Quotulatiousness

June 14, 2011

Yet another call for the government to “do something”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:26

Sean Gabb dissects what is really going on with the current push for the British government to “do something” about the sexualization of children:

The argument I have been putting is fairly simple, and I have not deviated from it in my various appearances. I argue as follows:

1. It is reasonable to assume that anyone who uses the “protecting the kiddies” argument is really interested in controlling adults. Indeed, one of the organisations most active in pushing for controls is Media Watch UK, which used to be called the National Viewers and Listeners Association, and which, led by Mary Whitehouse, spent most of the 1960s, 70, and 80s arguing for censorship of the media.

2. Ratings on music videos will have no effect, as many of these things are now downloaded from the Internet. As for controls on clothing, children will wear what they want to wear, and it will be hard in practice to do anything about it.

3. How children dress and behave is a matter for their parents to control, not the authorities. Doubtless, there are some rotten parents about. But any law of the kind proposed will not be used against a small minority, but against parents in general. It will be one more weapon in the armoury of social control that has already reduced parents to the status of regulated childminders.

4. Authoritarian conservatives deceive themselves when they think the authorities are fundamentally on their side. The moment you ask for a control to be imposed, you put your trust in people you have never seen, who are not accountable to you, who probably do not share your own values, and who will, sooner or later, use the control you have demanded in ways that you find surprising or shocking. The attempted control of clothing, for example, will certainly be made an excuse for the police to drag little girls out of family picnics to photograph the clothes they are wearing, or to measure their heels to see if they are a quarter of an inch too long. Anyone who dismisses this as an absurd claim has not been reading the newspapers. That is how the authorities behave. Even when it is not an abuse in itself, any law will be abused by them.

June 3, 2011

“The Amnesty film … was documentary as corporate hagiography”

Filed under: History, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:04

David Bowden reviews Amnesty! When They Are All Free, a BBC documentary on the 50th anniversary of Amnesty International:

The Amnesty film, by contrast, was documentary as corporate hagiography, evading nuance in favour of quick and easy narrative with a facile message: it ain’t easy being righteous.

It was a shame, because the story it told was potentially a fascinating one. Amnesty was born in the first wave of Sixties radicalism, and faced with the realisation that the apparently progressive politics of universal human rights adopted after the Second World War was being hijacked in the interests of Cold War realpolitik. The organisation began as a documentary news organisation, chronicling the disappearances and abuses under repressive regimes around the world. In the spirit of its famous torch image, Amnesty shone a light on human-rights abuses wherever it found them.

Certainly, as a product of the British postwar liberal intelligentsia, much of the organisation’s self-proclaimed apolitical stance smacked of naivety from the off; founder Peter Benenson was quickly forced to fall on his sword after accepting funding from the British government. Yet this overview of its early days was captivating stuff, offering a reminder of the genuine risks posed to its researchers and witnesses as this small organisation routinely found itself on the wrong side of Western and Soviet-backed juntas alike in its pursuit of accurate reporting of the human costs of the broader superpower struggle.

But Amnesty’s interventions were having distressing and unintended side effects — notably, the new tactic of ‘disappearing’ political prisoners before they became international causes célèbres. In the film, this raised interesting questions of journalistic ethics and apolitical campaigning, particularly pertinent in the context of the more cavalier instincts of the Wikileaks era.

Sadly, however, while willing to touch upon some of the uglier aspects of Amnesty’s growth from small, earnest campaign into the international China-baiting behemoth it is today, When They Are All Free tended to sideline difficult questions in favour of its heartwarming narrative. While there was a degree of soul-searching on offer, the problem with critiquing human rights as a political agenda today is that much of it is done by those on the inside. As Alex de Waal once remarked, ‘it is as though the sociological study of the church were undertaken by committed Christians only; criticism would be solely within the context of advancing the faith itself’.

May 30, 2011

Cory Doctorow: “Every pirate wants to be an admiral”

Filed under: Economics, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:09

May 29, 2011

Ace declares his lust for Christina Hendricks

Filed under: Media, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:42

I dropped by Ace of Spades H.Q. to steal borrow their nifty little “DOOM” graphic to slap on to the last post about the coming collapse of the US dollar, when I happened to read a paean to the lovely Christina Hendricks by Ace. He out-and-out declares his lust for her.

No, I mean he really does:

By The Way: Christina Hendricks Is Hot

I guess I didn’t telegraph this enough, but I was kidding when I said I might not “hit” Christina Hendricks.

I mean: Seriously.

It looks like two polar bears in a Greco-Roman wrestling match.

I didn’t have an “I’d hit that like…” joke so I went the other way and pretended she wasn’t hot. I thought it would be obvious I was kidding.

