Ankh-Morpork in the Jungle

There are some amazing parallels between Terry Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork and Papua New Guinea. Jim Austin's tales of being an active member of the Royal Papua New Guinea Police Force in the 1980s attests to that.

We have the old, pre-'Guards Guards' Night Watch in action:

To call their procedures non-confrontational was an understatement. Both cops stood on the road and began hurling gravel on the roof.

The roofs were all corrugated iron in our neighborhood so the racket was deafening. The idea was to alert the criminals to the presence of the police and then leave them a convenient escape route. In this case they could run out the back door, scamper over the fence and be gone. It worked. After ten minutes of rock throwing the police entered the house in a tentative manner and sure enough, no criminals. Now was my chance to join this cadre of crime fighting professionals.

And a touch of the old Night Watch, when it was run by street monsters:

When I finally climbed up the bank I saw Andy with his shotgun about halfway up the nose of the evil driver's passenger. The driver himself was in a fetal position on the road where four of PNG's finest were vigorously putting the boots to him.

It was sort of like a Rodney King deal without the caring gentility of the LAPD. Eventually the cops tired of stomping our suspect and tossed him and his pal into a waiting paddy wagon. On the way home I advised Andy to have an ambulance waiting for us at the station as I was sure our man was severely injured if not dead.

PNG highlanders still retained a strong element of traditional dwarfish clang:

[I] returned to see Andy in heated discussion with the head man. He was demanding that all of the men leave their spears behind before they entered the town.

The head man argued that the spears were merely ceremonial and were necessary to complete their tribal dress.

Traditional Ankh-Morpork activities are a big part of life in the PNG highlands:

The road was blocked with oil drums, logs and boulders. On the other side of this barrier were about 1000 screaming people and two flatbed trucks whose beds were crammed with so many people that the tire were virtually flat and going nowhere. We all stepped out and Appelis, our regular force member parlayed with some of the more prominent members of the mob.

The problem was that everyone wanted to board a PMV to get to town to see the dead politician and take part in the traditional rioting and sacking of the town. By the time the PMV's got to their part of the highway they were already full and just sped by the growing crowd.

And my favourite line in the story?

Most PNG mechanics know that six lug nuts on a rim is a waste of four

If you like that story, there are more by the author here.

Ex-Bush official confirms innocents at Gitmo

If it wasn't obvious by now, it should be: most of the people rounded up and jailed without charge at Guantanamo Bay were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Retired Army colonel and former chief of staff to the then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, Lawrence B. Wilkerson, told The Associated Press last Thursday that many of the detainees were innocent men, and that there was no meaningful attempt by US forces to distinguish actual terrorists from civilians.

Not only were they unable to separate civilians from fighters, but they had no desire to. Wilkerson revealed that he learned from military commanders that they had determined early on that the men were innocent, but decided to keep them imprisoned regardless: "It did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance." [Emphasis added.]

Wilkerson wrote, "U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released." Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney prevented the situation from being addressed, because "to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership."

Wilkerson also confirmed that many detainees had no connection to either the Taliban or to al-Qaida, and had been turned in for the $5,000 per head reward money.

Of the 800-odd prisoners at Guantanamo, of which 240 remain, Wilkerson claimed that two dozen are actual terrorists. (That's a ratio of over 32 innocents per terrorist.) He also revealed that the US government couldn't try them even if they wanted to, "because we tortured them and didn't keep an evidence trail."

More here.

This is a good time to remember that while President Obama has promised to close Guantanamo Bay, he has so far refused to do the same for the even more secret Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Not only has Obama refused to close Bagram, or open it to oversight, or at least to trials, but there are plans to increase the number of people disappeared into the secret prison.

Where has all the money gone?

The CEO of the Blackstone Group, Stephen Schwarzman, has claimed that over the last eighteen months 40-45% of the wealth in the world has been lost.

Lost? How can people lose trillions of dollars? Did they check behind the sofa or in their spare pants? Did some super-villain break into Fort Knox and teleport all the gold away? Perhaps they put it in a Swiss bank vault and lost the key and now can't get it back.

No, the reality is that most of the money lost never really existed -- it was all in our heads, and by "our" I actually mean mostly the jokers on Wall Street and bankers and crooks like Bernie Madoff. These guys fooled themselves that they were producing value when all they were doing was shuffling electrons in computers: a shell game, a confidence trick, where so long as everybody stays confident we don't notice the trick. Money is, when you get right down to it, a shared illusion, and often based on some really weird ideas too. Gold, too soft to make into either swords or plowshares, is considered valuable, while good clean air, without which we sicken and die in as little as minutes, is valueless.

