Quotulatiousness

August 30, 2011

Trivializing rape

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:23

Wendy McElroy points out how the underlying messages of the SlutWalkers have overwhelmed the original intent:

One message: It is fabulous for women to publicly flaunt their sexuality but an intolerable offense if men respond nonviolently. Wolf-whistles are taken as an attack. Disapproving or overly approving comments from men are an assault. But isn’t provoking a response the entire purpose of wearing fishnet stockings topped by a leather bustier?

Another message, as pointed out by Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail: “Slutwalks are what you get when graduate students in feminist studies run out of things to do.” In other words, SlutWalks are an expression of privileged women who mistake a costume party for a political cause. While Iranian women fight for the right to pursue an education, North American feminists fight to reclaim pride in the word “slut.” SlutWalk is an extreme expression of mainstream feminism’s political impoverishment.

Yet SlutWalkers proclaim they are performing a political service by protesting the trivialization of rape. Nonsense. They are using the ill-considered words of one ignorant policeman as a reason to throw a street party.

I do not begrudge anyone having a good time but as a woman who has experienced rape, I object to the political agenda being attached to a costume party. I object to the posters and attitudes that vilify men as predators. I do so because I was attacked by one man, not by mankind, and when I was helped, it was by men. I object to the notion that women do not bear any responsibility for controlling their circumstances, such as attire. I object to rape being trivialized by associating it with sluttiness and making it part of a celebration.

August 24, 2011

The origins of the “perp walk”

Filed under: Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

Tim Black outlines the Dominique Strauss-Kahn media drama, and explains the origin of the “perp walk”:

The whole tawdry affair looks to be petering out to a rather murky conclusion. Still, whatever else DSK might or might not have done, he has undoubtedly performed one vital function. That of the scapegoat. Historically, scapegoating referred to the ritual of investing an animal, a goat say, with the sins of the village, and then casting the burdened animal out. DSK, so-called, seems to have served a similar function. Strauss-Kahn was to be symbolically sent out of the community, taking the sins of men, especially French political ones, with him.

Nowhere was this strangely modern ritual more apparent than in the so-called perp walk. Introduced by FBI director Edgar Hoover in the 1920s to bolster public support for prosecutions, and used most famously with mobsters Alvin Karpis and Harry Campbell, it involves tipping off the press that the accused is about to be moved from one location to another. So as the ‘perp’ is walking between, for example, the jail and the police station, photographers appear to snap the accused in all their humiliation and shame. Yet although the perp walk has a long, ignoble, not to mention justice-thwarting history, it only really came into its own under then US attorney Rudolph Giuliani (a future mayor of New York) who, during the 1980s Wall Street-insider trading scandals, transformed it into a deliberately unceremonious ceremony. For example, in February 1987, handcuffed trader Richard Wigton was photographed weeping as he was marched from the trading floor of Kidder, Peabody & Co.

The purpose of the perp walk is worryingly clear. From the handcuffs to the embarrassment induced in the accused, we are encouraged to see the guilt before it has been proved. It is a spectacle designed to elicit condemnation — regardless of whether that condemnation is deserved or not. Strauss-Kahn’s perp walk was no exception. Snapped in all his handcuffed, unshaven and fallen-faced infamy as he was taken to a police station to be charged, the watching world was invited to see him as guilty, his sullen shame writ large in every defensive stride.

August 19, 2011

Cage match: Jason Kenney against Amnesty International

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

Paul Wells on the ongoing war of words between Canada’s immigration minister and the earnest folks at Amnesty International:

Some stories are so odd nobody knows how to handle them. I don’t know how else to explain why Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s extraordinary public feud with Amnesty International has attracted so little coverage.

Here’s a senior Conservative minister departing from the Conservatives’ normal bland talking points and unleashing a written broadside against a critic. And Kenney’s sparring partner wasn’t a predictable target. It was the Canadian branch of Amnesty, one of the most revered human rights organizations in the world. But that didn’t stop the minister from calling Amnesty’s concerns “poppycock,” “sloppy and irresponsible” and “self-congratulatory moral preening.”

