Quotulatiousness

August 10, 2012

Who’s more dangerous to a random American citizen, terrorists or police officers?

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:56

According to Jim Harper at the Cato@Liberty blog, you’re eight times more likely to be shot by the police than killed by a terrorist:

It got a lot of attention this morning when I tweeted, “You’re Eight Times More Likely to be Killed by a Police Officer than a Terrorist.” It’s been quickly retweeted dozens of times, indicating that the idea is interesting to many people. So let’s discuss it in more than 140 characters.

In case it needs saying: Police officers are unlike terrorists in almost all respects. Crucially, the goal of the former, in their vastest majority, is to have a stable, peaceful, safe, law-abiding society, which is a goal we all share. The goal of the latter is … well, it’s complicated. I’ve cited my favorite expert on that, Audrey Kurth Cronin, here and here and here. Needless to say, the goal of terrorists is not that peaceful, safe, stable society.

I picked up the statistic from a blog post called: “Fear of Terror Makes People Stupid,” which in turn cites the National Safety Council for this and lots of other numbers reflecting likelihoods of dying from various causes. So dispute the number(s) with them, if you care to.

I take it as a given that your mileage may vary. If you dwell in the suburbs or a rural area, and especially if you’re wealthy, white, and well-spoken, your likelihood of death from these two sources probably converges somewhat (at very close to zero).

July 27, 2012

Twitter joke trial comes to the correct result, eventually

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

Kelly Fiveash at The Register on the Twitter “bomb threat” case:

A bloke found guilty of tweeting a “menacing” joke about blowing up a UK airport has had his conviction quashed by the High Court today. A collective sigh of relief was heard moments later from comedians addicted to the micro-blogging website.

Paul Chambers, 28, was waiting to fly from Doncaster’s Robin Hood airport to Belfast to see his girlfriend, whom he met on the social networking site, when snow closed the airfield and delayed his flight.

He vented his frustration in a series of tweets to his squeeze Sarah Tonner, now his fiancee, including a suggestion that he had considered “resorting to terrorism” to ensure he could visit her.

[. . .]

Mr Justice Owen and Mr Justice Griffith Williams said in the High Court today that the facts needed to be considered in context, pointing out that the tweets had clearly appeared to be a reference to the airport closing due to adverse weather conditions.

“There was no evidence before the Crown Court to suggest that any of the followers of the appellant’s ‘tweet’, or indeed anyone else who may have seen the ‘tweet’ posted on the appellant’s time line, found it to be of a menacing character or, at a time when the threat of terrorism is real, even minimally alarming,” the High Court heard.

July 5, 2012

What do software developers and predatory bankers have in common?

Filed under: Business, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:02

In his regular column at The Register, Matt Asay points out that using another company’s API can be a quick and easy way to get going, but it carries significant risks:

In tech today, it has become a truism that “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product”. Somehow we have applied this wisdom to consumers without recognising that the same principle applies to enterprises and their developers. Recently, however, Netflix and LinkedIn have reminded us just how precarious it is to build on someone else’s platform — or API.

Paul Graham, one of the founders of Y Combinator, has described APIs as “self-serve [business development]”. It’s a great story: open and document your API and watch a thousand businesses bloom, bringing you cash and legitimacy. All of which may be true, if done correctly.

But the other side of Graham’s “business development” is the difficulty of predicting the business planning on the other side of the API. Twitter was pretty free with API access in its early days when it was seeking adoption rather than income. Now that the company has grown up and continues to tighten its grip on how and where users interact with tweets, Twitter terminated its tweet syndication partnership with LinkedIn and has promised to clamp down even more tightly on how developers use its API. Twitter is doing this because it can, as professor Joel West points out, but also because it must: its advertising business depends upon it.

So where’s the banking similarity come in?