I’ve written fan fic for an attempted Firefly spin-off series I call Saffron: Intergalactic Space Whore (Moderate Content Warning).

I know I didn’t telegraph this because people are still asking, “Dude, do you not think she’s hot?” So it’s on me.

So, for the record: She’s hot.

I’d hit that with the berserker fury of a dozen Norsemen. I’d hit that so hard she’d sing the aaa-aaa chorus of The Immigrant Song.

As the cool kids used to say . . . THIS.

May 25, 2011

Netflix now the 500lb gorilla sitting on your internet bandwidth

Filed under: Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:41

In a shocking display that if you make something legally accessible, people are willing to pay for it (who’d ever have expected that?), Netflix has supplanted Bittorrent as the largest user of peak-time internet traffic:

Is solving the copyright “wars” really so difficult? New traffic research shows that Netflix has overtaken Bittorrent as America’s favourite internet application, knocking http into third place. “P2P is here to stay,” note the authors in Sandvine’s Global Internet Report, Spring 2011 edition, which shows that demand for legal, paid-for stuff is the single biggest internet traffic trend.

Copyright-holders who are slow to bless legal services, by contrast, find themselves being swamped by pirates.

Netflix now accounts for 24.71 per cent of peak time aggregate traffic in the US, pushing Bittorrent into second place with 17.23 per cent. By contrast, the Sandvine numbers show that in markets where there are no legal services, pirate services flourish. In Latin America, file-sharing program Ares grabs 15.48 per cent of peak-time (fixed line) internet traffic, behind http. In Europe, Bittorent rules, with 28.4 per cent of peak-time traffic, ahead of http. Here, YouTube grabs third place, with almost 12 per cent of peak-time traffic.

We signed up for a month-long trial of Netflix (on the recommendation of Dark Water Muse) and have been quite happy with the service. In fact, it was a major factor in our buying a PS3 over the weekend, as our existing Blu-Ray player was incompatible with Netflix.

May 20, 2011

Bank of Canada is not there to “guide” the markets

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:22

Stephen Gordon points out that there appear to be some dangerous assumptions out in the market about whether and when the Bank of Canada will change interest rates:

The Bank of Canada is scheduled to make its next interest rate announcement on May 31, and my understanding is that the consensus of opinion among private sector analysts is that interest rates will remain unchanged, because there was no explicit warning of an increase in its April 12 decision.

This consensus of opinion may turn out to be well-founded — but not for that reason. Recent reports confirm what Bank officials have said several times: the Bank of Canada believes that it under no obligation to provide guidance about short-term interest rates. Governor Mark Carney has already noted that one of the contributing factors of the financial crisis was the private sector’s overconfidence in its ability to predict central banks’ behaviour.

This doesn’t automatically mean the Bank will raise interest rates at their next meeting, but it does mean that it could happen (despite the “lack of warning” in April).

May 16, 2011

Ear worms

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:08

For the last few weeks, I’ve had a musical track bothering me: I knew it very well, but didn’t know what it was called or where I’d encountered it. An unexpected earworm from the past. Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, I finally managed to track it down — it’s the theme music to a British TV show that I don’t remember watching (yet I know the theme music very well):

It’s a very distinctive late-60s to early 70s sound. I have no idea why I know it so well: perhaps my dad used to watch the show and I just heard the music in the background. Actually, that’s the only thing I could come up with to explain why I’d know the theme music, yet not remember ever having watched the TV show.

I thought I’d exorcise the earworm demon and buy a copy from iTunes. But no, they’ve got several covers of the music by various artists (including an interesting version by the Band of the 1st Battalion, the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment — currently classified as “Rock” by iTunes), but not the original. HMVDirect has a similar selection (covers, but no original performance). “Curses, foiled again!”

I found out more about the TV show from Wikipedia, the Unofficial Sweeney website, and a true labour of love, a page devoted to sleuthing up all the many musical tracks used in the original series named for the only album of music released: the Shut it! The Music of “The Sweeney” site.

This page is an ongoing development to identify the 300 different pieces of music used in the 1970s British television series The Sweeney. As is common practice with many television shows, other than the specially-comissioned title theme, Harry South’s unforgettable, rousing actioner, “ready-made” music was mostly used to provide incidental themes to the action. These came from specialist “Production Music” houses, the most well-known being De Wolfe, KPM (Keith Prowse Music), Chappell and Bruton. The years 1971 to 1978 arguably represented the genre’s most creative era (before competition and corporatism took over and strangled much artistic creativity), serendipitously co-inciding with production of The Sweeney itself.