Here’s what the fuss was about: last month, Kenney and Public Safety Minister Vic Toews released the names and photos of 30 fugitives who’d evaded immigration authorities since being found inadmissible because they’re believed to be complicit in genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes. In short, the ministers were asking the public to help track down fleeing war crimes suspects. The public has stepped up: since the ministers’ announcements, six of the 30 men have been apprehended and three of those six deported.

August 15, 2011

QotD: Trying to look tough once the fight is over

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:05

It’s hard to know which is more pathetic: the short-lived cheap bravado of those looters (which sometimes turned to weeping and wailing in court); or the belated show of phoney toughness from government ministers and police chiefs. The authorities have put on a hardman act in the days since the riot — from staging theatrical police raids to sending chumps to jail for months for stealing chewing gum or bottled water — to try to cover up the institutional impotence they displayed when it mattered, in the middle of the trouble that began in London last week.

The more canny looters wore face masks to hide their true identities. The authorities have now donned an iron mask in a desperate bid to conceal the confusion, fear and moral cowardice in high places that was exposed at the time. Everybody is up in arms about the way that rioters allegedly exploited BBM (Blackberry Messenger) and other social media to promote their illegitimate ‘cause’. The government meanwhile has been busy exploiting the weakness of the MSM (Mainstream Media) to get the dubious message of their ‘fightback’ across to their target audience.

Those braggartly idiots who posed for grinning Facebook photos with their hoard of stolen loot have naturally attracted ridicule and contempt. There has been little or no criticism of the way that the authorities have contrived swaggering media coverage of small armies of riot cops raiding suspected looters’ homes, supposedly to show that they are in control and did not really panic when faced with a few hundred barely organised looters and arsonists.

Mick Hume, “Theatrical ‘fightback’ turns to farce”, Spiked, 2011-08-15

August 12, 2011

“The riots have confirmed … the gaping chasm between Britain’s elites and its white working-class natives.”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:30

The problem, according to the governing class, is not the rioters — it’s the people who want to stop the rioters:

And so it has been this week, which kicked off with reckless rioting by multi-ethnic yoof in inner-city patches, yet which ended, bizarrely but at the same time predictably, with an orgy of elite handwringing about those non-rioting white working classes who haunt London’s suburbs. That some of ‘these people’ dared to patrol their streets, to set up miniature citizen armies to see off the chancers and tricksters of the looting lobby, has been treated as the No.1 threat now facing Britain. They are a ‘white mob’, we are told, who could precipitate a ‘race war’. According to the deputy mayor of London, Kit Malthouse, their community-protection antics are ‘deeply undesirable’. Come on Kit, you can say it: you think these people are ‘undesirables’.

This riotous week has confirmed that the great and the good of Great Britain don’t have much in the way of a shared morality anymore. At the start of the week, the political class, cops and Fourth Estate all proffered various explanations for the youthful violence, often pointing the finger of blame at each other in a moral stand-off not dissimilar to the final scene in Reservoir Dogs. Yet by Friday they were tentatively re-linking arms around the one thing they agree on: that there is nothing scarier — nothing — than the sight of 100+ white blokes on the streets, shouting things in those gruff voices they have. You may have looked at the groups of men in Enfield and Eltham and seen working people keen to protect their homes and shops, but the upper echelons of society, through their snob-goggles, saw the emergence of an English version of the Third Reich — they saw ‘race hate’ and ‘fascists patrolling the streets’.

[. . .]