Another example of the illusion of money is the diamond trade. Diamonds never wear out, they don't rot or break down. Almost without exception, virtually every gem-quality diamond every found still exists. Every year, the total pool of diamonds available in the market continues to increase. In truth, diamonds are not really that rare, and getting less rare every year. By the accepted laws of economics (to say nothing of common sense), diamonds should depreciate in value. But they don't. Under the cunning marketing of De Beers, diamonds are massively over-valued relative to the number of diamonds potentially available. De Beers' genius was to convince people for the last half century to buy diamonds, but not sell them. And now, with a Depression looming, they fear that this massive stockpile of diamonds may suddenly re-enter the market, flooding the market for diamonds and causing the price to crash drastically.

This is what happens when you value something under the assumption that it is far rarer and more precious than it really is. Sound familiar? Tulip mania, the South Seas bubble, the dot-com boom, the various housing bubbles, Worldcom, Enron... the list goes on and on.

By the way... what's wrong with Forbes? How can a magazine with their reputation write something as ridiculously stupid as this?

In 1920, Charles Ponzi, an Italian immigrant, began advertising that he could make a 50% return for investors in only 45 days. Incredibly, Ponzi began taking in money from all over New England and New Jersey. By July of 1920, he was making millions as people mortgaged their homes and invested their life savings. As with all frauds, he was discovered to have a jail record and was indicted on 86 counts of fraud. Some tens of millions of dollars were invested with him.

(Emphasis added.)

All frauds have a jail record? How can they make this claim in an article about a fraud with no previous jail record?

(I was also interested to see that Wikipedia seems to suggest that all financial futures are martingales. If this is the case, and I haven't misunderstood something, then futures are mathematically guaranteed to lose money in the long term.)

Perverse incentives

Bruce Schneier has written an article on perverse security incentives. The concept of a perverse incentive comes from economics, where it refers to an incentive that, deliberately or accidentally, rewards inefficient or bad behaviour.

Such "perversely" inefficient behaviour isn't necessarily bad. It's an economic term focusing on a single aspect of the human condition: a rather narrow view of economic efficiency. Spending money on taking Granny to the doctor instead of selling her to the glue factory would, according to some definitions, count as inefficient, and therefore love, loyalty, affection and kindness might be counted as "perverse incentives". This isn't a bad thing -- we'd all be a lot happier if we admitted that we're all pervs in one way or another, and besides it's not the job of economists to make value judgements. Their job is to tell us how efficiently we're spending, or making, money, and it's our job to make the value judgements that, all things considered, Gran's got a few more years left in the old bird, and besides one day we'll be that old too.

So remember that while perverse incentives are often harmful as well as inefficient, this isn't necessarily the case. Schneier discusses the case of a store who fired an employee for stopping a shop-lifter escaping with hundreds of dollars of stolen food. Sounds ridiculously stupid, yes? But not if you look at the big picture: a few hundred dollars worth of food is nothing compared to the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars the store could be liable for if the staff member tackled and injured an innocent customer, or if the thief pulled out a weapon and killed somebody. As Schneier explains (and so many of the commenters on the blog fail to grasp), "You Will Not Attack Shop-Lifters" is a security measure: it protects the store against worse consequences than a backpack full of groceries being stolen.

For the same reason, banks typically have a strict No Heroics rule. It's not worth the life of a teller to save the insurance company from suffering a slightly lower profit in one quarter. This sort of economic reasoning comes hard to most people. It comes hard to me -- even knowing all the reasons why it would be stupid to put yourself in danger for somebody else's profit, the very thought that thieves are getting something for nothing offends every fibre of my being[1]. As a species, we have a deep hatred of cheaters who break the social contract (unless it is Us breaking the contract against Them -- we're a moral species, but also a hypocritical species).



[1] As a 19 year old, when I was young and invincible, one of my fellow uni students and I almost walked into a bank robbery in progress at a bank on Melbourne University campus. We saw these two masked gunmen, and came *this close* to deciding to tackle them when they came out of the bank. Fortunately, we decided to walk around the building once first, and if the robbers were still there, then we would tackle them. They weren't. Back

Dissecting an apologist

Avram Grumer from Making Light has written about yet another abuse of power by sad, angry little Hitlers. The details aren't terribly unexpected: young people meet at the Jefferson Memorial to celebrate Jefferson's birthday; humourless cops overstep their authority by ordering them to disperse for no reason; one young woman asks why; the cops rough her up and arrest her.

