Not all democracies are equal

One of the defining myths of the second half of the 20th century, and the start of the 21st, is that by slapping the label "Democratic" on a system of government, it magically becomes good.

It's part of the lazy thinking that judges books by their cover, the self-satisfied idea that because we live in a democracy we can do no wrong, and of course it is cynically encouraged by the Bad Guys who know damn well that democracy just means you get to vote, not what happens either before or after the vote. People voted for the late, unlamented Saddam Hussein, and by memory he won 98% of the popular vote.

Saddam was a strong man who didn't feel the need to be subtle in his stealing of elections. In the West, we have a long tradition of quietly subverting the popular vote, from gerrymanders to super-delegates to outright ballot-stuffing. As Boss Tweed said, "I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating." Or for that matter, counting the votes. And if that fails, well, it's nice to have some friendly Supreme Court judges rule against the need to actually bother counting the votes. (In the words of Justice Scalia, counting the votes fairly and carefully would threaten "irreparable harm" to Bush "by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election." Got that? Actually having a fair election is a Bad Thing, because that would challenge Bush's public claim that he won in a fair election.)

But generally, despite the flaws, Western post-WW2 democracy manages to mostly be good, at least compared to dictatorships and faux-democracies in the developing world. More or less -- mostly more, with occasional less.

But the illusion that democracy implies goodness is dangerous. Over in Iraq, one of the former members of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), John Agresto, was tasked with rebuilding the country's education system. (Sadly, the CPA neglected to actually give him any money to do it with.) Agresto bitterly wrote:

America's been so successful at being a free and permanent democracy that we think democracy is the natural way to rule--just let people go and there you have it: Democracy. But all the ingredients that make it good and free--limited government, separation of powers, checks and balances, calendared elections, staggered elections, plurality selection, differing terms of office, federalism with national supremacy, the development of a civic spirit and civic responsibility, and above all, the breaking and moderating of factions--all this we forgot about. We act is if the aim is "democracy" simply and not a mild and moderate democracy. Therefore...we seek out the loudest and most virulent factions and empower them...

We, as a country, don't have a clue as to what has made our own country work, and so we spread the gospel of democracy-at-all-costs abroad. Until this country can find a Madison, it would be far better off with just a good ruler.

[Emphasis added.]

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.

Smoking worse than, well, everything?

You know the anti-smoking lobby has crossed the line from admirable social reformers to left-ear staring nutters when people make a new St Trinians movie showing the girls using hard drugs and working as prostitutes, but putting a cigarette in their hands is completely verboten.

Friends

I dislike social networking sites that misuse the term "friend" to mean "random people on the Internet whose blogs I like to read". The decision whether or not to reciprocate when somebody links to you is hard enough even without the baggage of faux "friendship". LiveJournal, you know I'm talking about you.

But LJ is not the only one. Recently, FileDen has transformed itself from a file hosting site to a social networking site, all the better to sell more advertising, and they too abuse the term "friend". Last time I logged on, I had a message from another user wanting me to "friend" him, apparently on the basis that since I had an account I must be worth friending.

When I checked out the user, I discovered that (s)he had no fewer than 1,586,620 "friends". I'm sure that there are thousands of Internet users (not just on LJ) with the emotional age of about 10 who see nothing creepy and sad about somebody claiming to have 1.5 million "friends", but in fact see it as something good to aspire to.

I'm reluctant to link directly to somebody who is likely to be some sort of spammer, but for those who want to see for themselves, if you go to FileDen and search for the user "mituozo" you'll see what I mean.

Unless (s)he really is a spammer, and has had his account suspended.

Raising the little devils to be little people

Are children little devils or little angels?

Trick question: they're neither. They're little Homo sapiens (sometimes known as Pan narrans), with all that that entails. That means that they're animals, not angels or devils. I don't mean that as an insult. I'm an animal. So are you. What else could you be? You're not a plant, or an abstract concept like "justice", and the state of the art of artificial intelligence is not good enough for you to be a robot. Even if you believe that you have a soul (whatever that is!) your soul doesn't stop you from hurting when you stub your toe, or let you flap your arms and fly, or see electric fields. We can do what our bodies can do, and nothing more.

