I’m going to have to mic check you there, Mr. Jones. You’re not talking about so-called libertarians, but your former boss and current president. See, it’s Barack Obama who supports “traditional marriage”; Barack Obama who supports a drug war that sends an alarming number of black men to prison and destroys their employment prospects; Barack Obama who supports a foreign policy that kills children; Barack Obama who supports regulatory barriers that require the poorest of the poor to borrow their way into the workforce; Barack Obama who supports an immigration strategy that rips apart families and sees the children of undocumented workers put up for adoption.
Whether Obama’s support for those policies means he hates gays or brown folk is not for me to say. As the scriptures tell us, “For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?”
Libertarians, on the other hand, love brown folk, the gays, the lesbians, the people with piercings, and immigrants. Many of us, after all, fit rather neatly into those categories, and we show our affection for ourselves and our neighbors by supporting the right of all peoples to live free of state-sponsored violence, discrimination, undue imprisonment, and theft; as well as the entirely predictable consequences of both left-wing and right-wing social engineering.
Mike Riggs, “Van Jones on ‘so-called Libertarians’: ‘They say they love America but they hate the people, the brown folk, the gays, the lesbians, the people with piercings'”, Hit & Run, 2012-04-03
April 4, 2012
March 31, 2012
Warning: Despite a total lack of evidence, we still want video game “violence” warning stickers
Erik Kain in Forbes on the latest attempt to put scare warnings on pretty much all video games sold in stores:
“WARNING: Exposure to violent video games has been linked to aggressive behavior.”
That’s the label Reps. Joe Baca and Frank Wolf want to place on every video game that hits store shelves.
Well okay, not every video game. Just every game with an E (Everyone) rating or higher. Only EC (Early Childhood) games would avoid the label. Every other game, regardless of content, would have the equivalent of cigarette warnings slapped on them.
This means that games like Tiger Woods PGA Tour would get a violence-warning label.
Can I humbly suggest that we sponsor a bill that would slap warning labels on all our elected officials?
“WARNING: May enact pointless, freedom-quashing laws based on bad data and lies due to sanctimonious pandering to special interest groups.”
The EFF is on the case.
EFF has put together an action alert that lets you to tell your Congressmember that you stand against the unnecessary and burdensome regulation of speech in video games, and that she should too.
Even though it is not required by law, many video game developers have been self-regulating games for age-level and content with Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) ratings since 1994. That system is widely understood in the marketplace, and allows consumers and parents to make informed decisions about their video game purchases.
March 30, 2012
March 29, 2012
Edinburgh may be killing the cultural golden goose
Tiffany Jenkins talks about the origins of the world famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the powers-that-be who seem to be determined to strangle it with red tape:
In 1947, eight theatre groups turned up to perform at the newly formed Edinburgh International Festival, an annual event established to celebrate and enrich postwar European cultural life. The theatre groups had not been invited, and were not part of the official programme. So instead they created a spontaneous festival on the side. Growing year on year, with the theatre groups encouraging others to participate, this alternative to the Edinburgh International Festival eventually established itself, in 1959, as the Festival Fringe Society.
Today, Scotland is home to some of the top cultural events in the world. Many take place in Edinburgh during the August months, attracting high-profile authors, artists, comics and theatre companies from all over the globe. At the heart of this cultural firmament is the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, an event now funded and supported by government and local councils. Yet, in a nasty twist, those very same central and local authorities, currently enjoying the prestige of being associated with a world-renowned festival of culture, are seemingly intent on stifling the spontaneous, do-it-yourself impulse that originally gave birth to the Fringe.
[. . .]
From 1 April 2012, it will become necessary to have a ‘Public Entertainment License’ to undertake any kind of public art in Scotland. Previously a licence was only required for events charging admission. Starting next month, even the smallest local events being run for free — say in a café or a bookshop — will require one, which must be applied for six weeks beforehand. This will include exhibitions in temporary places, gigs in record shops, free film screenings, music in pubs. You know, even really dodgy stuff — like poetry readings to 10 men and a dog.
Apart from the form-filling and curtailment of spontaneity — you cannot just ring around a few friends and suggest a performance at the weekend — this will cost money too. In the past, fees for a ‘public entertainment licence’ have ranged from £120 to £7,500, requiring several months’ notice to be given to the council and three weeks public notice. Nothing will happen without long-term planning. Small venues, like cafes, which support artists and performers by hosting free events, won’t be able to cover the costs. And they shouldn’t have to. Art doesn’t need a licence, and nor do we to enjoy it.