Grumer observes that "the primary mission of authority is to preserve authority", and notes that "knowing that almost anyone could be holding a video camera and their actions could wind up on YouTube, cops will still bully and assault people for refusing to instantly defer to arbitrary authority". But what's really interesting is Grumer's dissection of the apologist mindset:

[Megan McArdle's] comments section quickly fills with forelock-tuggers and knee-benders justifying the actions of the Park Police, even if they have to make up facts to do it. It’s practically a catalog of dishonest argumentation and propaganda. In fact, I think it’s useful to dissect the examples so that we can recognize them when we see similar arguments on the nation’s editorial pages. [...]

For example, a commenter named Jeff asks “If the Memorial is closed and people refuse to leave, why NOT arrest them for disorderly conduct?” — not aware that the memorial is open 24/7, too lazy to spend ten seconds on a Google search to check his facts, too lazy even to read the earlier comments where this had already been pointed out. When his mistake is rubbed in his face, Jeff adopts a faux-polite writing style and moves his goalposts. He argues first that the memorial is closed to certain kinds of events, of which group dancing might be one. (It might not, but hey, he doesn’t know, it might.) He later argues that since DC is a high-crime city, the Park Police have a legitimate concern, and even though it isn’t immediately clear, we need to grant them the benefit of the doubt. Of course, that’s totally ignoring the actual facts of the case — that the police didn’t arrest all the dancers, but merely the one who questioned their orders, and that the police offered no explanation for their actions. In Jeff’s mind, it’s only the authorities who get the benefit of the doubt. Ordinary citizens just have to obey orders.

Then we’ve got MarkG, who blames the dancers for appearing “odd”, and claims that “the police have to make a snap judgment about what to do”. Why exactly the police should need to make snap judgments in cases where no violence is occurring and no weapons or threat to life or limb are evident, that’s beyond me. Apparently, the fact that authorities sometimes unfortunately need to make snap judgments to preserve the lives of themselves or others means, in MarkG’s mind, that all judgments made by cops should be granted this same life-or-death importance.

There's a lot more:

• The argument that if you're relying on society to provide you with safety, you shouldn't complain when it fails to do so.


• The "they found you in contempt of cop -- no reprieve" argument.


• The "only in this country" argument:



Only in this country can one march in the streets of the capital obnoxiously protesting “the oppression inherent in the system” without fear of retribution.

Grumer says:

I want to admire that paragraph. One sentence of not even thirty words, and it packs at least three propagandistic payloads. Let’s unpack them:
[...]
All of these tactics — the use of your ideals to overturn your trust in facts, the assertion of nebulous threats that justify arbitrary authority, the portrayal of protesters as lunatics, the claim that an all-encompassing bureaucracy has legitimate authority over our every breath and step, that you’ll be fine as long as you don’t “make trouble” — these tactics can be seen and heard every day wherever political discussion takes place. They’re the words with which once-free people talk themselves into tyranny.

Sensible privacy ruling

It isn't always bad news, sometimes those in power get it right.

Bruce Schneier reports on a good ruling from the German Constitutional Court: the court rejected a state's law allowing investigators to covertly search computers online, finding them to be a severe violation of privacy. Instead the court declared that searching PCs need to be treated like telephone wiretaps and similar such exceptions to the expectation of privacy.

More here.

Schneier also discusses David Brin's "The Transparent Society", and why transparency on its own is not enough to protect people from abuse at the hands of the powerful. David Brin responds, but sadly completely misses the point of the imbalance of power made by Schneier: in the restaurant analogy that Brin favoured, all the patron's have roughly equal power.

UPDATE, 16/3/08: I'm liking those Germans more and more. The High Court has put a stop to British-style total surveillance of car number plates. The surveillance laws were described by one German newspaper as having "all the hallmarks of a totalitarian state, which wants to know everything about everyone, suspect or not, without cause and without limitation", and the High Court seemed to agree.

The ruling isn't a complete win for citizens, with the court declaring that "random samples" were allowed, and scanning of cars crossing the border, but at least the German government isn't hell-bent on returning to the days of Stasi domination, unlike the British government.

How unfair is this?

Life is full of injustice, big injustices and little injustices. This is a little one, but still.

