Quotulatiousness

September 27, 2018

France moves toward the Soviet system of psychological “treatment” for dissidents

Filed under: France, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

You may not agree with much that prominent French nationalist politician Marine Le Pen stands for, but the recent court order that she must undergo a psychological evaluation as part of the investigation of a “hate crime” should worry everyone. Jacob Sullum writes:

Marine Le Pen speaking in Lille during the 2017 French presidential election
Photo by Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick via Wikimedia Commons

France ranked 12 notches above the United States in this year’s World Press Freedom Index, produced by Reporters Without Borders. But such ratings can be misleading, as illustrated by the prosecution of Marine Le Pen, head of the right-wing National Rally party (formerly the National Front), for posting images of ISIS atrocities on Twitter. Last week Le Pen revealed that she had been ordered to undergo a psychiatric examination as part of the investigation into her speech crime, which added another layer of Soviet-style thought control to the story.

It is inconceivable that an American politician, no matter how extreme his views, would be prosecuted for doing what Le Pen did, because a law like the one she is charged with violating would be clearly inconsistent with the First Amendment. That law, Article 227-24 of the French Criminal Code, makes it a crime, punishable by a fine of €75,000 (about $88,000) and up to three years in prison, to distribute “a message bearing a pornographic or violent character or a character seriously violating human dignity…where the message may be seen or perceived by a minor.” Le Pen allegedly ran afoul of that prohibition in 2015 by posting three pictures of men murdered by ISIS—one beheaded, one burned alive, and one run over by a tank—in response to a Twitter user who likened her party to the terrorist organization. “Daesh [the Arabic acronym for ISIS] is this!” she tweeted.

This case vividly illustrates why Article 227-24 would never pass constitutional muster in the United States. Le Pen’s tweet is indisputably political speech, sitting at the core of the expression protected by the First Amendment. The terms of Article 227-24 (especially the phrase “seriously violating human dignity”) are broad and vague, encouraging self-censorship and inviting politically motivated prosecution of people who irk the powers that be. Le Pen, who unsuccessfully ran against Emmanuel Macron in a presidential runoff last year, was stripped of her parliamentary immunity six months later, leaving her open to prosecution.

September 8, 2018

A key statistic in the debate over gun violence in Toronto … turns out to be an invention

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Matt Gurney on an important claim in the controversy about guns and crime in Toronto — that will probably not get anything like as much coverage because it doesn’t support the prohibitionists’ narrative:

Earlier this summer — a summer that has seen Toronto wracked by gun violence — a report came out that suggested lawful Canadian gun owners were to blame for at least some of the violence. The article was originally published by the Canadian Press, and was widely republished elsewhere, including at the CBC, the National Post, a dozen local newspapers, CTV News, and, yes, here at Global News. Since then, it has been widely cited in other news stories covering the issue, including in The Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. The report was everywhere.

Here’s the problem. Newly released stats show clearly that it was wrong.

The article was based around an interview with a Toronto Police Services detective, Rob Di Danieli. Det. Di Danieli told the Canadian Press that Canadians who were lawfully licensed to purchase and possess firearms were increasingly a public safety issue. “They go get their licence for the purpose of becoming a firearms trafficker,” Di Danieli told the CP. “A lot of people are so ready to blame the big bad Americans, but we had our own little problem here.”

The CP article hangs on this revelation from the detective. It notes, in various places, “The number of guns obtained legally in Canada but are then sold to people who use them for criminal purposes has surged dramatically in recent years compared to firearms smuggled from the United States, Toronto police say,” and, “In recent years [investigators say they] have noticed a stark shift in where guns used to commit crimes are coming from,” and, “Legal Canadian gun owners are selling their weapons illegally, Di Danieli said, noting that police have seen more than 40 such cases in recent years.”

[…]

At the time the CP story first ran, there were no publicly available stats to support (or contradict) what di Danieli had told them. But now, those numbers are publicly available, thanks to Dennis R. Young, an Alberta-based researcher who filed a Freedom of Information request with the Toronto police and published their reply on his website. And these stats tell a very different story.

