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 25, 2011

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

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

June 20, 2011

Radley Balko dispels a few myths about the justice system

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:50

In his new column at the Huffington Post, Radley Balko discusses some common myths in US criminal justice:

Myth 1: You Can’t Be Tried More Than Once For The Same Crime

The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that no person shall “be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.” This protection against “double jeopardy” is intended to prevent the government from retrying the same defendant over and over until prosecutors can get a conviction.

But there are some exceptions. First, the protection only comes into play once a jury has convicted or acquitted a defendant. So in trials that end with a hung jury or a mistrial, the prosecution can usually bring the same charges again. One particularly egregious example is Curtis Flowers of Mississippi, who has been tried an incredible six times for the murder of four people in 1996.

Second, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the government can charge a defendant with both a crime and the conspiracy to commit that crime without violating the constitutional prohibition on double jeopardy. This gives the government two opportunities to convict for is essentially the same offense. Conspiracy is often easier to prove than the underlying crime. It also gives prosecutors a way to rope in alleged offenses they can no longer charge separately due to statutes of limitations.

Finally, there is the “separate sovereigns” exception to double jeopardy. This allows a defendant to be tried, convicted and sentenced for the same crime in both state and federal court. The most well-known example of the separate sovereigns exception is when the Los Angeles police officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted in state court, then convicted in federal court of violating King’s civil rights.

June 18, 2011

Is it right to name and shame the Vancouver “fans”?

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

Ken at Popehat discusses the charges that outing the misbehaving fans on Facebook is somehow “vigilantism”:

Vigilantism: Exposing people to the social consequences of their misbehavior is not vigilantism. Subjecting them to physical danger is. That’s why decent people involved in this process don’t post home addresses or phone numbers, and delete them when they are posted.

Proportionality: The proportionality argument is at least somewhat misguided. First of all, bad behavior doesn’t go viral on the internet unless it’s really notable. Garden-variety assholes don’t get top Google ranking. You’ve got to be somewhat epic to draw this modern infamy — by, say, being a water polo star on a scholarship trying to torch a cop car because your hockey team lost. Second, lack of proportionality is self-correcting. If conduct is actually just not that bad, then future readers who Google a bad actor’s name will review the evidence and say “meh, that’s not so bad. Everyone acts up now and then.” Saying that bad behavior should not be easily accessible on the internet is an appeal for enforced ignorance, a request for a news blackout. It’s saying, in effect, I’m more wise and measured than all the future people who might read about this; they can’t be trusted to evaluate this person’s actions in the right light, like I can.

“They Just Made A Mistake”: The argument that bad actors shouldn’t become infamous because they “just made a mistake” is a riff on proportionality. The same criticisms apply: it takes a hell of a mistake to go viral, and future viewers can make up their own minds. Plus, this argument is often sheer bullshit. Trying to torch a cop car because your hockey team lost is not a mere faux pas; normal and decent people don’t do it.

June 12, 2011

QotD: A scene from an Australian National Park

Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Environment, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:53

A few years ago, two National Park rangers were doing a similar service while assorted tourists looked on and took their happy-snaps. The birds, whatever they were, had moved along the road a few yards when a dingo walked out of the long grass, killed one and started to stalk the remainder.

The two Rangers became embroiled in an ideological argument as to which protected specie was to be left alone. The tourists, appalled at the slaughter, then chased the dingo away. The Rangers were instantly reconciled and started issuing citations to the offending tourists for trespassing in a National Park, threatening protected species, obstructing traffic, affray, foul language etc. The tourists were told their cars could be impounded and all, eventually, got court summonses. Fines were levied and they were warned that the offences potentially carried jail time.

One disgruntled victim opined that he should have run over the Rangers and the birds. This was overheard by ‘authority’ and he was hauled into court again.

Visitor numbers at the National Park declined dramatically.