Note to the cultural elite: Just because someone is white and possibly a labourer and not currently glued to the American remake of The Killing, that doesn’t mean he is a fascist. The police’s PR assault on the ‘vigilantes’ in Enfield and Eltham, suburbs with large white working-class communities, shows that what the cops lack in riot-tackling skills they more than make up for with shamelessness. This is a force so paralysed by risk-aversion, so witlessly scared of provoking controversy, that this week it effectively stood back and allowed young people to loot shops, burn cars and destroy homes. It seems that in the morally inverted world of the modern police, such destruction is a price worth paying if it means their own officers don’t get a graze or PTSD. Upon what moral authority is the Met now telling working people not to patrol their communities? Cops bussed into a suburb might consider it acceptable to allow youth to smash things up in the hope that they’ll eventually tire, but for the people who live in those suburbs, who have a moral, emotional and economic attachment to them, that really isn’t an option. It takes brazenness to a brand new level for a state which failed to police the streets to libel those citizens who decided to do it for themselves.

Now a chilly, damp banana republic?

Filed under: Britain, Law, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

Allister Heath tries to point out the real damages from this past week’s rioting:

What a year of contrast this has been for the UK. A few months ago, the world looked on longingly as we put on a marvellous, heart-warming show for the royal wedding, in a brilliant piece of PR highlighting the continuity and stability of Britain’s institutions, a valuable commodity in a troubled world. Today, all eyes are on us once again — but this time, the message is one of incompetence, chaos and decline.

From royal fairytale to banana republic in one summer: it has been a shameful, embarrassing disaster, not just for the tourism industries but also for foreign direct investment.

He also points out that more has changed than the blackened, burnt-out shopfronts:

The public’s mood has changed irrevocably; on crime and punishment, social attitudes will have hardened permanently as a result of the past week’s events. Strong speeches from the prime minister are a step in the right direction, as is the much more effective policing of the past 48 hours, but the public wants real, permanent change, not just temporary, emergency measures. A YouGov poll found that 85 per cent of the public believe that most of those taking part in the riots will go unpunished — they have lost faith in the system. This is understandable: it also reflects the perception of the thugs themselves. Criminal activity is far more rational than people believe, especially in wealthy societies such as ours: there is a lot of empirical and statistical work that shows that criminals implicitly weigh up the costs and benefits of crime. A high probability and cost of detection reduces crime, all other things equal; a low likelihood of detection, a low likely cost (such as a negligible prison sentence or a caution, as has too often been the case in the past) and a larger payoff (flat screen TVs or expensive trainers) raises it. Many of those storming shops made that very calculation this week, albeit implicitly and in some cases incorrectly.

No matter how much the public’s opinion has hardened, it’s the opinions of the governing class that will make the most difference, and there’s been mixed indications in the British press from that sector. Opinions have shifted, when even the Guardian can run articles that fail to exonerate the rioters, but there’s no guarantee that opinion has shifted far enough for changes to be made. A few more “tough” speeches from the PM and the Lord Mayor are not change: they’re a substitute for action, unless the pressure increases for real change to be implemented.

H/T to Tom Kelley for sending me this link. He responded to Mr Heath’s article:

Welcome to Detroit circa 1960, a once-vibrant community and global center of employment, now reduced to a ghost-town where serious consideration is being given to bulldozing entire neighborhoods and letting them return to nature. The past 50 years of unchecked, continuous, Democrat Party and labor union rule have resulted in what many saw right from the start as an inevitable outcome.

There’s no need for me to go on at length about Detroit, as the details of this downfall are well-recorded, even in the most biased of historical and news accounts.

What’s left of England has a choice, Detroit or the metropolitan areas of Texas (Dallas, Houston, Austin . . . ), two sides of a coin that were roughly equal in 1960, and couldn’t be farther apart today.

I’m sure that in England as well as in Detroit, the ill-fated plans started out with the best of intentions, but as is frequently the case, the well-intended plans completely ignored the reality of human nature, that when offered a free-ride, too many of the otherwise-capable will take it, leaving too few to provide the ride.

The class warfare that served the Left well as a political tool in elections, has led to its own inevitable result, real warfare, both in your current riots, and ours during the late sixties. I fear that we in the States are due for another round of riots when fiscal reality slams the door on the undelivered utopia promised in 2008.

Study Detroit thoroughly and decide wisely my friend, the future of England depends upon it.

