Ignatieff feels that by tweaking the system, he can make it more palatable to rural Canadians and less objectionable to the eight Liberals who originally voted for its abolition. He thinks that by dropping the renewal fees registered gun owners pay and making failure to register a ticketing rather than criminal violation for first-time offenders, he has struck a compromise that will allow him to rein in his caucus while still being seen as a champion of gun control.
He hasn’t. Ignatieff’s plan won’t make a single Canadian safer. It will make the dysfunctional, obsolete registry more expensive while simultaneously making it weaker. The registry has already failed and permanently alienated large swaths of voters from the Liberal party. Why is Ignatieff the last person to realize this?
To accomplish his “goals,” Ignatieff has not only decided to write off any hopes for a Liberal expansion into rural Canada for a generation, further relegating his party to also-ran status anywhere outside of downtown Toronto and Montreal, but has also called into question his much-discussed respect for Parliament. Private member’s bills have traditionally been opportunities for all MPs to vote their conscience — an important tradition Ignatieff would set aside just to prop up the long-gun registry.
Matt Gurney, “Michael Ignatieff’s brand new mistake”, National Post, 2010-04-22
April 22, 2010
QotD: Ignatieff’s gun registry position
April 12, 2010
What is “the difference between the current system and slavery”?
The Whited Sepulchre looks at a new book by Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in The Age Of Colorblindness.
We have more prisoners than any other nation — 25% of the world’s total, despite having only 6% of the world’s population. According to the Michelle Alexander interview, if we were to go back to the 1970’s-era incarceration rates, we would have to release 4 out of 5 prisoners currently doing time.
We have so many prisoners that we’re having to privatize the cages that we’re using to lock up black kids. Ordinarily, Big Gubmint likes to run everything, but this particular growth industry is beyond them. Marijuana prohibition creates tens of thousands of jobs, public and private.
[. . .]
When the prisoners are released, many of them have to pay for part of the cost of their incarceration. They often have to pay for their own parole officers, counseling sessions, etc. and after talking to ex-cons for about 10 years, I’m of the opinion that most of these counselors couldn’t counsel a 3-year-old to go the potty.
If they fail to make these payments, they’re either locked up again, or their paychecks are garnished. After all, the private prison system has to be paid, right? [. . .] Now that you have all that info, can you explain the difference between the current system and slavery?
Do you understand why the prison lobby, in its public and private form, fights so hard to preserve the system?
March 31, 2010
Disciplining the customer
In what may yet turn out to be a groundbreaking method of increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty, the US Copyright Group is suing 50,000 of them:
The number of Americans targetted by entertainment industry lawsuits nearly doubled this month, as the the US Copyright Group (“an ad hoc coalition of independent film producers and with the encouragement of the Independent Film & Television Alliance”) brought suit against 20,000 BitTorrent users. 30,000 more lawsuits are pending, bringing the total number of US entertainment industry lawsuit defendants up to 80,000 (when you include the 30,000 victims of the RIAA).
This beatings-will-continue-until-morale-improves gambit is puzzling to me. It seems likely to me that most of these defendants will settle for several thousand dollars (regardless of their guilt) rather than risk everything by hiring a lawyer to defend themselves. But does the “US Copyright Group” really think that Americans will go back to the mall with their credit-cards in hand once their friends’ lives have been ruined by litigation?
You have to wonder how they think this is a useful and creative solution to a problem they’ll be facing for the rest of their corporate existance. Suing your own customers would seem — on the face of it — as an unlikely way of persuading them to remain customers . . .
Some of the folks being sued are, undoubtedly, guilty of deliberate and repeated copyright infringement for purposes of personal gain. In a sample size like this, some of ’em will fit just about any profile you choose. Most of them, however, will almost certainly turn out to be teens and twenty-something students with no particular assets worth taking. It’s like taking a sledgehammer to a cloud of gnats: you’ll mess up a few permanently, but most of ’em will not be touched.
March 30, 2010
Nanny state now working entrapment angle
They may be able to get methamphetamines with their breakfast cereal, but the nanny state is determined to ensure that they can’t buy goldfish:
Buying a goldfish at a pet shop used to be an innocent childhood pleasure.
But today an elderly pet shop owner told how she was entrapped into selling a goldfish to a 14-year-old schoolboy, then warned she could face jail.
She had breached a law introduced in 2006 which bans selling live fish to anyone under 16.