As animals, our wetware has certain modes of behaviour, and one of those is that we learn. We learn a lot. We're the ultimate learning machines on the planet, at least until 20 or so.

(Animals and machines? Sure, why not? We're machines made of meat instead of steel and plastic. If you think that's an insult to the dignity of human beings, that's only because you're thinking of machines as those clanking, primitive piles of junk like cars and grandfather clocks and space shuttles. What you should be thinking of is the other machines, like eagles and dolphins and tigers and cobras, of hearts and muscles and eyes and nerves. There's nothing clanking about them. The simplest, most basic cell in the human machine is a million times more complex than the most advanced metal-and-plastic thing we can yet make. We'll catch up, eventually, and make machines worthy of being called "alive", but for now, there's a great yawning chasm between meat machines and metal machines. The metal machines might be stronger and tougher, but let's see them make new machines without our help, huh?)

But I digress... so, little children are learning machines. They soak in data like a sponge, and they learn. Depending on what they learn, we label them as little angels or little devils. But in fact they're neither: they're just risen apes, and we older, supposedly wiser risen apes should be helping them to grow into the best apes they can be.

The problem is, they have this annoying habit of learning things that we don't want them to learn. I don't mean such trivialities such as four-letter words, but things like temper tantrums.

There's an imperial ton of advice out there about raising children (and that's bigger than a metric ton). Most of it is bad advice, because it is based on wishful thinking that kiddies are little angels, or little devils, rather than the reality that they're Homo sapiens.

In civilized countries, you won't find many people willing to publicly talk about "beating the Devil out of children" (although there's always a few barbarians who will privately do so), but there's still plenty of folk who will talk about sparing rods and spoiling children without any clue whatsoever about how to get maximum learning from the minimum brutality. If that sounds harsh, it's because I have a generally low opinion of those who mindlessly quote Biblical aphorisms, not because I am philosophically opposed to mild corporal punishment when necessary.

Unfortunately, parenting skills are very low. There's no classes we can take, the books we buy all contradict each other, and when we do what was done to us, the chances are we're just repeating the same lousy mistakes our parents made.

So, what to do? I was going to spend time searching high and low on the Internet looking for serious academic sites to back up the following assertions, but it's the wee hours of the morning and I need to sleep sometime. So I'll fall back on the tried and true Argument By Assertion, and say if you don't believe this, do your own research. You know where Google is.

It's about the timing.

Conditioning is not the only way we Homo sapiens learn, but it is an important part of it. That's the way our brains work: behaviour which is rewarded becomes more likely to be repeated, and behaviour which is given negative reinforcement becomes less likely. Not all learning is based on conditioning, but a lot of it is, especially for children (but also for adults!). The refusal to accept the reality of how we learn means that we are doomed to implement ineffective or even counter-productive teaching strategies, and then wonder why our children aren't learning the lessons we intended them to learn.

The most important factor about reinforcement is the timing. If it doesn't happen immediately, it might as well never happen at all. Yes, people can -- eventually -- learn delayed gratification, but that takes time, and three year olds don't have those skills yet. There's probably nothing, short of brutal physical abuse, less useful and more harmful to a child's ability to grow into a decent human being than "Wait until your father comes home!".

To give a concrete example: when your child screams and cries in the store because he or she wants a candy bar, if you give him or her a candy bar you have just reinforced the temper tantrum behaviour. It's hard to ignore a screaming child, especially when everyone else is giving you those Looks that say "control your brat!", but if you don't ignore it, you're just reinforcing the tantrum. And no, spanking the child isn't going to help, not if the only attention it ever gets is when you smack it. Children will take bad attention over inattention every time.

Just like adults really.

There's more here and here on Violent Acres. They're hardly scholarly articles, and there's some adult language so watch those nanny-filters, but they're worth reading.

Pledge of what now?

American schools have a pledge of allegiance? And teenagers -- rebellious, hormone-crazed teenagers -- stand for it without mass rebellion? WTF is wrong with you people???

One day during my high school years, I chose not to rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. A daily compulsion to demonstrate my patriotism seemed wrong on the face of it. My fidelity to the United States, the republic for which the flag stands, should be assumed. The next day, I made the same choice. And you can guess what happened next.