Roger Henry, posting to Railroad_Modeling_Still_Makes_Me_Grumpy@yahoogroups.com, 2011-06-11

June 6, 2011

SlutWalk arrives in Britain

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

Brendan O’Neill is not impressed with the SlutWalkers, calling them “the most anti-social sluts on earth”:

The most annoying thing about the SlutWalk phenomenon, which arrived in Britain at the weekend, is not its knowingly provocative name or even its attempt to make a serious political project of the frazzled Nineties pop trend of Girl Power (“I wear sexy stuff, therefore I am powerful!”). No, it is its inherently anti-social nature. These are the most anti-social sluts on earth. Where I grew up, the catty phrase “she enjoys the company of men” was often used as a euphemism for “slut”, but you could never say that of those taking part in SlutWalk. On the contrary, many of the SlutWalkers seem to see interaction with men — especially cocky, swaggering men — as a dangerous and risky thing, best avoided.

Of course, no one — except maybe Peter Sutcliffe — disagrees with SlutWalk’s spectacularly uncontroversial message that women should be free to dress as they please without getting raped. But it is quite different to expect to be able to dress as you please without attracting *any* attention from blokes. Yet that is what some SlutWalkers seem to be demanding: effectively the right to dress provocatively without ever being looked at, commented on, whistled at or spoken to by a member of the opposite sex. Unless such interaction is clearly solicited, of course.

[. . .]

The high-minded feminists who make up SlutWalk’s supporters and cheerleaders seem to want to opt out of this everyday social interaction, to dress as sluttishly as they like while also being surrounded by some magic forcefield, legally enforced perhaps, which protects them from any unwanted male gaze or whistle. They are prudes disguised as sluts, self-styled victims pretending to be vixens, astonishingly anti-social creatures who imagine it is possible to parade through society dressed outrageously without any member of that society ever making a comment about or to them. This is the highly individuated politics of fear — fear of men, fear of unplanned-for banter, fear of sexual licence — dressed up as radical feminism. But to update an old saying: no slut is an island.

May 31, 2011

QotD: The paternalistic view of (some) crime victims

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:47

. . . there are certain regularities, and one of them is the way in which the victims of men such as Griffiths are described in the Guardian, the house journal of the British intelligentsia and its bureaucratic hangers-on. This is important because it illustrates the way in which a dominant elite — dominant de facto if not always de jure — thinks about social problems.

An article describing the victims of Wright, the Ipswich murderer, was titled THE WOMEN PUT INTO HARM’S WAY BY DRUGS. A similar article about Griffiths’s victims was headed “CROSSBOW CANNIBAL” VICTIMS’ DRUG HABITS MADE THEM VULNERABLE TO VIOLENCE. In other words, these women became prostitutes by force majeure, on the streets not because of choices they had made but because of chemical substances that controlled them without any conscious intervention on their part — no more than if, say, an abyss caused by an earthquake had suddenly opened up and swallowed them.

Now either we are all like this — no different from inanimate objects, which act and react mechanically, as Descartes supposed that dogs and cats did — or we are not. The view that we are brings with it certain difficulties. No one could live as if it were true; no one thinks of himself, or of those about him, as automatons; we are all faced with the need to make conscious decisions, to weigh alternatives in our minds, every waking hour of every day. Human life would be impossible, literally inconceivable, without consciousness and conscious decision making. It is true that certain medical conditions, such as temporal-lobe epilepsy during fits, deprive people of normal consciousness and that they nevertheless continue to behave in a recognizably human way; but if all, or even most, of humanity suffered from those conditions, human life would soon be at an end.

Assuming, then, that not everyone is driven to what he does by his own equivalent of drug addiction, the Guardian must assume that Wright’s and Griffiths’s victims were fundamentally different from you and me. Unlike us, they were not responsible for their actions; they did not make choices; they were not human in the fullest sense. Not only is this a view unlikely to find much favor with women who resemble the victims in some way; it also has potentially the most illiberal consequences. For it would justify us, the full human beings, in depriving such women of liberty. If “their hopeless addiction to heroin, alcohol or crack cocaine led them to sell their bodies in the red light district on the edge of Bradford city centre and made them vulnerable to violence,” as the article tells us, surely we should force our help on them to recover their full humanity, or, if that proves impossible, take them into preventive detention to protect them. They are the sheep, we the shepherds.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Murder Most Academic: A British Ph.D. candidate puts “homicide studies” into practice”, City Journal, 2011-05-31

May 26, 2011

Reason.tv: The government’s war on cameras

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 17:09

May 24, 2011

“Why does dubious social science keep showing up in medical journals?”