Update: Well, well, well. This might be an indication that things really are starting to change:

A London council is trying to evict a tenant whose son has appeared in court charged in connection with rioting and looting at Clapham Junction.

Wandsworth Council is serving the tenant with an eviction notice — the first stage in the eviction process.

The tenant is believed to be the first in England to face losing their council-owned home as a result of this week’s disturbances.

Neither the tenant nor their son can be named at this stage for legal reasons.

I’m not keen on the idea that they’re starting eviction proceedings based on only a charge rather than a conviction, but they claim they’ll drop the process if he’s found innocent.

August 11, 2011

You have to wonder why it took them this long

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

The New York City police department announced that it’s setting up a group to monitor Facebook, Twitter, and other social media in order to detect criminals who are stupid enough to boast about their crimes online:

According to The New York Daily News, freshly-appointed assistant commissioner Kevin O’Connor — styled as the NYPD’s “online and gang guru” — will head the new unit, which will trawl Web 2.0 for information on “troublesome house parties, gang showdowns, and other potential mayhem”.

The idea is to pinpoint net-savvy un-savvy juveniles who divulge their criminal plans on the web or boast about crimes already committed. You might think of them as Idiots 2.0.

In his former post with a north Manhattan gang unit, O’Connor apparently tapped the net for vital information on “a number” of shooting cases. In March, the Daily News says, the NYPD nabbed an eighteen-year-old who was part of a fatal beating after he boasted about the killing on Facebook.

Everything you need to know about the typical UK looter

Filed under: Britain, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:12

… is contained in this Guardian article about the “fast track justice” system being used to process the arrestees:

One of the people dealt with by the court overnight included a woman with 96 previous convictions for theft who pleaded guilty to stealing alcohol, cigarettes and mobile phone accessories.

Linda Boyd, 31, was one of a series of defendants who appeared before Manchester magistrates court, which sat late into the night on Wednesday.

The court heard that she was drunk and had found an orange bin liner filled with the stolen goods in Manchester city centre, and began dragging it away, intending to share it with friends.

Her case was adjourned until 16 August, when she will be sentenced at Manchester crown court. Boyd stalked from the glass-walled dock telling the district judge who presided over the magistrates court to “go away, shut up.”

Yes, you did read that right, “a woman with 96 previous convictions for theft” was one of the people arrested in the aftermath of a night of rioting. That was 96 convictions, not arrests or charges. That’s an example of the sort of people who were delighted to discover that the police weren’t cracking down on vandalism or looting, and decided to get in on the act.

July 28, 2011

Is Breivik sane enough to prosecute?

Filed under: Europe, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

Douglas Murray points out that Breivik’s actions even before the attacks would have marked him as insane:

Anders Behring Breivik believed himself a Knight Templar and awarded himself various military ranks accordingly. He also believed that he and other self-described Islamophobic racists had common cause with jihadis and that the USA has a Jewish problem. So even before he planted a car bomb in a civilian area and gunned down scores of young people, it would have been clear to anyone who bothered to question him that Breivik was insane.

Of course, no discussion of the Oslo massacre is complete without considering the media reaction:

But in the coverage since his atrocities first broke on to the world, two troubling tendencies have converged. The first is the search for reason in a mind that was clearly a stranger to it. The second is the tendency — particularly strong on the left — to use any horrific act as a megaphone for existing prejudices. In the aftermath of the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford in January, the left-wing media and politicians hunted for the right-wingers who they claimed had inspired the attack. That the gunman was not only a loner but a psychotic maniac was largely ignored as they rushed off excitedly to attack their ideological enemies. And so it is with Breivik.

For the past decade and more, every time an Islamist has blown something up, a chorus of voices — mainly from the left — has rightly said that ‘we shouldn’t jump to any conclusions’. But this time it was different. The Labour MP Tom Harris observed, with great frankness, that a ‘palpable relief that swept through the left when the identity of the terrorist was made known… Here, thank God, was a terrorist we can all hate without equivocation: white, Christian and far right-wing. Phew.’ So never mind not jumping to conclusions. When it seemed to emerge that, among many other things, the killer also claimed to be opposed to immigration and was fearful of Islam, that jump became a great leap towards group blame.