There’s one other thing to consider, as venture capitalist Bill Davidow opines in The Atlantic, and that is the very real possibility that this API mercantilism is a sign of how the technology world is changing, and not for the better:

    At both Hewlett-Packard and Intel, where I next worked, money was important — but it wasn’t the top priority. The goal was to do the right thing and do it well. If you did that, over time, rewards followed and shareholders supported your efforts…

    Many other things have changed in the valley over the past five decades. I’ve become increasingly concerned about one thing that is seldom discussed: the valley is no longer as concerned about serving the customer, and even sees great opportunity in exploitation. We are beginning to act like the bankers who sold subprime mortgages to naïve consumers…

Or sold developers subprime APIs?

June 11, 2012

We can’t “save” capitalism, because we don’t “have” capitalism

Filed under: Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:38

James Delingpole in the Telegraph (the italicized opening paragraph is a quite from Tim Morgan):

    Reforming capitalism so that it serves the majority, and strengthening the individual against the collectivist and the corporate, are inspiring visions. This is where government should be taking Britain.

Easier said than done, of course — as I was reminded yesterday when I Tweeted it under the headline “How to rescue capitalism….” only to have some Twentysomething smartarse Tweet back “Rescue it? Bury it!”

This is the kind of fifth-form, sub-Banksy political analysis which passes for conventional wisdom these days. It’s the dominant strain of thinking at the Guardian, at the BBC, among the studio audience at Channel 4’s apocalyptically lame 10 O’Clock Live, on Twitter, in the right-on brains of groovester opinion-formers all the way from Ben Goldacre to Graham Linehan to Polly Toynbee — and, of course, across the world in the entire Occupy movement. Capitalism, they all maintain, has failed.

No, capitalism has not recently been tried: that’s the real problem. And what I particularly like about Morgan’s report — well worth reading in full — is that it addresses this extremely important point. What we’re experiencing around the world at the moment is not laissez-faire, self-correcting, authentic, free-market capitalism but an excedingly corrupt and bastardised form thereof.

What we’re seeing is a grotesque stitch up between the banking class, the corporate class and the political class — at the expense of the rest of us.

One day, I like to hope, those of us on the libertarian right will find common cause with (at least some of) the Occupy crowd and unite against our real enemy.

May 23, 2012

Chris Selley on the disproportional sentences handed out by the “court of public opinion”

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

People can be idiots. Some of them are idiots all the time. Others are only idiots every now and again. When the idiotic events happen to co-incide with fluctuating public opinion, the sentence for public idiocy can often vastly exceed the impact of the original idiotic action:

It has been a tough week for notorious, misbehaving young people — well, outside of Quebec anyway. On Monday in a New Jersey courtroom, Dharun Ravi was sentenced to 30 days in jail for having briefly spied, twice, via webcam, on his Rutgers University roommate’s romantic encounters. He was 18 at the time. And on Tuesday, Swansea University, in South Wales, made it clear that 21-year-old Liam Stacey is forever unwelcome on its campus, where he was nearly done studying biology. Mr. Stacey just served half of a 56-day jail sentence for publishing some flamboyantly racist tweets. “Go suck a ni–er d-ck you f–king aids ridden c–t,” one read.

Both individuals are unredeemed pariahs. Yet on either side of the Atlantic, and across the political spectrum, their cases have sparked an interesting debate over whether criminal justice was the proper means through which to express polite society’s revulsion at their actions. I think it was not, for the simple reason that the charges bore little relationship to the true nature of the outrage.

[. . .]

The context of Mr. Stacey’s crimes is less tragic. On March 17, before a television audience of millions, Premier League soccer player Fabrice Muamba collapsed of a heart attack. (He has since made a remarkable recovery.) In response, an admittedly soused Mr. Stacey Tweeted the following: “LOL. F–k Muamba he’s dead!!! #Haha.” That astoundingly insensitive missive was what elicited society’s outrage; it is still quoted at least 100 times in the media for every mention of the torrent of racist abuse that followed, when fellow tweeters complained.

Twitter is not, generally speaking, a racism-free zone; earlier in this year’s NHL playoffs, it hosted some jaw-dropping invective against Washington Capitals forward Joel Ward. And British white trash can match or exceed anything their North American counterparts are capable of. So here it is even clearer: Mr. Stacey’s problem wasn’t “inciting racial hatred,” the charge of which he was convicted, but doing it at the wrong time and getting noticed.