August 10, 2018

“The banality of evil”

Filed under: Books, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Anthony Daniels in the most recent issue of Quadrant:

“The banality of evil” is a phrase that suddenly entered the English language, probably for ever, in 1963, on the publication of Hannah Arendt’s book about Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

It hardly matters that Hannah Arendt, after much arduous study and conscientious effort, got Eichmann entirely wrong, and had the wool pulled comprehensively over her eyes by the man she thought an utter mediocrity. Surely scum like him were no match for a much-garlanded political philosopher? But far from having been a faceless bureaucrat as she portrayed him, or mere pen-pusher who somehow, as if by accident, wandered into the organisation of genocide, Eichmann was an ardent and committed Nazi, an idealist of evil so to speak, who knew exactly what he was doing and regretted only that he had been unable to do more and finish the job. Bettina Stangneth’s book Eichmann Before Jerusalem should have put paid once and for all to the notion of Eichmann as a kind of sleep-walking little man, the post office clerk of extermination. But image often triumphs over reality, and in any case, the banality of evil could well survive as a concept, even if it had been grotesquely misapplied on its first outing.

Recently, I seem to be surrounded by the banality of evil: in books, I mean, not in real life (assuming that books are not part of real life, that is). For example, I just picked up a book by the well-known French forensic psychiatrist Daniel Zagury, titled La Barbarie des hommes ordinaires: Ces criminels qui pourraient être nous (The Barbarity of Ordinary Men: These Criminals Who Could Be Us). The very title, of course, makes reference to Arendt’s famous phase, and I had not gone many pages into it when her name cropped up: because Zagury is writing about men (mainly men in contrast to women) who commit appalling violent crimes without being obviously mad, he makes reference to Arendt and her banality of evil. The banality lies in the absence of all thought or reflection, of foresight or imagination. The most atrocious acts occasion no more mental trouble than, say, that entailed in the making of a sandwich.

Before I took up Zagury, I had just read Behind the Shock Machine, a book by the Australian psychologist and writer Gina Perry, about the famous, or infamous, experiments carried out by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s at Yale on man’s obedience to authority. These experiments, as written up by Milgram in his book Obedience to Authority, have more or less entered common consciousness, at least that of intellectuals, as proving that there is in most of us an inner Eichmann, if not quite struggling to get out, at least prepared to obey the most frightful orders if authority gives them.

Milgram published his book in 1974, which was twelve years after the conclusion of his experiments and eleven years after the publication of Arendt’s book. He was, I surmise, much influenced by Arendt’s masterfully summarising — or one might say misleading — phrase, for the truth behind which he retrospectively tried to supply some psychological evidence. Gina Perry, by examining the records of his experiments in detail, found that Milgram had misrepresented his results, exaggerating his subjects’ willingness to comply with orders in his eagerness to show man’s tendency to obey, a tendency which demonstrates that the Holocaust could happen again — by implication anywhere.

August 4, 2018

Violence against women

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

Joanna Williams on the problem that well-established, well-paid, financially secure women — at least the professional feminists fitting those criteria — are having to work very hard to maintain their air of victimhood:

Being a feminist must be hard work. Perhaps you’ve got a newspaper column to fill with your hot take on the latest sexist outrage. Or perhaps you have a university sexual-harassment policy to write. Or a government minister to consult about a proposed new law. Or a hefty budget to administer. You’ve got the salary, a platform for your views, and the capacity to influence what happens in almost every institution in the country. And yet the entire basis for you being in this fortunate position, for walking the corridors of power, is your powerlessness. The bind for today’s professional feminist is the more power and influence she gains, the harder she needs to work to show that women are still oppressed.

[…]

As feminists increasingly take positions of power, tackling violence against women drives their agenda. The World Health Organisation tells us that violence against women ‘is a major public-health problem’. The United Nations tells us it is ‘a grave violation of human rights’. The British government describes violence ‘against women and girls’ as a serious crime that has ‘a huge impact on our economy, health services, and the criminal-justice system’.

Of course, violence against women and girls deserves to be taken seriously and perpetrators should be severely punished. But the lives of women in poverty-stricken and wartorn countries are very different to those of women in England. Likewise, adult women have far more agency and control over their lives than girls. Conflating the experiences of women all around the world, and of adult women with children, allows professional feminists to claim suffering by proxy.

At the same time, the definition of violence seems to broaden by the day. The internationally agreed definition of violence against women and girls is: ‘Any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women [or girls], including threats of such acts.’ In the UK and the US, violence encompasses sexual harassment – which includes winking, whistling and looking at someone for too long. Amnesty International describes women’s experiences of ‘violence and abuse on Twitter’. In 2017, the organisers of a women’s strike against President Trump described ‘the violence of the market, of debt, of capitalist property relations, and of the state; the violence of discriminatory policies against lesbian, trans and queer women’.