Filed under: Economics, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:08

William Easterly and Laura Freschi have determined the decision tree for publishing crappy social science research:

Aid Watch has complained before about shaky social science analysis or shaky numbers published in medical journals, which were then featured in major news stories. We questioned creative data on stillbirths, a study on health aid, and another on maternal mortality.

Just this week, yet another medical journal article got headlines for giving us the number of women raped in the DR Congo (standard headline: a rape a minute). The study applied country-wide a 2007 estimate of the rate of sexual violence in a small sample (of unknown and undiscussed bias). It did this using female population by province and age-cohort — in a country whose last census was in 1984.

We are starting to wonder, why does dubious social science keep showing up in medical journals?

The medical journals may not have as much capacity to catch flaws in social science as in medicine. They may desire to advocate for more action on tragic social problems. The news media understably assume the medical journals ARE vetting the research.

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

May 22, 2011

QotD: The rise of the “new aristocracy”

Filed under: Europe, France, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:39

A man is innocent until proven guilty, and it will be for a New York court to determine what happened in M Strauss-Kahn’s suite at the Sofitel. It may well be that’s he the hapless victim of a black Muslim widowed penniless refugee maid — although, if that’s the defense my lawyer were proposing to put before a Manhattan jury, I’d be inclined to suggest he’s the one who needs to plead insanity. Whatever the head of the IMF did or didn’t do, the reaction of the French elites is most instructive. “We and the Americans do not belong to the same civilization,” sniffed Jean Daniel, editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, insisting that the police should have known that Strauss-Kahn was “not like other men” and wondering why “this chambermaid was regarded as worthy and beyond any suspicion.” Bernard-Henri Lévy, the open-shirted, hairy-chested Gallic intellectual who talked Sarkozy into talking Obama into launching the Libyan war, is furious at the lèse-majesté of this impertinent serving girl and the jackanapes of America’s “absurd” justice system, not to mention this ghastly “American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other.”

Well, OK. Why shouldn’t DSK (as he’s known in France) be treated as “a subject of justice like any other”? Because, says BHL (as he’s known in France), of everything that Strauss-Kahn has done at the IMF to help the world “avoid the worst.” In particular, he has made the IMF “more favorable to proletarian nations and, among the latter, to the most fragile and vulnerable.” What is one fragile and vulnerable West African maid when weighed in the scales of history against entire fragile and vulnerable proletarian nations? Yes, he Kahn!

Before you scoff at Euro-lefties willing to argue for 21st century droit de seigneur, recall the grisly eulogies for the late Edward Kennedy. “At the end of the day,” said Sen. Evan Bayh, “he cared most about the things that matter to ordinary people.” The standard line of his obituarists was that this was Ted’s penance for Chappaquiddick and Mary Jo Kopechne — or, as the Aussie columnist Tim Blair put it, “She died so that the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act might live.” Great men who are prone to Big Government invariably have Big Appetites, and you comely serving wenches who catch the benign sovereign’s eye or anything else he’s shooting your way should keep in mind the Big Picture. Yes, Ted Ken!

Nor are such dispensations confined to Great Men’s trousers. Timothy Geithner failed to pay the taxes he owed the United States Treasury but that’s no reason not to make him head of the United States Treasury. His official explanation for this lapse was that, unlike losers like you, he was unable to follow the simple yes/no prompts of Turbo Tax: In that sense, unlike the Frenchman and the maid, Geithner’s defense is that she wasn’t asking for it — or, if she was, he couldn’t understand the question. Nevertheless, just as only Dominique could save the European economy, so only Timmy could save the U.S. economy. Yes, they Kahn!