In the end, while two months was a remarkably harsh sentence for mere words, it’s hard to feel sorry for Mr. Stacey. One can argue for unfettered free speech, and equal application of the law, without defending this particular oik.

April 30, 2012

Twitter’s “Red Guard” of flag-spam abusers

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:56

Some nasty tricks being played by some Twitter users, abusing the report feature that is supposed to help cut down on spam posts to attempt to shut down opinions they find offensive:

Shortly after their video “If I Wanted America to Fail” went viral, Free Market America found themselves kicked off Twitter, a popular social media resource that allows users to post very short messages. After a few hours of confusion, their account was reinstated.

This past Sunday, the Twitter account of Chris Loesch, husband of conservative pundit Dana Loesch, was abruptly shut down. After a massive outcry, and the creation of a Twitter topic called “#FreeChrisLoesch” that swiftly became one of the hottest “hash tags” on the network, Chris’ account was reactivated… for a couple of hours. By Monday morning, he was gone again, after his account was restored and removed several more times.

What did Free Market America and Chris Loesch do to warrant suspension? After all, people like Spike Lee and Roseanne Barr flagrantly, openly, defiantly violated Twitter’s terms of service, and put human lives in jeopardy, by distributing personal information about George Zimmerman, the shooter in the Trayvon Martin case. Their accounts have not been suspended. What violation of Loesch’s compares to using Twitter to target someone for assault by an angry mob — and, for that matter, sending the mob to the wrong address?

These suspensions were apparently the work of “flag spammers,” digital brown shirt gangs that make coordinated attacks to silence conservative voices by abusing Twitter’s spam flagging feature. Al Gore coined the term “digital brown shirts” to describe the online squadrons supposedly unleashed to “harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President.” Of course, he was talking about President Bush, and there weren’t any actual “digital brown shirts” at the time, but this is precisely the sort of behavior he was describing.

New frontiers in border control bureaucracy

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

Travelling by air to the UK is a good way to discover the joys of forming queues. The British national pastime of days gone by has been making a stirring new appearance at British airports. The agency responsible is doing everything it can … to suppress information and forbid photography of the queues of people waiting for hours to get through customs:

Heathrow Airport has been ordered by the UK Border Agency (UKBA) to stop handing out to passengers leaflets acknowledging the “very long delays” at immigration, which have become a serious government concern in the runup to the Olympics.

Passengers flying into the airport at the weekend reported having to wait for up to three hours before clearing passport control. But after leaflets apologising for the problem were handed out by BAA, which owns Heathrow, the UKBA warned that they were “inappropriate” and that ministers would take “a very dim view”.

The airport operator was also told to prevent passengers taking pictures in the arrivals hall, according to the Daily Telegraph, which obtained correspondence from Marc Owen, director of UKBA operations at Heathrow. Pictures of lengthy queues have been posted on Twitter by frustrated travellers.

April 13, 2012

Blogging tip #2: Don’t be this guy

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Every now and again, someone asks me what it takes to be a successful blogger. If I knew all those secrets, I’d be a much bigger internet presence than I currently am, let me tell you. However, aside from updating frequently (daily or better), the best advice I can give you is to not be this guy:

See the whole thing at The Oatmeal.

March 30, 2012

“Fifty-six days. Two months. In an actual jail. For tweeting”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:54

Brendan O’Neill on Britain joining China and Iran in punishing free speech:

This week, Britain became a fully paid-up member of that clique of illiberal intolerant, tweeter-harassing states.

On Tuesday, at Swansea Magistrates Court in Wales, Liam Stacey, a student, was imprisoned for 56 days for writing offensive tweets.

Fifty-six days. Two months. In an actual jail. For tweeting. It needs to be spelt out like that in order to show how shocking it is that in the 21st century, in a nation that gave us such great warriors for freedom as The Levellers and John Stuart Mill, a young man has now been banged up for expressing his thoughts.

Stacey’s thoughts were far from pleasant ones. In fact they were offensive and repugnant.