The school was very uncomfortable with my stance. In only a day or two, nearly all my classmates and teachers knew I was the guy who wouldn't stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. Because they had to enforce pledge-making every morning, teachers had, by and large, a bigger problem with my stance than my fellow students.

As a child in primary school (years 1-6) we were expected to salute the flag every morning. As a Jehovah's Witness (don't worry, I got better) I wasn't supposed to give my allegiance to anyone but Uncle God in the sky, so on the (rare) occasions I wasn't late I just stood at attention respectfully and didn't salute. I never got any stick from either my fellow kiddies or the teachers over it. As near as I could tell, the entire school, from the Head Master to the youngest Grade 1, felt the whole thing was a tedious and pointless exercise, but one that had to be done lest the entire British Empire instantly collapse. (In the 1970s, Australia was sleeping around with the flash Yanks but hadn't quite got up the nerve to tell England we wanted a divorce. We still haven't, but at least we're more open about the trial separation and the whole "seeing other countries" thing.)

But once I got to High School (years 7-12) all that changed. At least when I was at school, public schools (for the benefit of any foreigners, that is government-run schools) didn't do any such thing. The thought of getting a couple of hundred fifteen year olds to salute the flag seems ludicrous to my experiences. Although I guess the private schools that run army cadet camps probably manage it, although how many of the kids playing at being soldiers actually treat it seriously and how many are doing it just so they get to play soldiers and get out of school work for a while I'm sure I don't know.

Diamond-coated Oscar madness

People with more money than sense can sometimes be amusing, and in the lead up to the Oscars the entertainment press is usually good for some Hollywood-silliness stories.

It seems that the latest fad amongst actresses is for diamond-dust facial scrubs.

The most crowded waiting room pre-Oscars is at the Beverly Hills clinic of celebrity skin specialist Sonya Dakar - where stars line up for her signature £1,000 facial.

Madonna is said to have headed there for a treatment last year which includes a diamond scrub (using diamond particles to exfoliate the skin), an exfoliating skin peel, green tea face mask and red-and-blue UV light therapy to prevent acne.

Diamond particles huh?

Even the oldest, toughest, most dried-out and sun-fried human skin is unlikely to be tougher than pumice stone, let alone the regular quartz particles you find on emery boards. Even Madonna's skin is unlikely to be harder than (say) a steel nail file (6.5 on the Mohs hardness scale, compared to diamond at 10). This is a good example of conspicuous consumption. Diamond dust is quite cheap: I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the diamond scrub contained less than a dollar's worth of diamond dust.

Holocaust idiocy

Totally without irony, Israel's Deputy Defence Minister, Matan Vilnai, threatened the people of Palestine with a holocaust (Hebrew "shoah"). Considering that Matan Vilnai was born in 1944 and has a B.A. degree in History, I find it inconceivable that he was not aware of the connotations of the word, even if he were not Jewish (yes, there are non-Jewish Israelis).

Meanwhile, here in Melbourne, artist Sam Leach has made a controversial self-portrait of himself in the same pose used for one of Adolf Hitler's famous portraits. Defending the painting, Leach stated:

Personally, as a white Australian, I inherit this Western European cultural tradition and the one of the products of that tradition was Nazism. In a nutshell, what I'm trying to say is that I think that we can't take for granted that Nazism can't happen again...

The president of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, Anton Block, replied by stating that Leach was:

deluding himself[.]

Well, certainly someone is deluding himself.

Equality of the sexes

It's all too easy to forget that "women's liberation" hasn't even begun in some parts of the world, and that women aren't even given the dignity of being treated as second-class citizens.

In Saudi Arabia, an illiterate woman is set to be executed after she was tortured into confessing to using witchcraft to make a man impotent. And tribal elders in Pakistan decide that women shouldn't vote.

Here in the western civilized world (and I make no apology for using that term), there are people who want to roll back the clock and return to their imagined glory days where women knew their place. Childless old men like Pat Buchanan and macho wanna-be Patriarchs are trying to frighten European women with scare stories that if they don't give up their jobs, stay home, obey their husbands and have lots of babies, the terrorists will win and the Muslim Hordes will take over. It's the Yellow Peril redux, only now it's the "slightly off-white, not quite brown, Islamo-fascist Peril".