This is not violence as a physical act, but violence as metaphor. No wonder it is experienced everywhere. The World Health Organisation describes violence against women as an ‘epidemic’. We are told that over a third of girls have been sexually harassed at school and that more than a third of women have experienced sexual harassment at work. But then we also learn that two women are killed each week by a current or former partner. And here, immediately, is the problem with violence as metaphor. Real violence becomes relativised. When winking and nasty tweets are described as acts of violence, the word is no longer enough to describe acts of physical brutality and murder. Violence has become nothing more than a badge permitting membership of an inclusive feminist club, and this does little to support women who really are in need of help.

July 27, 2018

Toronto’s proposed handgun ban is a feelgood/do nothing distraction

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

Every time there’s a tragedy, there are calls from the local media for politicians to “do something”. Politicians are hard-wired to want to “do something” even without prompting. They want (and need, for electoral purposes) to be seen to be “doing something”, if only to divert any blamecasting away from themselves. The most recent tragedy was a senseless shooting on Toronto’s Danforth in the Greektown district. The shooter, who was either killed by police or committed suicide shortly after the attack, was apparently not a legal gun owner, and under current gun laws would not have been able to obtain a handgun. So, in the wake of the tragic deaths and injuries, Toronto city council jumped into action to be seen “doing something”. Chris Selley explains why the proposed ban of handgun and ammunition sales in the city will not make a difference, except to punish non-criminals:

The whiz-bang solution on everyone’s lips — from Mayor Tory to city councillors to the Toronto Star’s and Globe and Mail’s editorial boards and the usual activists — is to ban handguns. Tory admits there is no “magic wand” that will solve Toronto’s gun problem. But still he asks: “Why does anyone in this city need to have a gun at all?”

The idea has a very superficial appeal. We all wish the Danforth shooter hadn’t managed to get a hold of a gun. Toronto is having a bad year for shootings — not much worse than last year, but at the wrong end of a distinct and steady five-year-trend. (At this point in 2014 there had been 101 shootings and 127 fatalities; so far in 2018 there have been 228 shootings and 308 fatalities.) It is understandable (if not entirely creditable) that the Danforth shooting would have rapidly intensified demands for something to be done: the victim count was high, and it happened in a wealthy part of town where it would have been easy to pretend there wasn’t a problem at all.

Still, the limitations of a “handgun ban” are both many and obvious. When Canadian police forces occasionally report on the sources of crime guns, they often find the vast majority have been smuggled across the border. In Toronto nowadays, the number is reportedly more like 50 per cent; the rest of the supply comes from licensed handgun owners who sell them on illegally — a spectacularly risky thing to do, as any used in crimes would be instantly traced back to the registered owner, but apparently worth it to some.

But we all know how permeable the Canada-U.S. border is. If we made it impossible to own a handgun legally in Canada, is there any reason to suspect the cross-border flow couldn’t regain its market share? Furthermore, CTV reported Wednesday that the Danforth shooter’s handgun was prohibited — i.e., it could never have been licensed in Canada — and that he had obtained it from some gang associates. If true, his carnage illustrates the limitations of handgun bans better than it does their efficacy.

July 25, 2018

Britain, refugees, and migrants

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Alex Noble explains why Britain needs migrants, but not all migrants:

Nurses, doctors, engineers, scientists, computer programmers – our society is very advanced and a big chunk of our economic strength is based on advanced services that need skilled people like these. And there aren’t enough native Brits skilled in these areas – our demand outpaces our supply of people. We need lots of computer programmers and only relatively few native Brits are qualifying in computer sciences. And the shortage of young Brits taking STEM subjects is worsening.

So far so good – we need a supply of skilled migrants for the foreseeable future. Hopefully we can all agree on that.

Do we need unskilled migrants?

Because when people with no skills come to the UK, we suffer and so do they. They are either forced into crime, fall into modern slavery, or find themselves exploited working on the black market.

When they are forced into crime, we see more stabbings and rapes and burglaries and murders.

When they fall into modern slavery we see more people-trafficking, more forced prostitution.

When they are exploited, they are forced to work below minimum wage, and the jobs that young British teenagers might have taken are taken by those willing to work for a pittance just to stay alive. When they find themselves working in the black market, they pay no tax and have no protections.