What kind of freedom of speech do you have when you can be punished for expressing unpopular and idiotic sentiments? None whatsoever. When you’re only free to mouth the mainstream popular opinions — or what the state tells you is acceptable — you don’t have freedom of speech at all.

When other tweeters complained to Stacey about his off-colour comments, he started to use racist language. He told his detractors to “f**k off”, and hurled pretty much every racial slur under the sun at them.

The Twitterati reported him to the police. And sure enough he got a visit from the cops, was charged with committing a racially aggravated public order offence, and now finds himself in the clink alongside burglars and rapists.

Yes, Stacey’s comments were horrible. But this was speech rather than actions, the use of words rather than the use of fists, and there should never be any state involvement, certainly not arrests and showtrials, in the arena of speech.

In finding himself incarcerated simply because he refused to “Pray for Muamba” and then expressed nasty racist thoughts, Stacey has effectively been punished for committing a thoughtcrime, or perhaps its modern equivalent: a tweetcrime.

March 17, 2012

“In a nutshell … market value and franchise value aren’t always going to match”

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:08

Tom Pelissero shares a few informative Twitter updates from free agent linebacker Erin Henderson — who still hasn’t had an acceptable contract offer from the Vikings:

Erin Henderson has heard enough from fans questioning why he hasn’t re-signed with the Minnesota Vikings.

On Friday, Henderson fired back on Twitter.

“In a nutshell…market value and franchise value aren’t always going to match,” Henderson wrote on his Twitter page (@50ErinHenderson). “If someone can play 3 positions … their value has to go up.

“I’ve watched every single 1 of my games from last (year) 10 (times) over. I know what I’m worth. Not to mention they (have not) even give me an offer. I don’t come to (your) job and tell (you) what you (should and shouldn’t) make. So how can (you) say what I’m worth?”

Henderson, 25, took over as the Vikings’ starting weakside linebacker last season, his fourth in the NFL. He recorded 91 tackles (56 solo), eight tackles for loss, 1½ sacks and two forced fumbles in 15 games, playing 53.8% of the defensive snaps.

I’m quite surprised that the Vikings haven’t been able to come up with an offer: linebacker is one of the positions that they’ll need to reinforce, as Erin’s older brother E.J. Henderson is also a free agent and may not be back with the team. You don’t want to be in the position of having to replace 2/3rds of your starting linebackers in the same season. With all the other pressing personnel needs the Vikings face, you’d imagine that re-signing Erin Henderson would be an obvious move.

March 10, 2012

“[A]theists and theists […] are quacking and waddling in the same way in different ponds”

Filed under: Media, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:19

Kennedy expresses the idea that atheism is a religion and becomes “a minor celebrity and a major troll” to her social media circles:

I didn’t know what fire and brimstone was until I made a throwaway claim recently during an appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher. It seemed pretty unaudacious at the time, but by dropping the simple sentence “Atheism is a religion,” I opened a biblical floodgate of ridicule, name-calling, and abuse.

My Twitter feed and Facebook page became engorged with angry responses. “Your adherence into adulthood to what is usually an adolescent phase (Libertarianism), speaks volumes about your confirmation bias levels,” wrote Kernan. Touchstone Supertramp added; “Damn girl you got a big forehead.” A guy named Kevin and about 70 other people shared this bumper-sticker nugget: “‎If atheism is a religion, then off is a TV channel.” Liz wrote, “Kennedy, is that if atheism constitutes a religious belief than anorexia is whenever you don’t eat.” Michael wrote: “re·li·gion /riˈlijən/ Noun: 1. Whatever Kennedy says it is.” That was awesome. Beth called me a minor celebrity and a major troll—and it was also awesome to have somebody think I’m a celebrity.

[. . .]

Newberg and his late partner Eugene D’Aquili mapped various parts of the brain showing activation in specific areas when people were undergoing certain religious rituals or experiences, such as a shaman being in a trance or a Buddhist entering a mystical state. Regardless of the religion, the brain function was the same. Something was happening when these people experienced their version of religious phenomena, and the scans lit up like Robert Redford’s suit in The Electric Horseman.