I believe that many feminists have well and truly lost their way, but don't imagine that means that feminism is no longer relevant or necessary. The forces of evil are still out there.

But it's not all bad news. Although the meme of sexism dies slow, it does die. When a religious school tried to ban a woman from refereeing a basketball match, her male colleagues boycotted the game:

The reason given, according to the referees: Campbell, as a woman, could not be put in a position of authority over boys because of the academy's beliefs.

[...]

"I said, 'If Michelle [Campbell] has to leave, then I'm leaving with her,'" Putthoff said Wednesday. "I was disappointed that it happened to Michelle. I've never heard of anything like that."

Fred Shockey, who was getting ready to leave the gym after officiating two junior high games, said he was told there had been an emergency and was asked to stay and officiate two more games.
"When I found out what the emergency was, I said there was no way I was going to work those games," said Shockey, who spent 12 years in the Army and became a ref about three years ago. "I have been led by some of the finest women this nation has to offer, and there was no way I was going to go along with that."

Isn't that something?

Why don't more conservatives go to university?

Why are most university professors liberal? Two academics, Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner, have done a study that suggests that most conservatives simply aren't interested in the sorts of things that attract people to academic careers. Matthew Woessner himself is an interesting counter-example: he's a fan of Fox New, Rudy Giuliani and Rush Limbaugh and usually votes Republican, and unlike most of the conservative students he has studied, has a deep interest in the scientific method. (Although he clearly doesn't apply it to Fox, Giuliani or Limbaugh...)

The Agonist has this to say:

What do you do when there are not enough laissez-fare loving, personal responsibility professing and family values fundies at your university? You make it more socialist:

The research led the Woessners to conclude that if higher education wants to attract more conservatives to the professoriate, it should smooth the way financially, offering subsidized health insurance and housing for graduate students

I've often thought that conservative politics simply meant "handouts for me, not for thee".

Read more here.

Taking back democracy

Sick of the Republican Party trying to block them from voting, students at Prairie View A&M University in Texas decided to take back democracy one street at a time: literally.

Faced with systematic efforts to disenfranchise blacks and Democrat supporters, such as putting polling places seven miles away from the voting precinct, more than 3,000 students took to the highway, blocking it as they walked the seven miles to the polling place.

Nice one guys!

Who owns data?

Ed Felten raises a very important point about many of the debates we have about data portability: we start off by making a poor assumption, and that closes off options.

An example is the Internet storm over Facebook canceling well-known blogger Robert Scoble's account. Scoble had amassed a vast amount of data in his account, and got caught using software tools to export it. Facebook has a vested interest in locking people into their service (more users = more advertising revenue), and the way they have chosen to do this is to give people free accounts, encourage them to invest a lot of time creating valuable (to the users, if not anyone else) data, but prohibit them from extracting that data elsewhere.

Hmmm... I must update my Blogger backup script. It hasn't worked well since Google made the upgrade from Blogger version 1 to version 2.

The poor assumption that we make is that data -- facts -- must be owned by somebody. As Felten says:

Where did we get this idea that facts about the world must be owned by somebody? Stop and consider that question for a minute, and you’ll see that ownership is a lousy way to think about this issue. In fact, much of the confusion we see stems from the unexamined assumption that the facts in question are owned.

Once we give up the idea that the fact of Robert Scoble’s friendship with (say) Lee Aase, or the fact that that friendship has been memorialized on Facebook, has to be somebody’s exclusive property, we can see things more clearly. Scoble and Aase both have an interest in the facts of their Facebook-friendship and their real friendship (if any). Facebook has an interest in how its computer systems are used, but Scoble and Aase also have an interest in being able to access Facebook’s systems. Even you and I have an interest here, though probably not so strong as the others, in knowing whether Scoble and Aase are Facebook-friends.

How can all of these interests best be balanced in principle? What rights do Scoble, Aase, and Facebook have under existing law? What should public policy says about data access? All of these are difficult questions whose answers we should debate. Declaring these facts to be property doesn’t resolve the debate — all it does is rule out solutions that might turn out to be the best.

---

UPDATE: Chris Finke has an innovative solution to the Facebook problem, one which could (in principle) be extended to all similar such websites. His Facebook Scavenger extension for Firefox lets you capture copies of the data once it's in your browser.