After a prosecution estimated to have cost taxpayers £20,0000, Joan Higgins, 66, a great-grandmother who has never been in trouble before, has been forced to wear a tag on her ankle like common criminal and given a seven-week curfew.
Her son, Mark, 47 was also handed a fine and ordered to carry out 120 hours unpaid work in the community.
The notorious criminals could face jail time if they’re brought up on similar charges in the future. The courts are doing everything they can to communicate the extreme seriousness of these crimes, and will stop at nothing to stamp out the evil goldfish sellers.
Apparently, the crime syndicate has been in operation for 28 years, concealing their evil, predatory behaviour behind such innocent-seeming activities as volunteering for PDSA (Peoples Dispensary for Sick Animals) and contributing food for the animals. The hardened criminal mastermind has been banned from contact with at-risk individuals like her own great-grandchildren and prevented from attending known criminal hang-outs like bingo halls and Rod Stewart concerts.
H/T to Kathy Shaidle for the link.
March 29, 2010
Don’t talk back to the man, part XLVI
Ken at the Popehat blog has a beef with part of the message in “10 Rules for Dealing with Police” from Flex Your Rights:
See, if your goal is not to be abused, wrongfully arrested, falsely accused, searched without probable cause, or proned out on the pavement because you irritated someone with a gun and a badge, then “don’t be mouthy to a cop” is excellent practical advice. But dammit, we shouldn’t have to give that advice. The concept that you should expect to be abused if you aren’t meek (or, to be more realistic, subservient) in dealing with public servants ought to be abhorrent to a society of free people. Courtesy is admirable, and unnecessary rudeness is not, but rudeness ought not be seen as inviting government employees to break the law. But the reality is that our society largely issues apologias for, not denunciations of, police abuse. The prevailing belief is that claims of abuse are about lawyers or crooks trying to game the system, that people accused of crimes generally committed them, and that cops are heroes of the sort who deserve the benefit of the doubt when their account of a roadside encounter differs from that of a citizen. Our society, for the most part, indulges cops in their expectation that citizens will be subservient. As a result, “don’t talk back to a cop” remains tragically apt practical advice.
Moreover, the truth of it is that many cops will interpret an assertion of your constitutional rights, however politely delivered, as a rude challenge. They are supported in that view by four decades of “law and order” talk that classifies constitutional rights as mere instrumentalities of crime, not as the rules by which we have chosen to live.
Shame on us if we put up with that.
H/T to Radley Balko for the link, who also offers a graphic example of what can happen when you don’t follow the helpful advice in the video:
Last week, a panel from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that three Seattle police officers were justified in using a taser three times on a pregnant woman for resisting arrest. The woman had been pulled over for going 32 mph in a school zone. She insisted it was the car ahead of her that was speeding, and refused to sign the ticket. That’s when they tased her.
The problem is that under Washington law, (a) you aren’t required to sign a traffic ticket, (b) speeding isn’t an arrestable offense, and (c) you can’t be arrested for resisting an unlawful arrest.
So the woman was completely within her rights. Yet asserting those rights got her the business end of a stun gun. Three times. And two of the three federal appellate judges to hear the case see nothing wrong with that.
March 25, 2010
The Belgian version of “asking for it”
A recent Belgian court decision is remarkable:
The crime victim, a businessman named only as Laurent, had been living in a suburb of Charleroi, in Belgium’s depressed French-speaking southern region of Wallonia.
He moved north after a series of violent attacks and robberies on his family but was taken to a local court because he had not paid back a grant to renovate his house in 1998.
It sounds fair that you’d be expected to repay a grant for renovations if you leave the area without good reason. I’d have said that these incidents would qualify for the “good reason” criterion:
In 2001, the victim was attacked and his BMW car was stolen. Shortly after it was recovered, armed men stormed his home and stole it a second time.
In 2006, his wife and children were threatened by armed raiders, who stormed his home at night and dragged him away in his pyjamas while his horrified family looked on.
He was later freed and dumped on a industrial estate as the thieves made off with another one of his cars, a Jaguar.
It might be questioned how someone who was able to own multiple expensive cars would be able to qualify for this kind of grant, but that’s a separate issue. But maybe not, as the presiding judge implied:
“It is perhaps not sensible to draw attention to oneself by driving a Jaguar and living in a big house, making an ostentatious display of one’s wealth in a poor and damaged region like Charleroi,” said the judge.
The businessman’s lawyer accused the civil court of supporting “hooligans”.
“In Charleroi, you must drive in a Trabant, wear a tracksuit and live in a slum to be safe from criminals and above reproach from judges,” said Clément de Clety
In other words, the judge really does think he was “asking for it”.