Modern Britain does not need or desire these things – young people enslaved and forced to work for low pay, exploited, or forced into crime. These are profoundly negative developments for our society, and a grotesque abuse of people who were mislead into coming here for what they thought would be a new life.

Modern Britain does not need unskilled migrants, and should not enrich their slavers.

And that brings us to refugees.

Are there genuine refugees? Yes of course.

But we know what refugees look like – men, women and children staggering over the border into the nearest safe nation with the clothes on their backs and often not much else. Poverty-stricken and unable to return to the homelands, they throw themselves on the mercy of their neighbours. Refugees don’t abandon their families in war zones and travel thousands of miles alone. They do not have thousands of dollars to give to slave traders for a seat on their rickety barges.

What we see on the boats are not refugees.

They are mostly young men coming for a better life. And while we cannot begrudge them those intentions, we have already discussed why unskilled migrants cannot be welcomed here in large numbers. And unskilled migrants they mostly are, because skilled migrants come armed with work permits and speak the language. At the very least they have documentation to prove who they are, because being able to prove you are an Iranian heart surgeon is important. Being able to prove you are a penniless and unskilled Eritrean, who doesn’t speak English……………that’s not an identity worth retaining at a border check.

And so the Mediterranean sea floor is littered with their travel documents.

Genuine refuges stagger over the nearest safe border – we must help them if we can.

The unskilled migrants travel here in boats, trafficked by modern-day slavers into the underworlds of our nations. They may have hope in their hearts, but they are bringing misery into a society that cannot absorb them.

July 21, 2018

Singapore suffers data breach from SingHealth

Filed under: Asia, Health, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Straits Times, Irene Tham reports on the data loss:

In Singapore’s worst cyber attack, hackers have stolen the personal particulars of 1.5 million patients. Of these, 160,000 people, including Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and a few ministers, had their outpatient prescriptions stolen as well.

The hackers infiltrated the computers of SingHealth, Singapore’s largest group of healthcare institutions with four hospitals, five national speciality centres and eight polyclinics. Two other polyclinics used to be under SingHealth.

At a multi-ministry press conference on Friday (July 20), the authorities said PM Lee’s information was “specifically and repeatedly targeted”.

The 1.5 million patients had visited SingHealth’s specialist outpatient clinics and polyclinics from May 1, 2015, to July 4, 2018.

Their non-medical personal data that was illegally accessed and copied included their names, IC numbers, addresses, gender, race and dates of birth.

No record was tampered with and no other patient records such as diagnosis, test results and doctors’ notes were breached. There was no evidence of a similar breach in the other public healthcare IT systems.

Health Minister Gan Kim Yong and Minister for Communications and Information S. Iswaran both described the leak as the most serious, unprecedented breach of personal data in Singapore.

July 2, 2018

QotD: Perverse incentives, death penalty edition

Filed under: Economics, Law, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

People cheered when, in the 1990s, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich advocated mandatory executions for drug dealers. But economists wondered why Gingrich wanted to decrease the penalty for murder. How does the death penalty for drug dealers decrease the penalty for murder? Think about it this way: Suppose that Gingrich’s bill becomes law and the police bust into an apartment where three drug dealers have hidden their stash. What happens? The drug dealers know that if they give up, they will be put to death. So why not try to kill the police? If the dealers are lucky, they get away. If the dealers are unlucky, they are no worse off than if they didn’t fight because when drug dealing is a capital offense, drug dealers face no additional penalty for murder.

Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, Modern Principles: Microeconomics (3rd Edition), 2015.

June 17, 2018

Blackmailing the Bishop – Blackadder – BBC

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

BBC Comedy Greats
Published on 11 Jan 2010

The baby-eating Bishop of Bath and Wells comes to collect a debt, but finds himself the victim of a fiendish plot.

June 9, 2018

The (formerly) friendly Bobby – “The police have been alienating their erstwhile natural friends for some time”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Patrick West on the long decline in public trust for British police:

Metropolitan Police at G20 protests in London, 2009-04-01
Photo via Wikimedia Commons

In Britain, there have traditionally been two sections of society who dislike the police. One type are radicals – or pseudo-radicals, as epitomised by the capitalist-run store Lush and Rik from The Young Ones – who object to the forces of law’n’order on anarcho-libertarian grounds. The police for them are ‘pigs’. The other type are the working class, or sections of it, who object to the police on account of them poking their nose into private matters that don’t concern them. The police for them have historically been ‘the filth’.