Making Communist Yugoslavia look good

It's certainly very special when the Home of the Free makes Communist Yugoslavia under a despotic totalitarian government look good, but the experience of photographers in the USA is doing that.

Avram Grumer explains:

Back in the ’80s, my parents (who are Balkan folk dance enthusiasts) visited what was then the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a Communist nation. While there, my father photographed a picturesque lake. He snapped off a shot or two, and was interrupted by a government official who told him that photographing that lake was forbidden, due to the presence of some militarily sensitive facility (I forget what; a power plant or something). My father put the camera away, and that was it. They didn’t confiscate the camera or the film, didn’t make him expose the roll to the light, didn’t haul my parents off for an interrogation. A print of the photo hung on my parents’ wall for years; no sort of industrial facility is visible in it. It’s just a photo of a pretty lake.

Compare that with the treatment this Japanese tourist got at the hands of Amtrak and the New Haven police:

The Japanese tourist was ordered by a conductor on an Amtrak train from New York to Boston to stop taking photos of the scenery "in the interests of national security", and threatened to confiscate his camera. The tourist, who spoke little English, complied with the order and put the camera away in his bag. Nevertheless, at the next stop, the train was bordered by police, who threatened to remove him with force:

The police speak through the interpreter, with the impatience of authority. [...] The officers explain, “After we remove him from the train, when we are through our investigation, we will put him on the next train.” The woman translates. The passenger replies, “I’m meeting relatives in Boston. They cannot be reached by phone. They expect me and will be worried when I do not arrive on schedule.” “Our task,” the police repeat, "is to remove you from this train. If necessary, we will do so by force. After we have finished the investigation, we’ll put you on another train.” The woman translates. The traveler gathers his belongings and departs.

To add insult to injury, it turns out that Amtrak has no such policy prohibiting photography on their trains.

The witness to these events wrote:

It doesn't take more than five minutes, in any airport in this country, before I hear the loudspeaker, "The current terror threat is elevated." We hear “terror” endlessly – traveling, at home, on television, in the news. Recent political campaigns have reminded – no, badgered – us, to be very afraid. What did Franklin Roosevelt say, that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Terror. Paranoia. We can no longer differentiate between terrors. Is this our generation’s enlightened contribution to American culture?

Watching police escort a visitor off the train, I felt anger, not comfort. This action was beyond irritating. It is intolerable, unacceptable. If it bothered me, it paled in comparison to the way it inconvenienced, and will long trouble, this visitor to our country. We disrupted his travel plans and family reunion. Even greater than the psychological damage we inflicted is the harm we’ve done to ourselves. We missed an opportunity to show kindness, to be ambassadors of goodwill. The visitor will return home. He will indeed impress many people – not with pleasant memories and pictures of a quiet morning trip along the New England coast, but with a story of being removed and detained by American police for taking pictures. Do we imagine we’ve gained anything because a single visitor returns home with stories of mistreatment?

Such blatant attempts to intimidate photographers aren't limited to tourists or Arabs. Avram Grumer links to a number of sites documenting these incidents. At one of these sites, "C.E." explains that he's been a professional photographer for thirty years, been taking photos all over the world, during martial law, before and after military coups and terrorist bombings, and even once accidentally inside a military base, and he's never been subject to as much harassment as he receives in the USA. And he is an American.

I think the best, or at least the most amusing, comment explaining why these events are becoming more common came from Chris Waller, talking about the similar situation in the UK:

Increasingly in Britain a lot of overweight young men of low intelligence who are otherwise unemployable are being stuffed into ill-fitting uniforms and given the idea that they are saving the Western world from sinking into chaos as a result of terrorism.

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

Those wacky Japanese

After Friday's 12 hour day at the office, I ended up putting in a mere 11 ¹/₂ hour day today. (Just call me Aussie salaryman-san.) Sigh. There's a few stressful things happening at work at the moment (and by "a few" I mean "a lot"), so when I got home I ended up doing something I don't often do: browsing the web randomly with my brain switched off.

(By the way... à propos of nothing, dark chocolate-coated strawberry licorice is a drug. I can't believe I ate the whole pack in one sitting.)

Purely by chance (by which I mean Google) I came across this fine blog, by Jeff, a 20-something American in Tokyo married to a local woman.