March 23, 2010
The Canadian “flavour” of free speech
Marni Soupcoff hits the nail on the head with this observation:
Do Canadians understand freedom of expression? For several years, I’ve been arguing that the majority of them don’t — that despite freedom of speech’s prominent place in the Charter, they think it means the ability to say critical things provided these things don’t offend or upset anybody. Protest away, as long as you don’t actually rock the boat.
It’s part of that notorious “Canadian nice” thing: we’re so terribly afraid of offending someone that we’ve empowered the state to monitor and “correct” our speech and behaviour. We like the idea of free speech, but we also undercut the spirit by carving out exceptions to ensure that free speech is not free to offend or insult or demean the listener (or bystanders, or people totally unconnected to the conversation).
This is the genesis of our “hate speech” legislation, which legally defines certain kinds of speech as being so harmful that the use must be proscribed. We appear to fear the use of certain words and phrases as much as if they were literal clubs or bludgeons or some other kind of blunt instrument. In other words, we think it worse to hear offensive speech than to be physically threatened with bodily harm.
This is why the University of Ottawa’s François Houle not only felt it necessary to warn Ann Coulter about our draconian speech laws, but almost certainly felt that without such a warning, those laws were likely to be put into motion. The unspoken but hardly concealed subtext is that we recognize that Americans are more mature than Canadians: they can hear those horrible, horrible words without taking damage or harm.
What initially sounds like another example of Canadian smugness turns out to be an example of Canadian inferiority. Again.
March 19, 2010
QotD: The term “pirate” is too sexy
After years of trying to cloud the public mind by calling it “piracy” instead of “unauthorised downloading,” key copyright industry reps are starting to realize that “piracy” actually sounds kind of cool. So now they’re lobbying for the even less intellectually rigorous term “theft,” which describes an entirely different offence, enumerated in an altogether different section of the lawbooks.
This has all the dishonesty of calling everything you don’t like “terrorism” (or as my friend Ian Brown says, it’s like rebranding jaywalking as “road rape”).
Cory Doctorow, “Entertainment industry sours on term ‘pirate’ — too sexy”, BoingBoing, 2010-03-18
March 18, 2010
Adding “ordinary” criminals to the sex offender registry
The sex offender registry in most jurisdictions doesn’t work — at least, it doesn’t work to deter re-offence and it almost certainly doesn’t work to protect the public. What these registries do quite successfully, however, is to continue punishing the criminals long after they have served their sentences.
People who appear in these registries have a long list of prohibited activities, most frequently requiring them to stay a certain distance from schools (which often means there is little or no choice for where they can live, work, or travel, as the legallly mandated distance exceeds the average distance between schools). Ordinary ex-cons have great difficulty getting employment even in a growing economy, and the situation for identified “sex offenders” is close to impossible.
As a general rule, having your name added to the sex offender registry is as close to a life sentence as possible, but with no hope of parole and no hope of even a semblance of living a normal life.
Georgia apparently thinks this situation is not only fine, but they’d like to add non-sexual offenders to the registry too:
Georgia’s Supreme Court is upholding the government’s right to put non-sex offenders on the state’s sex-offender registry, highlighting a little-noticed (but growing) nationwide practice.
Atlanta criminal defense attorney Ann Marie Fitz estimated that perhaps thousands of convicts convicted of non-sexual crimes have been placed in sex-offender databases. Fitz represents a convict who was charged with false imprisonment when he was 18 for briefly detaining a 17-year-old girl during a soured drug deal. He unsuccessfully challenged his mandatory, lifelong sex-offender listing to the Georgia Supreme Court, which ruled against him Monday.
Under the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2007, the states are required to have statutes demanding sex-offender registration for those convicted of kidnapping or falsely imprisoning minors. The Georgia court ruled that the plain meaning of “sex offender” was overridden by the state’s law.
If it’s your world view that criminals should never be forgiven for their transgressions, then this sort of deliberate act is understandable. It’s morally indefensible, but it’s understandable.
March 11, 2010
Reducing the over-mighty penalty kick in soccer
Andrew Potter makes a strong case for FIFA to address the disproportional effect of awarded penalty kicks in soccer games:
. . . the real problem is that it is the penalty shot itself which is unsportsmanlike. With a success rate of 85% it is already such a gross mismatch in the striker’s favour that I don’t see how much additional advantage is gained by permitting a bit of a fake-out; if anything, I suspect we’ll see the occasional embarrassment when a shot-taker pauses over the ball only to see the goalie standing calmly, waiting for a week one-legged kick from an out-faked faker.