What we are seeing is the hyper-regulation of everyday life where anything we choose to do spontaneously and between ourselves is seen as dangerous or threatening. The authorities want to monitor, codify and regulate the most normal, everyday interactions and behaviour.
March 24, 2012
“When you change the meaning of words to suit your purposes, you can ‘prove’ anything”
Sam Bowman discusses the injustice of minimum alcohol pricing at the Adam Smith Institute blog:
I’ve struggled to write something about minimum alcohol pricing today. It’s a hugely important issue, and one I care deeply about. But I can’t help but be angry at the people who’ve proposed it, and the government made up of supposed “conservatives” and “liberals” who plan on implementing it. It’s anti-individualism at its worst.
The “evidence-based” arguments made for minimum alcohol pricing are, in fact, based on distortion and bad science. The policy is paternalistic, indiscriminate, and only hits people who are frugal or on lower incomes. Slippery slope arguments are common, for good reason. But they’re especially appropriate here.
The idea that there should be a price floor for alcohol is well-loved by public health types, and often supported unthinkingly by middle class voters, often due to the media coverage of “binge drinking” among the young. It disproportionally hurts the poor, by increasing the cost of buying the cheapest forms of alcohol (which the poor are more likely to buy). To many, this is seen as a feature rather than a bug, as they assume that it will act to decrease alcohol consumption. Instead, it’s more likely to force poor drinkers to pay less for other things (like food and clothing) and will not measurably decrease alcohol consumption — how is it compassionate to make poor people even more poor?
The politics of this are straightforward but effective: target the most marginal, “problem” group – in this case, binge drinkers – with a low minimum price to pass an apparently-trivial law.
[. . .]
The justifications for this are completely, utterly bogus. Britain does not have a drinking problem: as ASI fellow Chris Snowdon has pointed out, we drink less today than ten years ago, less than a hundred years ago, and far less than we did before that.
Internationally, we are in the middle of the table in the European rankings, behind France, Germany and Spain, and far behind the Czech Republic and Luxemburg.
But what about binge drinking? In fact, the definition of “binge drinking” has been warped beyond all recognition. Four pints in a day counts as a “binge” for an adult man, according to official definitions. A woman drinking three standard (175ml) glasses of wine is “binging” as well.
As Chris points out, the number of diseases defined as “alcohol related” has tripled in the last 25 years. When you change the meaning of words to suit your purposes, you can “prove” anything.
March 11, 2012
Tim Worstall on “Protestant” and “Catholic” laws
No, not the differing flavours of Christianity themselves, but more their different approaches to understanding and interpreting the law:
The Protestant revolution was, in part (it never does to strain these analogy/simile things too much) that the Bible, when in the vernacular, as clear an outline of God’s will as any should need. Intervention was not needed, a man could commune directly with the Word and the Will of God.
On the matter of the law I am a Protestant. As rigid and unyielding as any Puritan, Lutheran or Calvinist. With a twist of course: the law must be written so that it can be understood directly, without that intervention of the priestly caste of lawyers, accountants, diversity advisors or bureaucrat’s helplines.
If you cannot write a law with the clarity of “thou shalt not kill” then go away and think through what it is that you’re trying to enact, the language that you are using to do so until you can, with clarity, tell us what it is that we must not do at fear of time in pokey.
That modern society is complex is no excuse. If you cannot write simple and simply understood laws then better that we have fewer laws.
That the Puritans went gargantuanly off the rails by using their new found revelations of God’s Will to tell everyone else what to do is true. But I do find it interesting that our new would be ruling class, the nomenklatura, are adopting such a Catholic view of the law. We’ll make it all so complex that no individual can understand it and thus there is the necessity of that nomenklatura to tell people what to do in detail by “interpreting” it.
Music control freaks? The Nazis got there well before you
J.J. Gould in The Atlantic a couple of months ago, but brought to my attention by the folks at BoingBoing:
Skvorecky left no shortage of legacies to remember him by, but one of the more notable themes in his nonfiction writing is an emphasis on, as Welch puts it, “the oftentime minute similarities between applied fascism and communism.” And some of Skvorecky’s more notable variations on that theme in turn are found in his recollections and insights on the common totalitarian hatred of, among all things, jazz.
[. . .]