July 21, 2011

This is why the British media is wall-to-wall Murdochmania

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Andrew Orlowski explains how the show trial of Rupert Murdoch has sucked the oxygen out of every other story in the British media:

For the past fortnight, TV and newspaper editors in the UK have pushed aside stories of famine and the European financial crisis — which is greater now than the credit crunch three years ago — in favour of saturation coverage of the troubles of a rival media company.

This rival has real troubles, to be sure, which I will not attempt to diminish. But the volume and intensity of coverage is defined by the real size and reach of News Corporation. And this is not reality, but a myth. Just as children want a Santa, so too do editors and Prime Ministers want a “Murdoch” that resembles the omniscient movie villain/myth Keyser Soze. They’ve defined themselves by this myth.

“Never again should we let a media group get too powerful,” PM David Cameron said today, tuning in to the editors’ mood music. But like so many politicians before him, and specifically the past two Prime Ministers, he has done everything he could to bolster the Murdoch Myth himself. For most of the past two decades, politicians have tugged their forelocks at the Aussie-born tycoon, increasing his perceived influence with each pull.

Haven’t they got the memo about Old Media being dead? Why are they so worried?

July 18, 2011

“We used to talk to career criminals all the time. They were our sources”

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:15

A look inside the News of the World newsroom before the closure:

“It was the kind of place you get out of and you never want to go back again.” That’s how one former reporter describes the News of the World newsroom under editor Rebekah Brooks, the ferociously ambitious titian-haired executive who ran Britain’s top-selling Sunday tabloid from 2000 to 2003.

Journalists who worked there in that period describe an industrialized operation of dubious information-gathering, reporters under intense pressure attempting to land exclusive stories by whatever means necessary, and a culture of fear, cynicism, gallows humor and fierce internal competition.

“We used to talk to career criminals all the time. They were our sources,” says another former reporter from the paper who also worked for Murdoch’s daily tabloid, the Sun. “It was a macho thing: ‘My contact is scummier than your contact.’ It was a case of: ‘Mine’s a murderer!’ On the plus side, we always had a resident pet nutter around in case anything went wrong.”

Moral outrage is a bad source of legislative impetus

Filed under: Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:53

Steve Chapman attempts to explain why the multiple “Caylee’s Law” proposals in many state legislatures are uniformly bad ideas that will become bad laws:

It was once suggested, as a general rule of staying alive, never to fly on an airline named after a state or the owner. As a general rule of sound government, it’s also a good idea never to enact a law named after a person. Personalizing criminal law usually stems from fruitless outrage at a freakish event.

Plenty of legislators are ignoring that risk. Their proposals, all going by the name “Caylee’s Law,” are an understandable response to the acquittal of Casey Anthony of killing her 2-year-old daughter. Swearing when you stub your toe is also understandable, which doesn’t mean it will do your toe the slightest good.

[. . .]

Targeting parents who fail to report missing kids on a government-approved schedule will probably accomplish nothing useful. Conscientious adults with grounds for concern already call the cops. But the change would burden police with trivial cases that would soon resolve themselves.

Already kids are reported missing at the rate of more than half a million a year, usually because they run away or neglect to tell parents where they are. A 2002 Justice Department study noted that “all but a very small percentage are recovered fairly quickly.”

But a mother whose son has a habit of absconding and reappearing could go to prison for exercising sensible patience. A divorced dad whose ex-wife gets angry when he’s tardy returning the kids from a weekend outing could give new meaning to “custodial parent.”