But otherwise, I expect the penalty shot to continue to wreak havoc with the tactical nature of the game, for two reasons. First, because goals are so hard to come by in regular play, second, because a penalty shot has such a high success rate, and third, because one must be awarded for any direct foul inside the 18-yard box the referee has no discretion here it makes diving (or “simulation”) one of the most effective moves in the attacker’s arsenal. It doesn’t matter if you were hauled down from behind at the 8 yard line while on a breakway, or tripped by accident in the far corner of the box with your back to the goal, both get you a trip to the twelve-yard line for a pk, and what is pretty close to a free goal.
I can think of fewer rules in sport that have such an overwhelming impact on how the game is played, and play such a decisive role in determining the outcome of so many games. As such, I find the penalty kick in soccer one of the most unsportsmanlike elements in any sport. But maybe this is because I misunderstand the intent of the rule.
Back when I was still coaching youth soccer, we didn’t have too much trouble with penalties, but only because our games were played with only a single official. As soon as you add in a couple of assistant referees, the number of penalties awarded seemed to go up . . . because there was more chance that infractions would be noticed with the extra eyes on the game (and probably also a greater chance that diving would successfully draw a penalty, too).
March 10, 2010
Some things never change
I was looking though some old postings and found this little gem, which is as true as ever:
It is a sad real-world fact that most legislators, when presented with something they do not understand, almost always attempt to ban it. This probably started with the first neolithic fire-tamer . . . who was probably beaten to death with sticks when the tribal shaman saw it. Senator Hatch is showing all the finely nuanced reactions of Ug the caveman here.
This was in reaction to Senator Orrin Hatch introducing a bill to make peer-to-peer file sharing illegal back in 2004.
March 9, 2010
Opening the door to arbitrary punishment
Cory Doctorow talks about why the proposed “three strikes” internet ban is such a stupid idea:
March 4, 2010
The jokes just write themselves
By way of Kathy Shaidle’s blog, a court case that was custom-designed for certain political campaigns:
A 45-year-old woman, charged with ending a domestic dispute by killing her 26-year-old husband of five days, is a registered lobbyist for a group fighting domestic violence.
Arelisha Bridges was ordered held without bond in the Fulton County Jail. She is scheduled for a preliminary hearing later this month on charges of felony murder, murder, aggravated assault and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony.
Officials said Bridges claimed she was unemployed. But records show she is a lobbyist for an organization called the National Declaration for Domestic Violence Order; its Web site says the group is pushing legislation to create a database of those convicted of sex crimes or domestic abuse.
And remember, guns don’t kill people: lobbyists for anti-domestic violence groups do.
March 2, 2010
Linking Olympic glory with jackbooted thugs?
Frequent commenter “Lickmuffin” responded to the post entitled SWAT forces now spend more time doing non-SWAT policing with a long comment tying together the Olympics and the omnipresent SWAT teams:
I have to say that I really don’t understand your views here.
Olympic fascist spectacle: A-OK!
The actual functional trappings of a police state: Boo, hiss!
You can’t have one without the other. As the man said, you have to break a few skulls to make Olympic Gold. Or something like that.
Lickmuffin then provided an extended discussion on the same theme:
It’s quite simple, really: if you want to host the Olympics, and you want to have a succesful national Olympic team, you have to have armed-to-the teeth SWAT teams.
To fund the Olympics and Olympians, you need to have confiscatory tax rates.
When you have confiscatory tax rates, you’re going to have people trying to avoid the taxes.
Some of those people are going to engage in dodgy and risky behaviour, such as importing, growing, manufacturing or just generally dealing with narcotics.
Some of those people are going to use violence to protect their businesses.
To deal with those guys, you need heavily armed and specially trained police.
Just three degrees of separation there, really, but it works out to something like this:
Publicly funded Olympics = SWAT teams on every corner.
What do we tell people whose family members are killed in no-knock raids where the cops had the wrong address? “Sorry about that, but that snowboarding dude needed a gold medal.”
It’s ironic that the first snowboarder to win a medal for the sport — a Canadian — tested positive for weed.
It’s not ironic at all that the same dude wants to become a Liberal MP. Snowboard boots, jackboots — same thing, really.
It really does cover all the ground, doesn’t it? Just lacking the obligatory German rendering of SWAT as Sturmabteilung, and we’re golden, as they say.