Local councils in Sydney (and almost certainly Melbourne as well) can fine you for over-staying in a parking spot -- even if you move your car to not just another spot, but another street.

The State Debt Recovery Office has rejected an appeal by a Coogee woman to be excused from a $79 ticket she received when she parked in Darling Island Road, Pyrmont. The woman, a Fairfax Media employee, wrote explaining she had moved her car. At 5.30pm she had driven "around the corner" into nearby Fyfe Street, another two-hour zone. But when she emerged at 7.20pm, she found she had been booked.

This week she received a reply from Gregrory Frearson, assistant director of operations at the Debt Recovery Office, advising that her appeal to have the fine waived had been rejected.

"Based on the circumstances you describe we cannot, under our guidelines, cancel or offer leniency for this offence." he wrote. "While a vehicle may be moved to a different spot, if it remains within the overall parking sector the time limit does not recommence."

See here for more.

The reality is that parking tickets are a lottery. Even if you do absolutely everything right according to the letter of the law, if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, and get a careless or dishonest parking inspector, you will lose money. And because local councils make more money the more incompetent and dishonest their inspectors are, they have little incentive to do anything about it. I received a fine for supposedly parking in a No Standing spot, when I was actually parked in a shopping centre car park five blocks away. I did some research, and with the threat of further expenses if I contested the fine, and the likely cost of thousands of dollars in legal fees even if I won, not to mention the inconvenience and stress, I paid it.

As far as I'm concerned, Footscray local council stole eighty-odd dollars from me as surely as if one of their inspectors had picked my pocket.

The theological necessity of goats

Thanks to PZ Myers, I hear that Texas is hearing legal arguments concerning the theological necessity of goats related to a priest's argument that if he is prohibited from sacrificing live goats his god will cease to exist.

(And that would be a bad thing, why?)

In related news, the British government has taken blasphemy off the books, and a Malaysian woman has been jailed for worshiping a giant tea pot. No, seriously. It seems that while Malaysia has laws permitting freedom of worship, it also has sharia laws which prohibit apostasy. See here for more.

Now that's a thought... one way that Obama could gain the redneck vote would be to remind everyone that millions of Muslims will be absolutely shattered to learn that the son of an apostate is the most powerful man on Earth. Oh my.

A reminder

When it comes to politics, it's easy to spend all your time blogging about bad news. But it's important to remember that although politics can be dominated by venal, short-sighted and selfish motives, it doesn't have to be.

In 1978, the Principality of Liechtenstein was admitted to the Council of Europe, which gave it the right to nominate a judge to the European Court of Human Rights. Their nominated judge was the eminent Canadian jurist, the late Ronald St. John Macdonald, the only non-European appointed to the Court. MacDonald served on the Court for 18 years and was succeeded by the Swiss human rights lawyer, Mark Villiger. To quote James Wimberley:

Liechtenstein thus set a truly revolutionary precedent for staffing international bodies simply with the most qualified people.

The Deserter's Tale

Smoking Chimp reviews a book by former US soldier Joshua Key, who deserted from the army and ran away to Canada because of the things he did and saw in Iraq. His application for refugee status in Canada has been rejected and he faces deportation to the US. In his book, he says:

“My own moral judgment was disintegrating under the pressure of being a soldier, feeling vulnerable, and having no clear enemy to kill in Iraq. We were encouraged to beat up on the enemy; given the absence of any clearly understood enemy, we picked our fights with civilians who were powerless to resist. We knew that we would not have to account for our actions.”

“... the American military had betrayed the values of my country. We had become a force for evil, and I could not escape the fact that I was part of the machine.”

“How would I react if foreigners invaded the United States and did just a tenth of the things that we had done to the Iraqi people? I would be right up there with the rebels and insurgents, using every bit of my cleverness to blow up the occupiers.”

(Quoted here.)

It's easy to forget that bad things happen in wartime not just because bad people go to war, but because war makes even good people turn bad.

Buy our product or we'll sue you

Two US companies have issues cease and desist letters to Microsoft, Apple, Real Networks and Adobe, warning them to stop not using their Digital Restrictions software.

That's right. Buy our product or we'll sue.

The manufacturers of the DRM software, Media Rights Technologies (MRT) and BlueBeat.com, claim that their product makes water not wet "effectively controls access to copyrighted material", and therefore failing to use their snake-oil product is illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act:

[The DMCA] makes illegal and prohibits the manufacture of any product or technology that is designed for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure which effectively controls access to a copyrighted work or which protects the rights of copyright owners. Under the DMCA, mere avoidance of an effective copyright protection solution is a violation of the act.