Jeff's back in California, fighting the bureaucrats to get his wife allowed to join him, so he hasn't exactly been posting much as late, but check out the archives. Not all of the pages are exactly Safe For Work, but there's also a lot of fine amateur photography of Japan, so I'm sure you can plead ignorance if you get caught reading a post about bikini-clad Japanese women.

I've just spent the last few hours reading almost the entire blog just for the sheer joy of all the WTF? moments like:

• The rampant Japanese obsession with "cuteness".


• Hard Gay the S&M leather wearing, crotch-thrusting, completely hetro altruist. No, really.


• A starlet famous for the rather unusual way she shows her love of cats.


• Shame and pain on Japanese game shows.


• And Jeff's take on this example of lazy journalism made me laugh.

Jeff clearly loves Japan, but he is no one-eyed Japanophile -- he's fully aware of the dark side of Japan's culture, like the hierarchical salaryman culture, the racism and ignorance, the corporate serfdom, and the reluctance to face up to underlying problems when you can merely paper over the cracks instead. And although he jokes about it, I detect a note of ambivalence about Japan's constant in-your-face sexual imagery. There's a culture gap between the West and Japan, but it isn't insurmountable. And in the meantime, it gives us something to laugh and shudder at.

As the Japanese no doubt do about us.

Big fish in small ponds

Jonathan Schwarz discusses the tendency of imperial elites to prefer being enormous fish in small ponds over being big fish in a large lake:

That's the interesting thing about the standard historical trajectory of imperial elites...at a certain point they either (1) forget the power they can wield outside their country ultimately derives from a healthy society beneath them, or (2) understand that but decide they'd rather be comparatively more powerful within a poorer society and less powerful outside.
To understand choice #2 it's useful to look at an extreme example, like Saudi Arabia. Certainly it has the natural wealth to be able to oppose Israel effectively. And you'd assume their elites want to do that, given that they're always screeching about it. But effective opposition would require Saudi society to be internally far more democratic, educated and egalitarian. So the Saudi princes have decided they'd prefer their country to be a weak, poor backwater if that's what's required for them to each own nine palaces.

The signs point to the elites of the USA being the same. Look at the way the White House talks up the need to fight the War On Terror, while simultaneously reducing their actual ability to do so: alienating allies, penny-pinching on basic equipment for the troops, making decisions so mind-explodingly stupid that even incompetence can't be the explanation, like the early decision to sack 400,000 Iraqi soldiers without pay, but allow them to keep their weapons.

(Aside: the above link, by Eliot Weinberger writing for the London Review of Books, contains the most understated yet eloquent description of the mess that is the invasion and occupation of Iraq I've yet seen.)

Won't somebody think of the children???

It's a truism that there is no surer sign of a politician who is out of ideas than when he or she starts talking about "protecting the children".

A few weeks ago, Australia's Prime Minister, "Honest John" Howard, launched a crusade to "save the children" of Australia's aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.

At first glance, if there ever where any children who needed saving, it is them: Australia's treatment of our native people is disgraceful. Alcoholism and unemployment is rife. Families live in Third World levels of poverty, and child abuse is common. Like most hunter-gatherers in contact with technologically advanced conquerors, history has not been kind to the Aboriginal people of Australia. Their culture is breaking down, and with it, the people are trapped in a cycle of self-destruction and abuse. The situation needs serious improvement.

But the situation has been dire for decades, including years of neglect during Howard's entire time as PM. It's only now, with an election coming up and for the first time in years a serious challenger in the Opposition Party, that Howard has discovered the plight of the Aboriginal communities and declared it a national emergency. There's no time to think, we must act, and to hang with the expense! Or, for that matter, the consequences.

After initially saying that it could cost tens of millions of dollars, the PM is now suggesting it could be half a billion or more -- and we shouldn't complain, because in an emergency like this, no expense is too great to save the children.

So how has Howard saved the children?

By sending in the Australian Army to take over Aboriginal communities. Parents will have their welfare payments cut if they resist -- and with unemployment at terrifying levels, most Aboriginal families are on welfare. No jobs out in the desert.