Yet the police are now widely disliked beyond those two demographics. These days, even conservatives and the respectable middle class don’t like the rozzers. A story beyond the hoo-ha over Lush and its anti-police ads might help to explain why.

This year there has been a litany of reports about rape cases collapsing owing to police failing to investigate evidence that would have exonerated the defendants. And this week it was revealed that 47 rape and sexual-assault cases in England and Wales were halted between January and mid-February because evidence was withheld from defence lawyers.

This is not entirely the police’s fault. They have been under political pressure from lobby groups obsessed with attaining rape conviction quotas – as if justice was about achieving statistical targets, rather than punishing guilty individuals and letting innocent individuals go free. As the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper that should be a natural friend of the police, put it: ‘It is hard not to conclude that under pressure to increase conviction rates, the police and prosecutors simply withheld evidence that would help the defence, in order to make a successful prosecution more likely.’

The police have been alienating their erstwhile natural friends for some time. This first became evident at the end of the last century, with the jailing of the Norfolk farmer Tony Martin for shooting dead a burglar who had broken into his home. The consequent outrage in the conservative press stemmed from a belief that the police were now more concerned with the human rights of criminals than with crimes against private property, in this case.

June 2, 2018

The Robinson Affair (that the British establishment would like to “disappear”)

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

If you haven’t been paying attention to the British media, you might not have heard about Tommy Robinson and his crusade to expose the “Asian grooming gangs” that have been left almost undisturbed by the British police, prosecutors and (until very recently indeed) the media:

The controversy around him continued. In March, Robinson was suspended from Twitter, where he had almost half a million followers. The social-media site (which merrily allows terrorist groups like Lashkar e-Taiba to keep accounts) decided that Robinson should be suspended for tweeting out a statistic about Muslim rape gangs that itself originated from the Muslim-run Quilliam foundation. And it is on this matter that the latest episode in the Robinson drama started — and has now drawn worldwide attention.

Ten years ago, when the EDL was founded, the U.K. was even less willing than it is now to confront the issue of what are euphemistically described as “Asian grooming gangs” (euphemistic because no Chinese or Koreans are involved and what is happening is not grooming but mass rape). At the time, only a couple of such cases had been recognized. Ten years on, every month brings news of another town in which gangs of men (almost always of Pakistani origin) have been found to have raped young, often underage, white girls. The facts of this reality — which, it cannot be denied, sounds like something from the fantasies of the most lurid racist — have now been confirmed multiple times by judges during sentencing and also by the most mainstream investigative journalists in the country.

But the whole subject is so ugly and uncomfortable that very few people care to linger over it. Robinson is an exception. For him — as he said in a 2011 interview with the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman — the “grooming gangs” issue isn’t something that afflicts some far-off towns but people in the working-class communities that he knows. And while there are journalists (notably the Times’ Andrew Norfolk) who have spent considerable time and energy bringing this appalling phenomenon to light, most of British society has turned away in a combination of embarrassment, disgust, and uncertainty about how to even talk about this. Anyone who thinks Britain is much further along with dealing with the taboo of “grooming gangs” should remember that only last year the Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, had to leave the shadow cabinet because she accurately identified the phenomenon.

Which brings me to last Friday. That was when Robinson was filming outside Leeds Crown Court, where the latest grooming-gang case was going on. I have to be slightly careful here, because although National Review is based in the U.S., I am not, and there are reporting restrictions on the ongoing case. Anyhow, Robinson was outside the court and appeared (from the full livestream) to be filming the accused and accosting them with questions on their way in. He also appeared to exercise some caution, trying to ensure he was not on court property.

But clearly he did not exercise enough caution, a strange fact given that last year Robinson had been found guilty of “contempt of court” for filming outside another rape-gang trial, one involving four Muslim men at Canterbury Crown Court. On that occasion Robinson was given a three-month prison sentence [PDF], which was suspended for a period of 18 months. Which meant he would be free so long as he did not repeat the offense.

Although Robinson appeared to be careful at Leeds Crown Court last Friday, to dance along the line of exactly what he could or could not livestream outside an ongoing trial with a suspended sentence hanging over his head was extraordinarily unwise. What happened next went around the world: The police turned up in a van and swiftly arrested Robinson for “breach of the peace.” Within hours Robinson had been put before one Judge Geoffrey Marson, who in under five minutes tried, convicted, and sentenced Robinson to 13 months. He was immediately taken to prison.