How's that again? If you fail to use DRM, that's the same as circumventing the DRM software that you would have used if you had used any.

(Or, to put it another way, if you give a sandwich to your friend without charging him money, you're guilty of being an accessory to theft, because your friend effectively stole from you the money he would have given you if you had asked for any, and therefore you assisted him in his crime. And if your brain hurts about now, you're not alone.)

That's a rather... unusual... interpretation of the DMCA. It's almost certainly a publicity stunt, and unlikely to go any further, but it isn't that far removed from media companies' efforts to outlaw open formats and mandate ineffective and restrictive technologies.

Those wacky Republicans

It certainly seems to be a pattern... Republican politician makes a career out of discriminating against gays, then gets caught in some sordid, dirty, anonymous tryst with another man.

Last time it was Bob Allen; before him it was Larry "Wide Stance" Craig; and now, Representative Richard Curtis -- what is it with men with a personal name as a surname? -- finds himself in a gay sex extortion scandal after allegedly promising a young man $1000 for unprotected sex, then claiming he only had $100.

Curtis denied he paid the man for sex, and said he had given him gas money.

Now, I don't really care what body parts people insert in other body parts, so long as everybody involved is a consenting adult, but this is newsworthy because Curtis has a history of voting against bills giving homosexuals equal protection under the law: in both 2005 and 2006, he voted against granting civil rights protections to homosexuals, and then in 2007 he voted against a bill creating domestic partnerships for same-sex couples.

Update: Tom's Modern World has a good cartoon covering my thoughts on this issue:

Follow that spam!

Make Wade over at the CA Security Advisor Blog decided to find out what happens when you buy from a spammer.

Our journey begins outside of Washington, DC. I am sitting at my desk, going through my SPAM filtered email, when I see one that catches my eye, “Dreams can cost less repl1ca w4tches from r0lex here”. Sounds interesting I thought, and I could use a new watch. Knowing the harmful effects of opening unsolicited email, I decided to open the email in a controlled virtualized environment.

It seems that the spam most likely originated in a small church in Washington State, probably from a malware-infected computer used by Cheryl Neff, the assistant to the senior pastor. Mark followed the link in the email to a professional-looking, but temporary, website. Using a credit card opened specifically for the experiment, he then purchased a set of earrings for $77 including postage and handling.

Mark followed the money, from websites in China and Korea, through a series of shell companies starting in Las Vegas, and finally ending up in Cyprus where the money was collected. Surprisingly, the earrings may have been shipped from China, but if they were, they got lost in the mail, because the parcel never arrived.

I'm fascinated by the fact that spammers can actually find any buyers at all. Economists will often talk about trust issues. For example, banks tend -- or at least they used to, before the economic rationalists moved in -- to go for big, imposing, expensive buildings, with high ceilings and marble floors and Grecian columns as far as the eye could see. The more risky the industry, the more important to convince people that you are trustworthy by showing commitment. "You can trust us not to take your money and run, because we've invested a lot in this business and we won't be going anywhere for a long time". And yet this seems to go right out the window when it comes to on-line purchases, at least for those who buy from spammers. Most spam websites are active for only a few weeks, before they are close down and re-open under a new name. But there seems to be an never-ending stream of buyers.

It's tempting -- oh, so very, very tempting -- to just put it down to pure, unadulterated stupidity. But that's a simplistic answer. Many buyers are hardly stupid: they have good white-collar jobs, educations, can walk and chew gum at the same time.

So what's going on? Is it that buyers are so naive that they can't recognise that they're being scammed? Is spam just the 21st century version of the old con of selling the Brooklyn Bridge to some country bumpkin, still with hayseed in his hair, visiting the big city for the first time?

I think there's more to it than that. For various reasons (advertising, welfare, the legions of pop-psychology books...), we live in a society that encourages a sense of wishful thinking, that wanting something to be real makes it real. Not that Homo sap needs much encouragement to wishful thinking and delusion. Rather than "if it seems to good to be true, it probably is", too many people act as if "if it seems too good to be true, it will be true anyway just because you deserve it".

Add to that the widespread use of credit cards, which encourages people to act as if money didn't matter even when it does, at least until all five of your cards are maxed out. Since you're not really paying for the goods, the credit card is, the risk is minimal -- or so seems to be the perception.