July 1, 2011

Canadian and US judicial differences

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:49

Conrad Black, who is now very well-versed in the oddities of American court practices, contrasts them with their Canadian equivalents:

This brings me, most happily, to the subject of Canada Day, 2011. I regret to have to write that I have also discovered in this mundane Odyssey that Canada, too, has its share of obtuse judges. But it does not actively encourage pre-trial media lynchings; requires a plausible test before charges are laid and not just the mockery of the grand jury; has reasonably even and impartial procedural rules; the defence speaks last in trials; acquittals are not immediately reversible for sentencing purposes; few prosecutors revert to the private sector in Canada, and very few become politicians; and most judges are not, as they are in the United States, ex-prosecutors. And in Canada, the prison and prosecution industry is not a Frankenstein Monster that incarcerates 1% of all adults as in the United States (only about one-sixth of that, in Canada), or more African-Americans of university age than there are in university, as in the United States. And in Canada, the number of people with “a record,” (even if for impaired driving 10 years ago, or being disorderly at a fraternity party 30 years ago), is not 15% of the entire population, as it is in the United States (47 million people, none of whom is eligible, for that reason, to enter Canada, even on a family holiday to look at the Calgary Stampede).

Canada is not a prosecutocracy amok in a carceral state, and the United States, no matter how fervently tens of millions of Americans may stand, hand over heart, singing their splendid anthems on Monday, is. Above all other things, if I were in Canada this weekend, and a Canadian citizen, I would celebrate the country’s good fortune in having 33 million relatively well-adjusted people in a mighty treasure house of a country, a steadily more geopolitically enviable condition as the developing world, led by China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil, four of the five most populous countries, with 40% of the world’s population, consistently put up six to 10% annual economic growth rates, and buy Canada’s resources. Canadians can also celebrate their good fortune that there was never an economic justification for slavery in Canada; that its only close neighbour has not been militarily aggressive, and that it has the official languages of two of the world’s very greatest cultures.

June 30, 2011

Does exposure to porn increase the incidence of rape?

Filed under: Law, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:54

In brief, it appears not:

But while theorising is all very well, it is necessary occasionally to fine-tune such theories by looking at the empirical evidence. And the most obvious fact about porn and rape is that reported rape incidence — at least in the United States, where a National Crime Victimization Survey takes place every year — has been falling in recent decades as porn becomes ever more available.

[. . .]

Now yes, it is absolutely true that correlation and causation are not the same thing. But at first glance we’d have a hard time claiming that the greater availability of porn led to more rapes: simply because there are fewer rapes reported while there’s definitely more porn.

[. . .]

In D’Amato’s paper, he uses Freakonomics-style statistics (one of his colleagues wrote the Freakonomics abortion and crime paper with Levitt) to try to tease out evidence of something more than just correlation.

What he found is that the lower the internet penetration in 2004 in a US state, the higher the rape rate had risen and that the higher the internet penetration, the lower rate had fallen.

We expect, for those societal reasons, that the reported rape rate will have risen over the time period. And where there’s no or limited internet access, it has. Where there is high internet access it has fallen, the fall being greater than the general societal rise.

Thus we have an empirical connection between internet access and lower rape figures. Whether it’s porn or not is a different matter: they could all be playing Second Life instead. An unlikely way to bet though really.

June 28, 2011

When headline writers go feral, or a typical day at The Register

Filed under: Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:44

I mean, really. How else can you describe an article headlined like this:

Drunken bust-up woman sprays cops with breast milk
Ohio jub juice bandit faces substantial rack of charges

An Ohio woman is facing a substantial rack of charges after allegedly getting drunk at a wedding reception, assaulting her husband and then spraying cops with breast milk.

Stephanie Robinette, 30, (pictured) was cuffed in the early hours of Saturday morning outside a banqueting hall in Westville. Delaware County sheriff’s deputies responded to a call that she was having a bit of a ding-dong with her other half.

Having allegedly whacked her husband various times, an “intoxicated” Robinette locked herself in their car, and refused to get out when officers moved in with the cuffs.

According to the Columbus Dispatch, Robinette loudly declared she was a breastfeeding mother, “removed her right breast from her dress and began spraying deputies and the car with her breast milk”.

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