From that moment it was not just Robinson but the U.K. that entered a minefield of legal problems. In addition to the usual reporting restrictions on the ongoing trial, a reporting ban was put on any mention of Robinson’s arrest, swift trial, and conviction, meaning that for days people in the blogosphere and the international media got free rein to claim that Tommy Robinson had been arrested for no reason, that his arrest was a demonstration of a totalitarian state cracking down on free speech, and even (and this one is remarkably clueless as well as careless) that the recent appointment to the position of home secretary of Sajid Javid — who was born to Muslim parents — is the direct cause of Robinson’s recent arrest.

May 31, 2018

Megan McArdle’s tweetstorm explaining the Reagan coalition to under-35s

Filed under: History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’d embed all of these, except it would take a week for the page to render, so here’s the start of the thread, and the rest will just be copy-pasta’d text:

Fear not, my little chickadees, there will be no spoilers. Except that, as Woddy Allen once remarked of “War and Peace”, “It involves Russia.”

Oh, heck, obviously this tweetstorm is going to be typo-tastic. I think we’re just gonna have to roll with it, folks.

Actually, most of this Tweetstorm is going to be about one small point that I raised in the column, but didn’t have space to explore.

Which is the extent to which those on the left who are under 45, and particularly those who are under 35, fundamentally misunderstand the Reagan coalition, because they don’t remember communism.

There’s a phenomenon in cognitive science called “hindsight bias”. People wildly overestimate their ability to predict events when they know what the outcome was.

Indeed, if you ask them to predict an event, then tell them the outcome, and then ask them what they predicted, some of them will misremember having correctly predicted the outcome.

They will also think they could have predicted an outcome that was designed to be random. Don’t think that you are not one of these people. All of us are, at least to some extent, plagued by hindsight bias. It takes conscious effort to overcome, and you never will, fully.

So once you know that Soviet Communism was doomed to the ash heap of history, because it is an infinitely inferior way of satisfying your society’s basic material needs, you become nearly incapable of imagining what it was like to live in the shadow of the Berlin Wall.

Unless you actually did.

Nonetheless, let me try to explain what it was like to our younger viewers. When I grew up, the Soviet Bloc was just one massive red blob on the map. One that the Soviets had repeatedly demonstrated an interest in expanding.

Whatever you think of American foreign policy post-1945, Soviet foreign policy was like that too, except with nastier. Our client regimes were terrible. Their client regimes were terrible. But we didn’t shoot people to keep them from leaving, or run a totalitarian police state.

It obviously, in hindsight, was not plausible to think that they were going to take over the whole world. They didn’t have the resources. But alas, we did not get the benefit of hindsight when it was happening. Almost until the Wall came down, people were predicting convergence.

There was a large, expansionist power. They were basically singlehandedly keeping Cuba afloat, subsidizing actual, honest-to-God communist groups that wanted to bring the rugged splendors of life without consumer goods to America, and oh, had a history of invading their neighbors

And then there were the nukes. So true, funny story–they were phasing out nuclear drills when I was in grammar school, because someone in the NYC Department of Ed had realized there’s not much point in drilling to become radioactive vapor. Pretty much just happens naturally.

But I had an older teacher who insisted on telling us to get under our desks if the Bomb hit. Also, inexplicably, to tuck our pants into our socks to protect us from fallout.

“I’m afraid your daughter is dead, Mrs. McArdle. But just look at those pristine ankles!”

Were Red Dawn and Top Gun over the top and a little silly? Yes. But folks in the 1980s (at least those of the appropriate age for viewing such things) didn’t watch them *ironically*. They believed the Soviets wanted to bury us. Because they had said stuff like “We will bury you”

We grew up actually afraid that the Soviet Union was going to turn our country into a sheet of radioactive glass. In hindsight, seems obviously overblown, but again: *we didn’t have hindsight*.

Also, even in the 1980s, there was a delusional portion of the left that actually thought life was better for ordinary people in the Soviet Union. That portion had, thankfully, gotten smaller after Hungary. But there was a larger portion that thought maybe it wasn’t really worse.

To be clear, I’m not talking about “Democrats”. I’m talking about hard leftists who I grew up with on the Upper West Side. They existed, and were kind of noisy.

And then there was a larger still part of the left that wasn’t Marxist, but thought that the things they were concerned about, like gender inequality and racism, didn’t exist under communism, or were better.