Anyone who finds this proposition fascinating won’t, I promise, be disappointed to read the rest of this book, or for that matter all of Talkin’ Moscow Blues: Essays About Literature, Politics, Movies, and Jazz. But maybe the single most remarkable example of 20th-century totalitarian invective against jazz that Skvorecky ever relayed was here in the intro to The Bass Saxophone, where he recalls — faithfully, he assures us (“they had engraved themselves deeply on my mind”) — a set of regulations, issued by a Gauleiter — a regional official for the Reich — as binding on all local dance orchestras during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Get this:
- Pieces in foxtrot rhythm (so-called swing) are not to exceed 20% of the repertoires of light orchestras and dance bands;
- in this so-called jazz type repertoire, preference is to be given to compositions in a major key and to lyrics expressing joy in life rather than Jewishly gloomy lyrics;
- As to tempo, preference is also to be given to brisk compositions over slow ones so-called blues); however, the pace must not exceed a certain degree of allegro, commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo (so-called hot jazz) or in solo performances (so-called breaks) be tolerated;
- so-called jazz compositions may contain at most 10% syncopation; the remainder must consist of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races and conductive to dark instincts alien to the German people (so-called riffs);
- strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit (so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc.) as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl (so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.);
- also prohibited are so-called drum breaks longer than half a bar in four-quarter beat (except in stylized military marches);
- the double bass must be played solely with the bow in so-called jazz compositions;
- plucking of the strings is prohibited, since it is damaging to the instrument and detrimental to Aryan musicality; if a so-called pizzicato effect is absolutely desirable for the character of the composition, strict care must be taken lest the string be allowed to patter on the sordine, which is henceforth forbidden;
- musicians are likewise forbidden to make vocal improvisations (so-called scat);
- all light orchestras and dance bands are advised to restrict the use of saxophones of all keys and to substitute for them the violin-cello, the viola or possibly a suitable folk instrument.
March 3, 2012
Three persistent myths about the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War 2
Historian Stephen Davies names three persistent myths about the Great Depression. Myth #1: Herbert Hoover was a laissez-faire president, and it was his lack of action that lead to an economic collapse. Davies argues that in fact, Hoover was a very interventionist president, and it was his intervening in the economy that made matters worse. Myth #2: The New Deal ended the Great Depression. Davies argues that the New Deal actually made matters worse. In other countries, the Great Depression ended much sooner and more quickly than it did in the United States. Myth #3: World War II ended the Great Depression. Davies explains that military production is not real wealth; wars destroy wealth, they do not create wealth. In fact, examination of the historical data reveals that the U.S. economy did not really start to recover until after WWII was over.
February 28, 2012
The palpable disappointment of discovering there isn’t a vast “denier” conspiracy
Ben Pile discusses the huge letdown for environmental activists that the Heartland Institute revelations merely revealed that there isn’t a huge, shadowy conspiracy to discredit them:
When internal documents from a libertarian think tank — the Heartland Institute, known for its sceptical views on climate change — were published on the internet recently, climate-change activists around the world were elated. The leak seemed to reveal the existence of a conspiracy to distort science and impede political progress on solving climate change, just as activists had claimed. But the celebrations turned sour when one of the documents turned out to be fake, and the remainder turned out to reveal nothing remarkable. Rather than telling us anything about organised ‘climate-change denial’, this silly affair reveals much more about environmentalists.
One of the endlessly recurring themes of the environmental narrative is — in the words of the man at the centre of the ‘Fakegate’ mess, water and climate researcher Peter Gleick — that an ‘anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated’ effort exists ‘to cast doubt on climate science’, and ‘muddy public understanding about climate science and policy’. According to this mythology, right-leaning think tanks are funded by big energy companies that are keen to protect their profits from environmental regulation.
There are two problems for environmentalists convinced by this mythology.
The first is that it has never been plausible. Large corporations do not suffer from regulation. They are simply able to pass costs on to the consumer. Moreover, regulation creates firm ground on which to base longer-term strategic decisions about capital investments. And finally, regulation creates opportunities for companies that are able to mobilise resources to enter new markets. Wind farms, for example, are not cottage industries. Regulation suits larger companies.
The second problem for environmentalists has been to demonstrate that the myth is anything more than a myth. An ongoing Greenpeace project launched in 2004, for instance, aimed to provide a ‘database of information on the corporate-funded anti-environmental movement’. However, the sums of money involved were paltry. According to Greenpeace, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of the most vilified organisations, had received just $2million from Exxon between 1998 and 2005. Yet between 1994 and 2005, total donations to Greenpeace amounted to over $2 billion. According to the greens’ conspiratorial narrative, a handful of conservative think tanks with relatively small resources were seemingly able to undo the campaigning of a host of huge international environmental NGOs, national governments, international agencies, and yes, corporate interests, whose combined resources were many, many thousands of times greater.