Mark Steyn, “The unzippered princelingand the serving wench”, Orange County Register, 2011-05-20

May 19, 2011

Nathalie Rothschild: Britain’s debate on rape “is demeaning to women”

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

There is much sound and fury in Britain this week over some remarks by a Tory cabinet minister in a BBC interview. The leader of the opposition has demanded that he be dismissed from the government for suggesting that there are ‘other categories of rape’. Nathalie Rothschild wrote this article in response to a 2010 review of the rape law.

In 2007, Camilla Cavendish of The Times (London) found that rape allegations had jumped by 40 per cent between 2002 and 2005. While this can partly be put down to improved support for women, which facilitates the process of reporting rape, Cavendish argued that a widening official definition of rape also played a big role. Since the Sexual Offences Act 2003 came into force, the definition of rape has been expanded to include oral sex. But there has also been a profound attitude shift with roots in the second-wave feminist idea that heterosexual sex is an inherently violent and degrading act that women subject themselves to against their better judgement.

More than four out of five rape allegations are made against friends or acquaintances. As alcohol and/or drugs were involved in over half those cases, Cavendish puts this down to ‘the culture of binge drinking’. But this avoids the more complex picture. Today, various rape-awareness activists and state feminists are themselves helping to blur the boundaries between sex and rape, encouraging women to regard themselves as violated, abused and traumatised for having gone to bed with a man without thinking it through in minute detail.

The Sexual Offences Act 2003 declared that consent must be ‘active, not passive’; in rape cases, consent is now taken to mean agreement rather than the absence of a refusal. So if a woman goes along with sex, but doesn’t make it explicitly clear that she is actively consenting to it, it can be deemed to be rape. The government has even moved towards ensuring that no agreement can be taken as consent if it is given under the influence of alcohol. As Cavendish pointed out: ‘In our zeal to protect women, are we going to legislate so that a drunken man is accountable for his deeds, but a drunken woman is not? Why do we encourage women to see themselves as victims?’ Absolving women who engage in sexual liaisons — whether drunk or sober — of responsibility for their actions is not liberating; it’s demeaning.

There is no doubt that forcing someone to have sex is a heinous, violent and degrading act and victims of rape should indeed be treated with dignity and respect. But in the name of protecting women, the government is insisting that rape cases be treated differently from all other crimes, while interfering with the course of justice in a way that undermines defendants’ rights and undercuts the power of juries.

May 18, 2011

Neil Davenport: The cognitive dissonance of “SlutWalk”

Filed under: Cancon — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:35

It’s possible to feel a bit sorry for Michael Sanguinetti, whose anachronistic, ill-advised, yet well-intended caution to female students at Osgoode Hall in Toronto triggered the SlutWalk phenomenon. By phrasing his advice in such a retrogressive way, he became the poster boy for all that women perceive as being wrong with the criminal justice system’s approach to solving the problem of violence against women.

However, as Neil Davenport points out, the reaction seems to be directed at the legal system and attitudes of thirty years ago, not the system of today:

The legal system, at least officially, now takes any accusation of sexual assault against women very seriously. It’s ironic that SlutWalk is supposedly exposing the ineffectiveness of a legal system at a time of high-profile sexual assault charges made against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn. More than ever, law enforcers in Britain and the US are likelier to act on an accusation of assault, even if the alleged crime took place years previously.

Faced with such a gap between feminist thinking and how society actually views violence against women, the anger expressed by SlutWalk protestors and cheerleading feminists rings a bit hollow. Although the protestors are aiming to avoid being victimised on the basis of what they wear, their offence taken at one police officer’s comments suggests a willingness to claim the mantle of victimhood for themselves. In this case, women are victims of a patriarchal state that doesn’t take violence against them seriously, even though the evidence suggests that the state is all too keen to monitor and regulate any type of contact between men and women. Feminists used to have many issues on which to express genuine grievance on the unequal treatment of women in society: equal pay and employment rights, abortion rights and so on. But since many of these issues have been resolved, more or less, there seems to be an on-going search for examples of oppression to facilitate the elevation of women to the exalted status of victimhood.