This does not prove God exists, but it does show humans are wired or biologically predisposed to believe in something. When I interviewed him for this article, Newberg said his research demonstrates that “we are wired to have these beliefs about the world, to get at the fundamental stuff the universe is about. For many people, it includes God and for some it doesn’t. Your brain is doing its best to understand the world and construct beliefs to understand it, and from an epistemological perspective there is no fundamental difference.”

[. . .]

When atheists rail against theists (as many did on my Facebook page), they are using the same fervor the religious use when making their claims against a secular society. By calling atheism a religion, I am not trying to craft terms or apply them out of convenience. I just see theists and atheists behaving in the same manner, approaching from opposite ends of the runway. The entire discourse about religion stems from those who think they know more than the other guy. But what we really know is that we don’t know much. And we seem to share the same mechanism in our brains that drives us to make claims of faith and rationalism as a way of making sense of the great unknown.

You can call atheism a belief system, which Newberg guardedly does, or you can make a stronger assertion and say that atheists and theists, who have conveniently developed hate-tinged froth and vitriol for one another, are quacking and waddling in the same way in different ponds. Either way, they are ducks and atheism is a religion. At least it is in the hands of those who are so religious about their disbelief that they place the weight of the argument on the feathery shoulders of their believing brothers and sisters.

February 17, 2012

Colby Cosh on the current drama around the Falkland Islands

Filed under: Americas, Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:22

The last time Colby Cosh discussed the Falkland Islands, we had a bit of a discussion on Twitter, with my pessimism about Britain’s strategic situation finally persuading him to say “You’ve convinced me to worry about this a little more than I would’ve” (summary in this post). He’s now posted a new article at Maclean’s, which I think accurately captures the situation in the south Atlantic:

Argentina, the world press tells us, intends to rename its top soccer league the “Cruiser General Belgrano First Division”, in honour of the Argentine ship sunk by the Royal Navy during the 1982 Falklands War. Far be it from any outsider to prescribe how a country honours its war dead, but honour is not what the move is about: it’s part of a continuing, exhausting barrage of Falklands agitprop from Argentina’s Kirchner government. Kirchner is scrambling to keep Argentine economic growth rolling, barracking businesses and workers in the classic caudillo manner as inflation outpaces the dubious official statistics. She has tried, with some success, to close off Southern Hemisphere ports to boats flying the maritime flag of the Falklands and to weld traditionally UK-friendly neighbours into a regional bloc against “colonialism”. Tensions are high and the Falkland Islanders are feeling besieged.

Britain is passing through a phase of relative strategic vulnerability when it comes to the Falklands. The islands are garrisoned much more strongly than they were in 1982 and the RAF has a proper airfield. But the UK has sold off its Harrier fleet, and its naval force-projection capacity is a little threadbare; public austerity has forced the Royal Navy to wait until 2016 for a new Nimitz-sized aircraft-carrier class to come into play. General Sir Michael Jackson, often considered the top UK commentator on military affairs (how many General Sirs are there?), recently summed up the situation by suggesting that the Falklands could be defended—but if Argentina captured them in a coup de main, as it did in ’82, its soldiers could probably not now be driven off. From a game-theoretic standpoint, the situation is a nightmare.

Update, 21 February: Brendan O’Neill explains that in the modern celebrity-fuelled world, the Penn really is mightier than the sword:

Easily the most extraordinary thing about Sean Penn’s recent comments on the Falkland Islands is the impact that they made. The tidal wave of furious commentary has tended to focus on Penn’s undoubted combination of daftness and arrogance, with enraged British hacks asking ‘where does Mr Madonna get off holding a press conference to pontificate about the serious affairs of the South Atlantic?’. That is indeed a good question. But a better and more pressing one is this: how on earth did the musings of one muppet make such a massive impact, intensifying the stand-off between Argentina and Britain, generating acres of newsprint, and even provoking a huge protest in the Falkland Islands themselves under the banner ‘Falk You, Sean’?

[. . .]