(NARRATOR: they existed. They weren’t better)

They thought these things because it’s hard to get good information about a police state. People saw America’s oppressions being reported on the front pages of American newspapers, and concluded that they must be worse than places we had no information on.

The existence of various sorts of at least vaguely communist-sympathetic folks inside the country, and an eerie background expectation that at any moment, a large, Imperialist communist power outside our borders might vaporize you, made this a very, very politically salient issue

If you are trying to interpret the Reagan Right without understanding the large emotional impact that this had on voters, you are getting it badly wrong.

As an aside, as I also mentioned in this column, this is *ALSO* true of people who aren’t old enough to remember urban crime in the 1980s.

I was mugged for the first time at the age of 8. In the girl’s bathroom of my grammar school. Which was supposedly the safest on the UWS.

A kid in my high school class was hospitalized after a gang of boys his own age beat and mugged him. At 10 in the morning. Off of Park Avenue.

It’s easy to have a complex, nuanced, high-level response to crime when you’re reading about crime statistics. When you are actually personally, viscerally afraid of being hurt or killed every time you walk out of your front door, your reaction tends not to be so measured.

Was there a racialized aspect to politicians talking about crime? Absolutely. That was not, however, the only thing driving it. When politicians ranted about crime, what they were often really actually talking about was … crime. Which was genuinely scary for everyone.

Which is why, as the excellent “Locking Up Our Own” documents, so many “tough on crime” laws that did huge and disproportionate damage to young black men were originated or supported by the black community. They were most at risk from law enforcement, but also from crime.

We can argue over how important “the Southern Strategy” was to the GOP’s rise. But you can’t argue that race was the whole story. Or even the overwhelming majority of the story. There was a lot going on.

But some of those problems faded, largely of their own accord. And the generation that doesn’t remember them first-hand tends to discount those problems that faded, leaving only the problem which is still with us, to which they overattribute Reagan’s success.

The left frequently suggests that conservatives are insufficiently imaginative when discussing the problems of the poor, leaving out huge areas of complexity and nuance. They’re right. I see young lefties making the same error about the problems of their parents & grandparents.

It’s one part hindsight bias (“*I’d* have known this wasn’t that big a threat”) and one part the simple difficulty of imagining how something feels if you haven’t lived it.

May 29, 2018

“[T]here’s just no way that we’re going to get to fentanyl harm reduction without [legalization]”

Filed under: Health, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall reports on a recent Nebraska drug bust involving enough fentanyl “to kill 26 million people” (that is, about 120 lbs of the stuff) and explains why the current enforcement regime is going to have to change:

Now, I’m in favour of all of these drugs being legalised anyway. It’s the idiot’s body, up to them what they ingest in whatever manner. If it kills them, well, their choice. The argument that they shouldn’t therefore we must prevent them doesn’t cut much ice with me.

But put that aside and think in a utilitarian manner. If we can prevent overdoses and wasted lives then we should. But only if how we’re going to do it is better than the results of either not doing so or even using some other manner of dealing with the problem.

It’s arguable that clamping down on certain illegal drugs does at least limit their penetration of the market. I don’t think this is true of heroin but perhaps it is potentially true. It’s absolutely not true of fentanyl. For that’s a synthetic opioid. A decent chemist can synthesise it – a good one can make the precursors as well. There is no need to get opium, morphine or any other poppy related product that we already control.

It’s also, as we can see, alarmingly cheap already. Easy to smuggle in vast quantities of doses.

There’s another problem with it. The difference between a dose that gives a high and one that kills is pretty narrow. And it’s an extremely potent drug as well. Quantities for either are small – smaller than can generally be measured by users with candles and teaspoons.

It’s cheap, easy enough to make, has no precursors we can control, kills easily enough and dosage is alarmingly difficult to get right. So, what do we do?

We’re not going to get rid of it for all of the above reasons. So, we need to do damage limitation. Stopping people from dying from it sounds like a pretty good idea actually. And that means that we need it to be pure and in known dosages. That is, we need it to be legal.

I think all drugs should be legal, hey, your body and all that. But even if you think that harm reduction is a more important goal there’s just no way that we’re going to get to fentanyl harm reduction without legality of it. For that’s the only way we will get it in known doses which don’t kill people. And we’re most assuredly going to keep getting it even if we don’t legalise it. Our choices are people tooting on illegal fentanyl and dying or people tooting on legal fentayl and not dying. Not such a toughie that question, is it?