It’s perhaps not helped that the frothy issue of sexual identity is at the heart of the SlutWalk debacle. Some feminists argue that the protestors are feeding into a wider ‘raunch culture’ that is having a debilitating impact on young women. The sexualisation of society, the argument goes, is pressurising more young women to make themselves available to men in order to be accepted. SlutWalk is simply buying into the old madonna/whore duality that was often cited as an example of women’s inferior status in society. Again, though, this ignores how far society’s attitudes towards sex and women have changed. Women’s greater independence in society and the depoliticisation of marriage and the nuclear family have all helped transform attitudes towards women and sex.

May 17, 2011

Matt Welch: BHL is a “national embarrassment to France”

Filed under: France, Law, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:42

Actually, I understate in the headline what Matt actually wrote:

And since we don’t want to reprint the whole quavering bag of apologia (“Charming, seductive, yes, certainly; a friend to women and, first of all, to his own woman, naturally,” etc.), let’s close with perhaps my favorite line:

     What I do know is that nothing in the world can justify a man being thus thrown to the dogs.

I’m guessing what BHL really means here is that no worldly rape can justify Strauss-Kahn’s treatment. Since if the accusations are true, a 62-year-old man known by every French person I’ve asked to have the sexual manners of a primate lunged nakedly at hired help half his age, grabbed her breast, knocked her to the floor, and chased her around his expensive hotel suite attempting with some success to thrust his penis into her body and discharge DNA evidence.

I don’t know if he’s guilty, and it would be imprudent not to consider the conspiracy theories in a case involving someone who until this week was the single biggest political threat to the sitting president of France, but the only decent way you can arrive at “nothing in the world can justify” Strauss-Kahn’s treatment is if you oppose all perp walks equally. Short of that, it’s just special pleading for a powerful dick. And another reminder that BHL is 10 times the national embarrassment to France than Jerry Lewis or even Johnny Hallyday ever was.

May 13, 2011

Iatrogenic gullibility?

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

Bruce Schneier summarizes a report that is either a very late April Fool story or proof that the sight of a white coat and stethescope induces compliant behaviour:

This is a pretty scary criminal tactic from Turkey. Burglars dress up as doctors, and ring doorbells handing out pills under some pretense or another. They’re actually powerful sedatives, and when people take them they pass out, and the burglars can ransack the house.

According to the article, when the police tried the same trick with placebos, they got an 86% compliance rate.

The linked report shows that people are nearly as likely to open the door when the caller claims to be a robber.

April 30, 2011

“When police decide they need to make an arrest, he said, they find a way to make an arrest”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:38

Not the finest day in Albertan justice:

Charges have been dropped against three Alberta men accused of shooting dead a pregnant wild horse and tossing its body down a hillside. For more than a year, the RCMP and the Crown were sure they had the right guys. They even charged the then-12-year-old son of Jason Nixon, one of the accused. But then, just as the trial began, the defence produced an important piece of exculpatory evidence: The horse hadn’t been shot.

The Mounties had assumed it had been. They were operating on a tip from a man named Dave Goertz. Mr. Goertz, as everyone involved in the case knew, was a crackhead and a meth addict. He reported the crime after a local group that defends Alberta’s wild horse population posted a $25,000 reward.

[. . .]

Apparently, the word of a drug addict was enough for the guardians of our justice system to arrest three innocent men and run them all the way to trial, costing them their jobs, a small fortune and untold grief.

[. . .]

The horse had been badly decomposed, apparently, by the time police found it, so determining whether it had been shot wasn’t possible. And yet, lacking critical evidence, the province proceeded with its prosecution for wilfully killing and careless use of a firearm. The three men faced a maximum of five years in prison.

This kind of thing, said defence lawyer Willie deWit, “is what happens in our system a lot of times.” When police decide they need to make an arrest, he said, they find a way to make an arrest. They ignore anything that might exculpate the accused, and seize on anything that feeds their assumptions of guilt.

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