In 2001 Sanctuary Records issued a Sweeney CD compilation with 25 tracks used in the show. As good as it was, it really only scratched the surface and sadly no further volumes have been forthcoming.

But unless I happen across a physical copy of the CD, I’m stuck with my persistent earworm. Here’s the closing credits, in hopes it’ll help banish it from my mind temporarily:

May 10, 2011

Superinjunctions

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:08

British law is already difficult enough for outsiders to suss out, but the recent use of superinjunctions to prevent even the hint that a story is being legally suppressed makes it even tougher:

The high profile are gagging, the press is losing the ability to speak, and now the Twitterati is vomiting up half-digested rumours. All the signs are that Britain is in the grip of the legal virus known as ‘injunctionitis’.

It makes for an unedifying spectacle. In between news of uprisings in the Middle East, the killing of Osama bin Laden and the marriage of Will’n’Kate, the British press has been running another set of stories about what it is forbidden from reporting. The reason for this is the increasingly problematic use of the injunction, a legal prohibition issued by a judge that prevents a particular story from being published. While these have been issued for a few years now with largely little public knowledge — especially after the use of so-called superinjunctions, which forbid people from mentioning the fact that an injunction exists — over the past year or so, the injunction in all its forms has started to make the news all by itself. Which, you’d be correct in thinking, rather defies the point.

In fact, over the past few weeks, the attempts by certain individuals to gag the press has resulted in an outbreak of calculated press indiscretion. There has been the tale of the unnamed English actor who employed the services of Helen Wood, a prostitute whose previous clients include footballer Wayne Rooney. Of course, given the injunction, Wood couldn’t do a proper bonk-and-blab about the actor, but there was enough detail there for a salacious few pages’ worth. Then there was the unnamed Premier League footballer who had allegedly been having an affair with Big Brother 7 victim/star Imogen Thomas. She has since been frequently pictured looking disconsolate in a series of fetching bikinis.

It’s bad enough when the government uses its powers to suppress public discussion of items of importance to “national security” (with the definition as loose as possible). It’s much worse when the courts are allowing private individuals and corporations to have their own version of court-imposed censorship, as there’s no possibility of it being a “national security” issue.

It has not just been the tabloids making news of the unreportable. There has also been the case of ex-Royal Bank of Scotland boss Fred Goodwin who took out a hyper-injunction, which absurdly forbids anyone from even talking about the subject of the injunction to the lawmakers themselves — namely, parliament. (Although, of course, someone did, hence we know about its existence if not any of the details.) And things became even crazier when a prominent member of the media, BBC journalist Andrew Marr, revealed that he himself had violated his own profession’s freedom by taking out an injunction in 2008 to hush up an infidelity. In fact, as The Times gleefully reported, there are over 30 high-profile injunctions currently in operation involving a whole heap of public figures, from footballers to politicians.

So, in at least one area, we’re back to there literally being two different kinds of law, differentiated by the wealth of the plaintiff.

May 9, 2011

Gadgets from science fiction

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:55

Caleb Cox rounds up ten geeky gadgets from science fiction shows and movies that he thinks we’d all like to have:

Tomorrow is always round the corner in the world of tech, and gadgets that started life in the imaginations of mad folk are starting to become a possibility.

Tools that give us superpowers may seem impossible, but ultramobile computing is a reality these days, with commonplace kit that seems more capable than devices Gene Roddenberry dreamt up.

As we’ve already looked at fantasy blades you wished you owned, it’s about time we talked-up the fantasy tech, after all, we are Reg Hardware. So here’s ten of our favourite gadgets from popular culture that may or may not be the tech of the future.

Let us know if there’s anything you think we’ve missed and give us your views on its commercial prospects in the comments section at the end.

His choices are:

  • Cloaking device — Predator
  • Holodeck — Star Trek: The Next Generation
  • Hologram communication — Star Wars
  • Orgasmatron — The Sleeper
  • Peril Sensitive Sunglasses — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
  • Personality glasses — Joe 90
  • Sonic Screwdriver — Doctor Who
  • Timebooth — Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
  • Telepathic Lens — The Lensman series
  • Teleportation belt — The Tomorrow People

May 5, 2011

Christian Ponder on ESPN’s Sports Science

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 14:40

May 3, 2011

The Royal Wedding as proof of monarchy’s descent to celebrity status

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

Brendan O’Neill won’t expect his name to show up on the royal honours list after this scathing piece:

Now that the I do’s have been done and the dress has been papped to death, it’s time to put the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton into perspective. Friday’s knees-up in London and other parts of Britain was not, as both right-wing fantasists and bitter republicans would have us believe, evidence that everyday Brits remain in thrall to monarchy. Rather, the Big Day confirmed just how far the monarchy has been hollowed of meaning, and the extent to which it has rather desperately thrown its lot in with one of the few institutions that still has political purchase in Britain today: celebrity culture.