If the PM is quoting half a billion dollars -- that's $7500 for each Aboriginal person in the Territory -- it will probably end up five times that. But the Government's sights aren't set very high: they want to introduce "dry areas", where the sale or possession of alcohol and pornography are criminal offenses, and compulsory health checks. No money for housing, or education, or actual health treatment. And the cost is the military occupation of part of Australia, the creation of virtual mini police states, robbing the Aboriginal people of what tiny sliver of self-determination they had left. Aboriginal leaders are saying that this "help" is something they don't need or want.

That's a lot of money for little expected result. What's going on? Is this, perhaps, like the apocryphal "$14,000 hammers" the US military used to buy when there was need to have money disappear off the books for black ops? Could it be merely old fashioned corruption? Or just incompetence?

These Aboriginals may be poor, but they're still citizens, and so it is surprising how little media attention has been given to the literal military occupation of their communities. Google News for army "northern territory" aborigines gives a mere 14 results, the second of which is about an Aussie Rules football coach.

(Note: due to the nature of Google News, these results will change with time.)

The authors of the report that prompted Howard to launch his Crusade labelled the government use of the Army to seize Aboriginal land as "devastating", and said they felt betrayed by the PM's government:

"There is not a single action that the Commonwealth has taken so far that has corresponded with a single recommendation," Ms Anderson said.

...

[Mr Wild] said he and Ms Anderson were able to get indigenous people to talk honestly about child sexual abuse because they arrived quietly in communities, displaying courtesy. "We didn't arrive in gunships, we didn't arrive in tanks and trucks." found [sic] evidence of child sexual abuse in every one of 45 communities visited in the Northern Territory, blaming poor health, alcohol and drug abuse, unemployment, poor education and housing, and disempowerment that has contributed to violence.

The government's plan, such that it is, goes for the easy targets, while ignoring or making worse the fundamental causes of the problem: unemployment and a dying culture. Yahoo reports:

But Ms Anderson conceded there was the need for urgent action and for commonwealth help.

"We needed the assistance of the federal government that had the bigger cheque book," she said.

"We did want to bring it to the government's attention but not in the way it has been responded to by the federal government."

Ms Anderson said the report was deliberately written in such a reasonable way that the commonwealth would be unreasonable to ignore the recommendations.

"They behaved as though we all have done nothing and we don't know anything and we have all been sitting on our hands," she said.

Ms Anderson said there needed to be an appropriate way of returning power to people in Aboriginal communities.

"Aboriginal people are worried about their kids but they want to be part of the solution not merely to be passive recipients," she said.

"There has to be a whole new terms of engagement renegotiated with Aboriginal people. The days of being passive recipients are over, absolutely over. That isn't going to work, that hasn't worked."

Despite early reports that Aboriginal leaders supported the plan, it seems that in fact they actually oppose it:

The Australian Government's intervention in the Northern Territory is sickening, rotten and worrying, says one of the most powerful Aboriginal leaders in the territory.

At the Garma Festival in Arnhem Land, former Northern Land Council president, Galarrwuy Yunupingu, called on people to fight the Howard Government's takeover of Northern Territory Aboriginal communities.

It's gratifying to see the pieces fall into place. When I first heard about this plan, back in June, I thought it was Children Overboard again. And what did I discover today? The Liberal Party's own polls are supporting what newspaper opinion polls are saying: Australia's voters now find Howard too old and dishonest. Even the right-wing Herald-Sun plastered the report on their front page.

White girl in the promised land

Elatia Harris, writing on 3quarksdaily, talks about her life as a white girl before the Civil Rights Movement, about being mistaken for a black child, and the latest attempt by the activist judges of the Bush Supreme Court to roll back the clock to a time where black children can be legally denied an education.

“You look like a sweet little girl,” she said to me. “But I need to know – are you a white girl?”

The sound I had been waiting for, my mother’s wheels crushing the gravel of the driveway, delivered me from any necessity to reply. Too bad the lady couldn’t get a good look at Mother, I remember thinking -- Mother, who was tall, blue-eyed, almost blonde, and beautiful enough that she commanded deference. I knew what would have happened to me, had I lacked the right answer in this country club where people like me -- my people -- never even wanted to belong: I would have been directed to wait outside, almost certainly at the back entrance, in the 100-degree heat that covered the city like a tight lid. I would not have had the same right to tolerable shelter that a white girl had, and no blue-eyed avenger would have come early or late for me.