But one thing that doesn't make any sense to me at all is that people can take seriously any advertising written as shoddily as "repl1ca w4tches from r0lex here". This is worse than Greengrocer's Apostrophe; worse than VCR instructions translated into English from Chinese by a Korean. Not only does it look careless and incompetent, it is a deliberate attempt to bypass software that filters out spam. That screams "Deceit!". Why would anyone choose to buy from somebody who as good as says "Hey, I'm lying to you right now"?

Raising our kids to be sheep

One of the side-effects of the utterly moronic "Zero Tolerance" policies of many schools and governments is that it is teaching our kids to be sheep, devoid of moral sense or an understanding of consequences. What else did we expect to happen when we teach our children that taking a butter knife to school is as worthy of punishment as taking a shotgun?

From Berkeley County, Amber Dauge was expelled from school for accidentally taking a butter knife to school:

"I know I made a really stupid decision but I don't think I should be expelled for it," Amber Dauge said.

Amber says that stupid decision was taking a butter knife to school. She ran out of the house to meet the bus while making a sandwich, when she realized she had the knife. She put it in her bookbag, then she put it in her locker at Goose Creek High school. She forgot it was there until a few weeks later when the knife fell out of her overstuffed locker.

"A kid behind me yelled out a comment that I was going to stab someone with the knife and everyone started laughing and the teacher saw it," Amber told us.

You got that everybody? Taking a butter knife to school is "a really stupid decision".

(Putting aside that it was hardly a decision as such, just a spur of the moment thing.)

No.

Voting for a political party that plans to strip you of your legal protections is "a really stupid decision". Taking a third mortgage on your house to buy shares in a company selling paper clips on the Internet is "a really stupid decision". Putting weed killer in a Coca-Cola bottle and then storing it in the kitchen is "a really stupid decision". Using a lit match to look inside your car's petrol tank is "a really stupid decision".

Kicking kids out of school, destroying their chances of getting educated and condemning them to a life as an angry, bitter second-class citizen is "a really stupid decision".

Taking a butter knife to school is so trivial it doesn't even show up on the radar. As sins go, taking a butter knife to school is up there with such heinous crimes as scratching your ear or eating a boiled egg on Tuesdays.

Supporters of Zero Tolerance actually consider the injustice it results in as a plus. The so-called reasoning behind that is that because the rule is inflexible, those at risk of breaking the law are forced to take even unreasonable steps to avoid breaking the rule.

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, crazy talk. This puts obedience to the law above the consequences of the law. It is no virtue to obey bad laws, although it may be the path of least resistance. Any law that requires unreasonable steps to avoid breaking it is an unreasonable law, and an unreasonable law is unjust and therefore a bad law.

Some might argue that if the consequences of the act are sufficiently terrible, then unreasonable steps to avoid it might be needed; but that's simply stupid. By definition, if the steps required to avoid breaking the law are unreasonable, either they cause more harm than breaking the law, or they are impossible or impractical to do. Otherwise they would be reasonable!

If obeying the law causes more harm than the thing it is trying to prevent, then we would be better off without the law (it's a bad law); and if it is impractical or impossible to obey the law, then no matter how much you punish people the law will still be broken. A law that can't be obeyed is also a bad law, because we're better off without it: we'd still suffer the consequences of the bad actions, but we'd avoid the needless and pointless punishments. Whipping a baby for wetting itself doesn't stop it wetting itself, and it harms the baby for no good reason. Needless to say, not only are bad laws useless, they can even be counter-productive: people can be driven into socially harmful behaviour.

Whether they are Politically Correct liberals, or conservative god-botherers like "Louisa" who wrote:

I think the School did the right thing the school's laws were made to be obeyed by all students. If the school was to compromise for one, {after all even a butter knife could kill someone}then the next incident? the student would expect the same. Compromise is not the answer. God Is!

they're all moral midgets who shouldn't be trusted with deciding what underwear they wear, let alone something important like the education of our children.

"Zero Tolerance" in this case meaning "We're too stupid to be able to apply conscious thought on a case-by-case basis". -- Mike Sphar

Top cop criticises war on drugs

Sometimes I think the only people who support the War on Drugs must be on drugs themselves. Never have I seen such a long-lasting, counter-productive policy that is so much worse than the thing it is supposed to be curing.

The Agonist reports that UK Chief Constable Richard Brunstrom took a swipe at the drug war recently:

[Brunstrom says:]

Some say legalization is immoral. That’s nonsense, unless one believes there is some principled basis for discriminating against people based solely on what they put into their bodies, absent harm to others.