The Penn affair confirms the extraordinary and terrifying power of celebrity today. It shows that in our celeb-obsessed era, the famous and allegedly fabulous are no longer used simply to advertise booze or to titillate the readers of gossip columns — they have become actual tools of global politics. (In both senses of the word ‘tool’ — ‘a device used to carry out a particular function’ and ‘one who lacks the mental capacity to know he is being used’.) Indeed, Kirchner’s use of Penn in her war of words with Britain shows that she is a sussed and wily leader — she recognises that, today, a comment from a celeb is a far more effective political manoeuvre than readying a warship or making a stern speech at the United Nations. Her message is basically: ‘I’ll see your Prince William and raise you Sean Penn…’

February 12, 2012

Interpol system key in arrest of Hamza Kashgari

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:27

Abuse of a system designed to catch international criminals led to the arrest of Saudi journalist Hamza Kashgari for “insulting the Prophet Muhammed” on Twitter:

Interpol has been accused of abusing its powers after Saudi Arabia used the organisation’s red notice system to get a journalist arrested in Malaysia for insulting the Prophet Muhammad.

Police in Kuala Lumpur said Hamza Kashgari, 23, was detained at the airport “following a request made to us by Interpol” the international police cooperation agency, on behalf of the Saudi authorities.

Kashgari, a newspaper columnist, fled Saudi Arabia after posting a tweet on the prophet’s birthday that sparked more than 30,000 responses and several death threats. The posting, which was later deleted, read: “I have loved things about you and I have hated things about you and there is a lot I don’t understand about you … I will not pray for you.”

More than 13,000 people joined a Facebook page titled “The Saudi People Demand the Execution of Hamza Kashgari”.

Clerics in Saudi Arabia called for him to be charged with apostasy, a religious offence punishable by death. Reports suggest that the Malaysian authorities intend to return him to his native country.

February 9, 2012

Brazil tries to quash Twitter users over speed trap tweets

Filed under: Americas, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:44

Proving yet again that the main concern is revenue generation rather than safety, Brazil is trying to force Twitter to stop its users from sending out tweets that warn about speed traps:

The attorney general of Brazil has filed a lawsuit against Twitter in a bid to block accounts that warn drivers of police speed traps and roadblocks.

The government argues the tweets interfere with police efforts to fight drunk driving, reduce accidents and uncover evidence of crime, report CNN, PC Magazine, The Next Web and BBC News.

The suit, which seeks $290,000 for each day that Twitter or its microbloggers fail to comply, claims the warnings violate criminal and traffic laws.

Twitter recently announced that they now have the capability of restricting the distribution of tweets within countries (they used to block worldwide distribution by default).

H/T to Walter Olson for the link.

January 31, 2012

Homeland Security Theatre: The case of the “Destroy America” Brit twits

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

Jim Harper sifts through the evidence in the “Destroy America” Twitter case:

The Department of Homeland Security has been vague as yet about what actually happened. It may have been some kind of “social media analysis” like this that turned up “suspicious” Tweets leading to the exclusion, though the betting is running toward a suspicious-activity tipline. (What “turned up” the Tweets doesn’t affect my analysis here.) The boastful young Britons Tweeted about going to “destroy America” on the trip — destroy alcoholic beverages in America was almost certainly the import of that line — and dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe.

Profoundly stilted literalism took this to be threatening language. And a failure of even brief investigation prevented DHS officials from discovering the absurdity of that literalism. It would be impossible to “dig up” Marilyn Monroe’s body, which is in a crypt at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles.

[. . .]

Other facts could combine with Twitter commentary to create a suspicious circumstance on extremely rare occasions, but for proper suspicion to arise, the Tweet or Tweets and all other facts must be consistent with criminal planning and inconsistent with lawful behavior. No information so far available suggests that the DHS did anything other than take Tweets literally in the face of plausible explanations by their authors that they were using hyperbole and irony. This is simple investigative incompetence.

If indeed it is a “social media analysis” program that produced this incident, the U.S. government is paying money to cause U.S. government officials to waste their time on making the United States an unattractive place to visit. That’s a cost-trifecta in the face of essentially zero prospect for any security benefit.

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