The observing classes were in equal measure overexcited and disgusted to see so many little people waving Union flags on Friday. For monarchists, this was evidence that Britons still have ‘great affection’ for their Queen and her brood and all that they represent — including hereditary privilege. For the more fashionable Windsor-weary set — republican commentators at publications such as the Guardian and the New Statesman — the sight of hordes of happy people cheering a prince and his gal was utterly alien. They are ‘brainwashed drones’, sniffed one columnist, partaking in a ‘monstrous [display] of imperial pride’, said another.

What both these cheerers and sneerers amongst the chattering classes fail to appreciate is the extent to which the royal wedding was a celebrity event rather than an imperial one. And people related to it accordingly, cheering and photographing Will’n’Kate not as their future natural rulers, but as individuals who have the aura, and authority, of celebrity. This was a celebrity happening not only in the much commented-upon fact that slebs such as David Beckham, Elton John and Tara-Wotsit-Wonkynose squeezed into the pews alongside the King of Tonga and the Queen of Denmark, but also in the fact that all those Union flags were handed out to the revellers by Hello! magazine. Responsibility for adding a nationalist gloss to Friday’s proceedings was effectively outsourced to the army of ‘Hello! helpers’ who ‘lined the royal wedding route’ armed with thousands of factory-made Union flags.

April 29, 2011

QotD: The NFL draft is “The Oscars for Straight Men”

Filed under: Football, Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:59

Some comedian once called the NFL Draft “The Oscars for Straight Men,” and there is something to that label. While everyone will “grade” the teams’ drafts, and fans will argue and kibitz about who their team should have drafted, there are no definitive winners or losers. One of the more ridiculous aspects of the day is how every team claims to have gotten the players they wanted or rated highest. Just once, it would be thrilling to hear a general manager come out and say, “Look, we know he’s a reach, but all of the guys we rated highest were picked already, the coach and head scout got into a screaming match, the clock was ticking down and so I flipped a coin. Knowing his pain-in-the-tush agent, he’s probably going to hold out most of training camp, anyway.”

Jim Geraghty, “Why Is the Draft So Engrossing to NFL Fans?”, National Review, 2011-04-29

NDP surge extremely taxing for . . . NDP candidates?

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:35

I’ve worked on political campaigns for minor party candidates (provincial and federal Libertarians) who had to keep their campaigning to the weekend and after-work slots because they still had to earn a living during the election. I find it hard to believe that so many candidates for a “major” party are running part-time candidacies:

There’s a standard-bearer in Quebec who went on a Las Vegas vacation for a week because she didn’t want to lose her deposit. She also reportedly spoke French so poorly that a local radio station had to scotch an interview rather than air the exchange. Another candidate went to the Caribbean and one travelled to France. There’s a Toronto candidate who has not campaigned at all, can’t be reached, and, judging by a Toronto Star report, quite possibly is an apparition. There are all kinds of students who, presumably, did not have the pesky constraints of full-time work that weighed down Mr. Larkin.

None of these things are unusual — third-place parties usually have a fair bit of cannon fodder — but it is unusual for anyone to be asking about them. And that’s what’s happening to the NDP. People are asking about them, and about the party and its platform, far more than they were last month, or even early last week.

It’s what naturally happens when an also-ran finds itself suddenly very much in the running. The key question for the NDP is: Can it manage four days of impromptu scrutiny?

That will depend on how the traditionally Liberal media handles this unexpected surge from the left: they know how to find awkward quotes and disreputable connections for candidates on the right, but generally have treated leftists with a faint air of “isn’t that cute?” rather than as serious campaigners. Can they apply the same standards in a mirror image?

It’s possible that they will give Jack Layton a much rougher ride than they have so far:

Jack Layton himself is also now facing a different sort of question about his own policies from reporters travelling with him. He was asked on Thursday about how his platform, which calls for a price on carbon, would affect gasoline prices. One analysis says the NDP plan would add 10¢ a litre at the pumps. Mr. Layton insisted that an ombudsman would be able to keep oil companies from raising prices for consumers, but he disagreed that he was proposing to regulate gasoline prices. Reporters described the exchange, which included questions about the AWOL candidates, as “testy” and “heated,” which has been rare for the NDP leader thus far. And testy exchanges lead to stories about how a leader is “on the defensive” or “responding to critics.” Eventually they can become “embattled.” (In the case of Mr. Ignatieff, a report on Thursday referred to him as “beleaguered.”)