February 27, 2012
Goodbye and good riddance to the architect of “Canadian Content” media rules
Marni Soupcoff on the lasting legacy of former CRTC head Pierre Juneau, the mandatory “CanCon” ratio for TV and radio:
Former CBC and CRTC president Pierre Juneau died last week at the age of 89, and the requisite obituaries followed. Almost all of them congratulated Mr. Juneau on his most well-known achievement: having mandated minimum standards for Canadian content on radio and television. It is an unfortunate legacy.
The troubles with CanCon requirements are both moral and practical: It is not simply wrong to try to forcibly engineer a population’s taste in music in television. It is also impossible. People like what they like, and if what they like is Canadian, they will watch and listen to it even absent rules dictating that they must. If what they like isn’t Canadian, rules saturating the airwaves with all the Loverboy ditties in the world won’t make them tune in.
So even if you aren’t bothered by CanCon rules’ violation of freedom of expression, you should at least ask yourself how effective the regulations can possibly be — especially today. More and more people are selecting their music and television shows on their own, now, picking an episode from iTunes here, a free song download from a band’s webpage there. The idea that the nation’s culture can be shaped by mandating the nationality of prime-time content on TV networks and radio stations is as antiquated as it was flawed to start with. And we’re wasting money and time by continuing to force media outlets to comply.
And yes, my Cancon blog category is a backhand at the longstanding regulation.
February 25, 2012
Reason.tv: Banning drugs, banning same-sex marriage, and banning fun
February 23, 2012
Reason.tv: Months later, still no charges in the Gibson Guitar raid
February 17, 2012
America’s galloping regulation state
You know you’re becoming a regulation-for-the-sake-of-regulation state when even The Economist — whose current staff have never met an EU regulation they didn’t love to pieces — can correctly poke fun at you for your obsessive over-regulation of everything:
Americans love to laugh at ridiculous regulations. A Florida law requires vending-machine labels to urge the public to file a report if the label is not there. The Federal Railroad Administration insists that all trains must be painted with an “F” at the front, so you can tell which end is which. Bureaucratic busybodies in Bethesda, Maryland, have shut down children’s lemonade stands because the enterprising young moppets did not have trading licences. The list goes hilariously on.
But red tape in America is no laughing matter. The problem is not the rules that are self-evidently absurd. It is the ones that sound reasonable on their own but impose a huge burden collectively. America is meant to be the home of laissez-faire. Unlike Europeans, whose lives have long been circumscribed by meddling governments and diktats from Brussels, Americans are supposed to be free to choose, for better or for worse. Yet for some time America has been straying from this ideal.
[. . .]
Two forces make American laws too complex. One is hubris. Many lawmakers seem to believe that they can lay down rules to govern every eventuality. Examples range from the merely annoying (eg, a proposed code for nurseries in Colorado that specifies how many crayons each box must contain) to the delusional (eg, the conceit of Dodd-Frank that you can anticipate and ban every nasty trick financiers will dream up in the future). Far from preventing abuses, complexity creates loopholes that the shrewd can abuse with impunity.
The other force that makes American laws complex is lobbying. The government’s drive to micromanage so many activities creates a huge incentive for interest groups to push for special favours. When a bill is hundreds of pages long, it is not hard for congressmen to slip in clauses that benefit their chums and campaign donors. The health-care bill included tons of favours for the pushy. Congress’s last, failed attempt to regulate greenhouse gases was even worse.
February 4, 2012
The true slippery slope in the Ian Thomson case
Rex Murphy gets to the bottom of the crown’s odd fixation on prosecuting Ian Thomson for successfully scaring off arsonists who attempted to burn his house down around him:
Mr. Thomson is alive, his house stands, but the Crown is still busy with him. Why is this man being punished for self-defence? Why are the Crown prosecutors making his already tormented life more miserable?
I can only suggest it is because in this, as in similar cases, our caring authorities are uncomfortable with the idea of a citizenry that retains some common sense and courage when it comes to self-protection or the protection of their property. Why, here in Toronto two years ago, a Chinese-Canadian merchant was himself charged with nothing less than “kidnapping” when he, with some help, captured a chronic shoplifter and thief. The “kidnapping” amounted to holding the wretch that was robbing him till the police arrived. They charged the storekeeper after making a deal with the thief. If this is not dread of a resourceful citizenry, then what is it?
Here’s another theory: Perhaps we have subscribed to the Thomas de Quincey school of criminology. De Quincy, as every schoolboy knows, was the great 19th-century author and essayist, the creator of the classic Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. He also penned two satirical, fearsomely prescient essays, beginning in 1827, on Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts. In the second of these, he outlined an interesting perspective on how dabbling in one form of crime can gradually, almost imperceptibly, lead to other, more horrific, desperate and truly despicable matters:
“For if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination … Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.” Very wise words indeed.