This phrasing presents as unpalatable the idea that taking some drugs is intrinsically immoral. However I think it is a moral position held, consciously or unconsciously, by a large fraction of people. Fundamental moral opposition to drug taking may underly some of the difference in the way society treats recreational drug use compared with other risky activities pursued purely for pleasure such as scuba diving or handgliding. Many factors contribute to peoples moral opposition to drug use, some well considered but also some which are ill thought through and have their roots in less salubrious areas of human nature and history.

It is important to examine the roots of commonly held moral beliefs surrounding drug taking because they form the social background to media and policy on the subject. The dramatic changes in policy towards homosexuality in Western democracies in the 20th century could not have occurred without corresponding shifts in moral beliefs in those societies. One key component in ensuring we have better drug laws in future is to raise the standard of the moral debate about drug use from its currently often infantile level.

One of the things that strikes me is the inconsistency in the conservative position on drugs compared to much of the rest of conservative policies.

The stereotypical conservative supports a hard-line prohibition on drugs -- at least, some drugs: I've written about the hypocrisy of anti-drug pundits like Rush Limbaugh and politicians like Jeb Bush before. One of the major arguments supporting that hard-line is the idea that people are weak-willed and easily manipulated into taking drugs against their better instinct. In the conservative mind-view, people are easily manipulated into acting against their own better interests and against their own wishes -- but only when it comes to drugs. When it comes to nearly everything else, the modern conservative position is that people are in full command of their actions: there's no suggestion that (e.g.) advertising might manipulate people into needless consumerism or eating unhealthy junk food.

While progressives like myself have a nuanced view of human nature, that our actions are caused by a mix of factors, some internal and some external, the typical conservative view is schizophrenic: it flip-flops between treating people as masters of their own destiny and slaves to temptation, depending on whom they wish to punish.

Taxes

I came across this fascinating little snippet of Australian tax law:


For the purposes of making a declaration under this Subdivision, the Commissioner may:

1. treat a particular event that actually happened as not having happened; and


2. treat a particular event that did not actually happen as having happened and, if appropriate, treat the event as:
   
   1. having happened at a particular time; and
   
   
   2. having involved particular action by a particular entity; and


3. treat a particular event that actually happened as:
   
   1. having happened at a time different from the time it actually happened; or
   
   
   2. having involved particular action by a particular entity (whether or not the event actually involved any action by that entity).

Oh-kay.

Torture, part 1

Over at The Atlantic, Matthew Yglesias points out something that should have been obvious to even the dimmest among us: torture simply doesn't work for gathering intelligence except in fantasy land. 350 years ago, Hobbes pointed out that when you torture people, they tell you lies that might make you stop torturing them.

The myth of tortures effectiveness is understandable: the angry ape inside all of us might very well like the idea of ripping terrorists' fingernails out, and if you can save lives by stopping crimes before they happen by indulging in your sadistic fantasies, all the better.

But who do you want fighting the war on terror -- an angry ape, or an intelligent, sensible, calm and collected human being? I'll even go further: when it comes to a choice between having interrogators who know how to perform "waterboarding" and interrogators who actually speak the prisoners' language, my choice is the diametric opposite of that of the Bush administration.

Yglesias explains:

So in summary, what they've hit upon is a protocol based on the best practices developed by Soviet and medieval torturers alike to accomplish torture's traditional goal -- the extraction of false confessions -- and seem to have wound up with a bunch of false confessions. Which, of course, is precisely what you'd expect to wind up with if you thought for a minute about why governments have, historically, resorted to the systemic deployment of torture.

Dumb senator goes down

Schadenfreude is such an unworthy emotion... but so fun!

Republican senator Bob Allen was arrested for soliciting for sex in a Florida public toilet. Whoops! For a senator from the "Family Values Party" (ha! there's a joke) that's embarrassing. But what came next takes the story to surreal levels of stupidity: he tried to blame the black men in the park for it.

But having been caught doing something stupid, Allen, who is a pudgy white fellow, has decided to double down on his stupidity by offering what is a truly, spectacularly -- indeed, magnificently -- dumb reason for soliciting another man for sex: Fear of a Black Planet!

"This was a pretty stocky black guy, and there was nothing but other black guys around in the park," said Allen, according to this article in the Orlando Sentinel. Allen went on to say he was afraid of becoming a "statistic."

[...]