“Tone matters,” explains Prof. Matthews. “People do respond to the media. Not everyone, of course, not the partisans and not the people who aren’t paying any attention, but there are people who take their cues from the coverage.”

Update: Publius points out that the situation could be at least as good as last season’s CBC offerings:

Everyone has been stunned by the NDP surge. The newly minted Sun News has started calling it an “Orange Crush,” which is a gross insult to a fine fizzy beverage. No one has been more surprised than the NDP. For years the party has run non-entity place holders in most ridings, as they did this time around. One of them is a Quebec barmaid who took a vacation mid-campaign, which says everything you need to know about the NDPs organization in Quebec. Now some of those ridings are competitive. We could have MPs in the next Parliament that were “accidentally” elected. There’s a sitcom in there somewhere.

April 26, 2011

Archaeology as a form of collectivism

Filed under: Americas, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:19

L. Neil Smith was watching an old archaeology show on Netflix the other day:

What this otherwise interesting and enjoyable documentary on the early Mayans whined about — even more than Third World agricultural techniques — was the fact that descendants of these ancient people were venturing out in the thulies without government approval or, more importantly, academic sanction, finding pyramids and other structures abandoned by their ancestors before tenured treasure-hunters could, burrowing into them and laying claim to their inheritance, which they then used to supplement the crappy income that comes of subsistence farming.

These people were constantly referred to as “looters” by the documentary’s writers and the featured academics, who, unbelievably, begrudge them — and their hungry children — what Indiana Jones’ girlfriend Marian Ravenwood accurately called “little bits of junk”, a phrase that I firmly believe should be tattooed across every academic archaeologist’s torso simply to remind him of the proper priorities in life.

Backwards, so he can see it in the bathroom mirror.

Or upside-down, across his stomach.

Robert Bakker of hotblooded dinosaur fame has criticized proposed laws that make amateur paleontology a crime, pointing out that most good finds begin with non-professionals stumbling across interesting new materials. Unfortunately, many such laws are already in place for archaeology, with government, in effect, preclaiming everything under the topsoil before it’s discovered, a clear-cut case of underground Marxism.

You often hear supporters of such laws snort, “That ought to be in a museum!” when they spot some desirable something on a collector’s mantlepiece. But isn’t it infinitely better off there, than hidden in a museum basement where most “nationalized” artifacts and fossils end up? And given the miserable track record socialism has earned in every other field of human endeavor, isn’t it socialists who belong in a museum?

Believe me when I attest that archaeology is important to me for many reasons and has been since I was about five years old. Much like paleontology, it tells us where we are by showing us where we’ve been. Sometimes it explains how we got this way and warns us of mistakes we shouldn’t make again. And it’s just plain splendiferously mysterious and interesting — like an old adventure radio serial. My very lovely and talented wife is preparing herself even now for a second career in archaeology. She’d like to be curator of a private museum in the Southwest.

What fun we’re going to have!

But not only is there nothing under the ground worth depriving some poor farmer’s family of a meal, of arresting, jailing, possibly killing him over, there is yet another extremely important ethical consideration.

Or two.

What, precisely, is the moral distinction between a pot-hunting farmer, on the one hand, digging into a hill and extracting something for profit that will improve his life and the lives of his kids, and a college professor, on the other hand, from some faraway country, doing exactly the same thing for profit in the form of tenure and scientific prestige?

April 23, 2011

QotD: The debunking problem in media

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:23

[. . .] the second issue is how people find out about stuff. We exist in a blizzard of information, and stuff goes missing: as we saw recently, research shows that people don’t even hear about retractions of outright fraudulent work. Publishing a follow-up in the same venue that made an initial claim is one way of addressing this problem (and when the journal Science rejected the replication paper, even they said “your results would be better received and appreciated by the audience of the journal where the Daryl Bem research was published”).

The same can be said for the New York Times, who ran a nice long piece on the original precognition finding, New Scientist who covered it twice, the Guardian who joined in online, the Telegraph who wrote about it three times over, New York Magazine, and so on.

It’s hard to picture many of these outlets giving equal prominence to the new negative findings that are now emerging, in the same way that newspapers so often fail to return to a debunked scare, or a not-guilty verdict after reporting the juicy witness statements.

All the most interesting problems around information today are about structure: how to cope with the overload, and find sense in the data. For some eyecatching precognition research, this stuff probably doesn’t matter. What’s interesting is that the information architectures of medicine, academia and popular culture are all broken in the exact same way.

Ben Goldacre, “I foresee that nobody will do anything about this problem”, Bad Science, 2011-04-23

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