiled from the country. No internet access would mean children can’t get access to school work, parents can’t get access to their bank accounts, and everyone will be cut off from large parts of their social circle (more and more people depend on email, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media to stay in touch).
Due process? That seems to have been lost in the rush. Proportionality? That’s been gone for years.
October 29, 2009
Another non-surprise development in Britain
You can’t be a proper Nanny State without properly trained nannies:
Only council-vetted “play rangers” are now allowed to monitor youngsters in two adventure areas in Watford while parents must watch from outside a perimeter fence.
The Watford Borough Council policy has been attacked as insulting and a disgrace by furious relatives who say they are being labelled as potential paedophiles.
Of course, like all such idiotic measures, it’s intended to “protect the children”, so no rational thought is welcome on the subject. All across Britain today, local councils are suddenly wondering if they should adopt the same kind of policy for fear of being held responsible should anything happen.
The Daily Telegraph disclosed on Tuesday how employers will come under pressure to register staff with the Government’s anti-paedophile database even if they have little contact with children
Sir Roger Singleton, the chairman of the Independent Safeguarding Authority, said the scope of the planned database could increase significantly because companies would fear losing business if they did not have their employees vetted.
Last month, he was asked by the Government to look again at the complex definitions of “frequent” and “intensive” contact following concerns that the scheme would lead to state supervision of all relationships between adults and children.
It may not be the intent, but it will almost certainly be the final result.
October 21, 2009
Soccer stupidities, explained
David Goldblatt reviews Why England Lose and Other Curious Football Phenomena Explained, by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski:
“Anyone who spends any time inside football soon discovers that just as oil is part of the oil business, stupidity is part of the football business.” Well, football may not spend billions of pounds actively seeking out stupidity, piping, refining and selling it, but as Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski demonstrate over and over again in Why England Lose, it is certainly swimming in the stuff.
[. . .]
Economic rationality is just not football’s strong suit, and nor is emotional intelligence. As Kuper and Syzmanski demonstrate, the transfer market is full of obvious irrationalities. For example, scouts over-report blonde players — who stand out and stick in the mind — irrespective of their actual performance. Despite all evidence to the contrary, clubs also overpay for teenagers, for players of fashionable nationalities and for recent stars of international tournaments without properly assessing their likely course of development, their suitability for the football culture they are moving to or the latter’s real long-term track record and value.
In fact, almost every mainstream football homily is revealed by the authors of this book to be hokum: untested, prejudiced myth spawned by an unreflective, anti-educational and above all closed culture. What other business would allow a single person to take all the key purchasing and personnel decisions unexamined and untested by the rest of the company? They certainly don’t do that at Shell, but then Shell makes money while football and its megalomaniac managers pour it down the drain.
October 17, 2009
Tweet of the day: Mayan prognostication
cetaylor: Everything you need to know about Mayan 2012 nonsense: They couldn’t foresee the end of their own effin’ civilization in the 16th century.
October 12, 2009
Protip: a police station parking lot is not a “private place”
BBC News reports that a couple of Edinburgh pub-goers chose a particularly unsuitable place to go have sex after meeting in the pub:
An amorous couple have been fined for having sex in broad daylight — in a police station car park.
Leanne Richardson, 26, and Ross Welsh, 30, had to be physically stopped mid sex act by officers from Portobello police station in Edinburgh.
They both pleaded guilty to committing a breach of the peace in the car park on 21 April and were fined £200.
October 9, 2009
October 7, 2009
QotD: The essence of religion
The fuel of every religion, one way or another, is guilt. Properly indoctrinated — generally from birth — a religious individual cannot eat, sleep, work, make love, or do much of anything else, either as a living organism in general, or a human being in particular, without automatically accumulating a burden of guilt that has to be discharged somehow from time to time, preferably (that is, preferably to those in the guilt-discharging industry) through the heavenly apparatus, sacred plumbing, and holy mechanics of whatever religion controls the territory.
Throw a nickel on the drum, save another drunken bum.
Churches are generally in the business of peddling forgiveness — for having done things nobody can avoid doing if they’re a living, physical creature. They’re middlemen between God and sinner (this means you). They may only want you to come to church on a regular basis, sing the songs, say the prayers, drop a quarter in the plate. Or they may want something else, your witness, your testimony, your speaking in “tongues”. In this hemisphere, once upon a time, climbing to the top of a pyramid and having your heart chopped out was highly encouraged.
L. Neil Smith, “Time for Another Another Reformation”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2009-10-04
October 5, 2009
Maybe this is why some eBay sellers don’t ship outside the US
The six agents, wearing SWAT gear and carrying weapons, were with — get this — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Kathy and George Norris lived under the specter of a covert government investigation for almost six months before the government unsealed a secret indictment and revealed why the Fish and Wildlife Service had treated their family home as if it were a training base for suspected terrorists. Orchids.
That’s right. Orchids.
By March 2004, federal prosecutors were well on their way to turning 66-year-old retiree George Norris into an inmate in a federal penitentiary — based on his home-based business of cultivating, importing and selling orchids.
[. . .]
Mr. Norris ended up spending almost two years in prison because he didn’t have the proper paperwork for some of the many orchids he imported. The orchids were all legal — but Mr. Norris and the overseas shippers who had packaged the flowers had failed to properly navigate the many, often irrational, paperwork requirements the U.S. imposed when it implemented an arcane international treaty’s new restrictions on trade in flowers and other flora.
H/T to Radley Balko.
October 2, 2009
September 28, 2009
Random links of possible interest
- More on the ongoing ammunition shortage in the US, as manufacturers are still unable to produce enough to satisfy demand.
- Police at G20 take trophy photo including arrested protester handcuffed and kneeling in front of the group. H/T to Radley Balko.
- Voyeurs rejoice! What sounds like a report from the Journal of Spike TV reveals that a mere 10 minutes of ogling well-endowed women provides as much benefit to men as 30 minutes in the gym, as far as heart disease, high blood pressure and stress are concerned. H/T to Ghost of a Flea.
- New Zealand bans in-vehicle GPS navigation systems . . . but only if they’re running on a mobile phone. Non-phone based systems apparently don’t distract you with directions the way phone-based ones do. Or something.
- Detroit Lions fans love the Washington Redskins.