As may be imagined, over the years I have considered this occasion differently. How complicit with the club lady was I? Would I -- who was plenty mouthy -- have found my tongue, if my mother had come later still? As I write this, I understand yet one more thing that was hidden from me then. The way the club lady fidgeted and flexed and left her office to look at me many times – until now, I have recalled that as guilty behavior: the lady had something ugly to say to me, and she didn’t want to do it. It is far more likely, however, that she was showing herself to me so that I’d be gone at the very sight of her, as a black child would have been cued to be gone. Important to her, too, would have been that club members coming and going would have seen not just me – a non-member to say the very least – but the brass, vigilant and battle-ready to shoo me. The lady was intimidating me; white beneath my tan, I had no reason to know it.

You can't buy that

A reminder of just why feminism still matters, despite the foolishness, even despite the wicked man-hating of some feminists -- because weasels (of either sex) are still out there poisoning the minds of girls with toxic memes like this:

I work at a bookstore. I was cashiering today when a woman and her two kids (a boy and a girl, both somewhere between 13-15) came up to the register. The mom was buying 2 celeb gossip magazines, and the boy put down a book. The girl then walked up and set down the newest volume of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series.

The mom says "You can't buy that."

Girl: Why?
Mom: Because it's too big.
Girl: [Brother] is buying a book that big. It's not very expensive.
Mom: [Brother] is a boy. You're a girl. And girls shouldn't read big books like that. It's too thick. Boys don't like girls who read thick books. You want boys to like you, don't you?

The girl went and put the book away.

When a nation eats its young

I recently blogged about the fact that Iraq is turning against its own young, targeting University students (especially women) for death, and how that cannot help but lead to an atavistic decline in Iraqi culture and society.

In a similar vein, the rise of conservative values in the USA has, in its own way, lead to the brutalizing of America's youth. The Reality-Based Community's Mark Kleiman writes about the abuse of America's children. He quotes from a reader:

These were 13-14-15 year old children, and we tortured them, we tortured each other into proclaiming the desired truth, and we did it at the behest of so called conservatives. I saw broken bones, people covered head to toe in bruises, people who were not allowed to go to the bathroom, people stripped naked in private homes and taunted for 8 hours a night, then taken into the 'building' and taunted for 10-12 hour days, every day for a year, two years, three years. I was there, I saw it, I did it. I live with it everyday of my life. I live with the nightmares of being abused, and the far worse nightmares of being the abuser.

This isn't a rare exception to the treatment of kids at "boot camp", it's the norm. ReasonMag has more about the institutionalised torture at "tough love" boot camps:

The state of Florida tortured 14-year-old Martin Lee Anderson to death for trespassing. The teen had been sentenced to probation in 2005 for taking a joy ride in a Jeep Cherokee that his cousins stole from his grandmother. Later that year, he crossed the grounds of a school on his way to visit a friend, a violation of his probation. His parents were given a choice between sending him to boot camp and sending him to juvenile detention. They chose boot camp, believing, as many Americans do, that “tough love” was more likely to rehabilitate him than prison.

Less than three hours after his admission to Florida’s Bay County Sheriff’s Boot Camp on January 5, 2006, Anderson was no longer breathing. He was taken to a hospital, where he was declared dead early the next morning.

In no way shape or form am I one of those airy-fairy rose-coloured-glasses romantics who thinks that children are all (or even mostly) sweet innocents who want nothing more than to grow up to give the world a group-hug. "Tough love" isn't an oxymoron: what we want and what we need are not necessarily the same thing. But by his fruits ye shall know him: it is clear that many -- perhaps the majority, perhaps even all -- of the boot camps aren't about rehabilitating children or teaching them to be better people, but about mean-spirited and thoughtless punishment for the sake of punishment. If, at the end of the process you get decent young people, then that's a lucky accident. If, instead, you get brutalised, broken, hardened anti-social thugs, well, you've just guaranteed yourself clients for the next three or four years until they turn 18. And after that? Time to buy shares in the many private prisons (one of the few growth industries in the USA today).

And thus the vicious circle continues: a broken society produces broken children, who in turn grow up to form a broken society.