Allen, during the middle of the work day, was at the park, just minding his own business, enjoying the Florida sunshine or whatever, like you do, when he suddenly noticed that the park was full of black men. Fearing for his own personal safety, he decided that the best course of action was to go into the public restroom, peer over a stall -- twice -- to locate a black man, and offer that black man $20 and a blow job if he'd just leave him alone.

It speaks volumes that Allen would rather his constituents see him as a terrified, cowardly racist willing to degrade himself and grovel at the feet of a random black man, than take responsibility for his own actions, admit he gets off on giving anonymous black men blow jobs, and take his licks like a man. Pun intended.

I believe this is why a certain breed of conservative is so keen to talk loudly about responsibility and are constantly accusing progressives of not taking responsibility for their own actions: they're projecting. Because they would rather make excuses than face up to the consequences of their actions, they imagine that everybody else is also making excuses.

But regardless of that, I personally don't have any problem what so ever with gay men giving each other happy endings in public toilets, so long as they're quiet and discreet and clean up after themselves and don't frighten the kiddies. Consenting adults, dontcha know. I'm also aware that homophobic cops have been known to entrap gay guys so they can make an arrest.

But in this case, I've got no sympathy, not one iota. Because the irony just piles up: Senator Allen was one of the co-sponsors of a Florida law against public lewdness.

What is it with these hypocritical GOP politicians? A year and a half ago, it was Congressman Mark Foley, now it's Senator Allen. Do these Bozos honestly believe that the laws they pass don't apply to them?

How did I miss this anniversary?

Six years and three days ago exactly, the President of the United States of America spent the day at his Texas ranch, and spoke to then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice about Macedonia.

Oh yes, he also received a Presidential Daily Brief warning that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike in the USA itself, was preparing to hijack aircraft, and that the FBI had detected "suspicious activity". Bush, who was in the middle of a 32-day holiday (at the time the longest presidential vacation since 1969), was too busy building a new trail to do anything about it, but fortunately the then Attorney-General John Ashcroft had earlier been given a warning about al Qaeda's plans to hijack airplanes. He did the only thing a man in his position (head of all law enforcement in the USA) could do.

He stopped travelling on commercial airlines and started travelling exclusively on chartered planes. Hang the expense, nothing's too good to save the Attorney-General and his staff.

Dead man walking

Injustice comes in many forms, but one of the most pernicious is the injustice of the death penalty on the basis of shoddy, questionable evidence and perjury.

Troy A. Davis has been on the Georgia death row for 17 years. His trial was a paragon of injustice: at one point, his state-appointed lawyer turned up drunk in court; when one prosecution witness tried to change her testimony and admit to perjuring herself, she was arrested and prevented from giving evidence at the trial. There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime, and of the nine eyewitnesses who testimony convicted him, seven have recanted or changed their testimony, and claimed that they were pressured by investigators to lie under oath.

As Digby of Hullabalo writes, the US Supreme Court has refused to hear his appeal, on the basis of a 1996 law which "streamlines" the death penalty, allowing the state to kill people faster, with fewer of those pesky appeals, and new evidence proving his innocence be damned.

This sad case is another demonstration of the moral bankruptcy of the Christian Fundamentalists who decide matters of life and death for decent people. I don't know which is worse: police and prosecutors willing to convict the innocent and allow the guilty to escape, or the hypocritical, Holy-Than-Thou Christians sitting in judgement over others. One of the old men of the American Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia, wrote in Herrera v. Collins regarding the possibility of an innocent man being executed:

With any luck, we shall avoid ever having to face this embarrassing question again, since it is improbable that evidence of innocence as convincing as today's opinion requires would fail to produce an executive pardon.

Never mind the rule of law. Don't bother finding innocent people innocent or reversing unjust and unsafe convictions. The President will simply give the guy a pardon.

With any luck.

(In)Justice Scalia, who apparently believes that bringing evidence to trial is the defendant's privilege and not a right, doesn't see the execution of the innocent as anything worth getting upset about: it just sends them to God sooner. In 2002, he gave a speech explaining:

For the believing Christian, death is no big deal. Intentionally killing an innocent person is a big deal, a grave sin which causes one to lose his soul, but losing this physical life in exchange for the next – the Christian attitude is reflected in the words Robert Bolt’s play has Thomas More saying to the headsman: "Friend, be not afraid of your office. You send me to God." And when Cramner asks whether he is sure of that, More replies, "He will not refuse one who is so blithe to go to him."

Save us from the Believers and their "morality".