May 17, 2018

QotD: Emotion beats the facts (to post on social media)

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Suppose a black guy is shot by a cop. I have absolutely no information about it. I don’t know if the black guy was shot, for example, accidentally or in a conflict. I don’t know if he was armed or not. I don’t know if the cop shooting is black or white.

I know nothing about it.

Now — should I have an opinion on this matter?

The obvious answer is “No, I should not,” but that’s not the real answer.

In this #HotTake non-culture culture, I should definitely have an opinion.

Based on what, if i have no information?

Based upon my tribal sympathies and chauvinisms, is the answer.

See, anyone can condemn a cop shooting once they know the actual facts and the facts turn out to show that the victim was innocent and the cop was blameworthy, fast on the trigger or negligent or what have you.

But if I wait to know the facts, what does that say about me as a person? It says nothing about me — again, anyone can see the facts of a bad shooting and then say “That was a bad shooting.”

No — to establish yourself as on a higher moral plane than other people, You have to offer a strident, emotionally-hot opinion without knowing anything.

Because only if you don’t have the proper facts upon which to make that determination can you successfully advertise the fact that you are knee-jerkedly siding with BlackLivesMatter.

(Or, for that matter, with cops, if that’s your preference.)

Again, this is not a game of showing that you’ve come to a reasoned judgment after the evidence has emerged and you have apprised yourself of it.

Bad people can use the power of reason too, after all. Racists can see a shooting was bad, if the evidence proves the shooting was bad.

The game is not to make a reasoned, fact-based judgment — because that says nothing about your default sympathies, tribal allegiances, and ideological priors.

The game is to make an unreasoned, non-fact-based judgment, a judgment based only on emotion and allegiance and chauvinism — because that, unlike a fact-based judgment, shows where your heart is.

That’s why people in the #HotTake culture pressure others to take positions before any facts are actually known — facts are for the emotionally cold.

Ace, “Our #HotTake Culture and Why It Exists, and Open Thread”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2016-08-26.

May 13, 2018

Title IX complaints as a form of Prisoner’s Dilemma

Filed under: Education, Law, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The more I read about Title IX, the more I wonder why university students dare risk mingling with the opposite sex under any circumstances outside class:

The University of Cincinnati suspended a female student for allegedly engaging in nonconsensual sex with a male student who claimed he was too drunk at the time to approve the encounter.

The fact that this case involves a male accuser (“John Doe”) and a female aggressor (“Jane Roe”) makes it unusual among Title IX complaints. (Title IX is the federal statute that forbids sex discrimination in schools.) But the female student’s lawsuit against Cincinnati — which accuses the university of violating her due process rights — reveals something even odder: Roe had previously filed a sexual misconduct complaint against one of Doe’s friends.

Roe’s lawsuit, then, suggests that Doe filed the complaint against Roe as a kind of revenge for getting his friend in trouble. (I have an alternative theory, but I’ll save that for the end.)

“On information and belief, John Doe was motivated to file a Title IX Complaint in retaliation for a prior Title X Complaint Jane Roe had filed against his friend,” according to the suit.

Roe also contends that it was ridiculous to find her guilty of nonconsensual sex because of Doe’s drunkenness, but not find Doe guilty too: Roe was also drunk at the time, so under the rules she was just as unable to consent to sex as he was. While this might seem like a paradox — how can two young people rape each other? — it would actually be a straightforward application of affirmative consent, which requires all participants in a sexual encounter to proactively obtain freely given and unambiguous consent before proceeding.

[…]

According to The Cincinnati Enquirer, Roe said that she was being punished for “engaging in the same sexual freedoms that men on the campus enjoy.” It might be more accurate to say she is being held to the same standard — a standard that is, for many reasons, horrible.

Roe’s theory that Doe’s complaint was a form of revenge is interesting, and it could be true. Perhaps the whole thing was a setup — he lured her to his bedroom, feigned drunkenness, and initiated sexual contact, fully intending to race to the Title IX office the next day, no-one-wounds-me-with-impunity style.

Here’s an alternative theory: Doe woke up, realized they had engaged in sexual activity while they were both drunk, and feared that she would file a complaint against him, as she had done to his friend. Panic-stricken, he felt he had no choice but to beat her to the punch.

Indeed, if you suspect you are going to become the subject of a Title IX investigation, the optimal strategy may very well be to file the first complaint. For reasons not completely clear to me, Title IX administrators often appear biased in favor of the initial complainant, and presume the other party is the wrongdoer.

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