This is why I love the internet

http://i.thefairest.info/funniest_thumbs/gUqQWH.jpeg

Of course, the best way to “counter-protest” that sort of sub-human biped is with hollow-points in something like .308 Winchester, but the sign’s funny too.

Law enforcement vs. your own safety

Have a peek at this:

• More on Isaac Singletary from Reason Magazine

Now try to keep a straight face while telling me that the federal government (pick a fed, any fed, I don’t care) has your safety in mind when it passes laws.

So — if you believe Reason Magazine — here’s what went down:

[T]wo undercover officers trespassed onto Singletary’s property. They then invited criminals onto his property to engage in criminal activity with them. Mr. Singletary, recognizing the trespassers as drug dealers, then properly demanded they leave. He brought a gun along to defend himself, not an unreasonable action, given the circumstances. For this, he was shot to death.

Mmm, yeah. Undercover cops pose as criminals, then shoot homeowner who doesn’t want to have dealings with criminals. Good job protecting and serving, there, boys!

Clearly, the solution is to deny homeowners the right to own and use firearms in defence of their own lives and property, on the off-chance that the criminals they chase off might turn out to be undercover cops. It doesn’t matter that most of the confrontations thus prevented will result in dead homeowners, because those situations won’t make the news — and if they do, they’ll just be more evidence that “oh Lord, we need to get the awful guns whose malevolent mind-control devices are making good kids smoke crack and break into people’s houses off the streets!” Carry on!

There’s been some insightful commentary on What Would John Wayne Do? recently:

I’m generally a great supporter of the police, my father was an LA County Deputy for 20 years, and my military service was with the Coast Guard, which often acts in a law enforcement capacity.

That being said, in more recent years, I have begun to grow increasingly concerned about the conduct of police with regard to civilian populace. It seems to me that more and more of late there is an “us vs. them” mentality in law enforcement, and amongst the civilians. Civilians regard cops as “out to get them”, and cops regard those they’re tasked to protect as nothing but a potential threat.

I’m more than a little bit surprised that this sort of thing hasn’t come up more often in terms of the War On (some) Drugs and the War On Terror (and airline passengers’ dignity). I’m just an idealistic ignorant airheaded ivory-tower theorist, of course, but it seems to me that it would be better for all concerned if regular folks saw police officers as “the good guys”, and police officers saw regular folks as “the good guys” — the sheep and the sheepdogs, as it were. (Some of us sheep have teeth and claws, but pointing that out makes one unpopular, so forget I said anything.) Seriously: we all want to keep the streets reasonably safe and get home at the end of the day with the same number of holes with which we set out, right? (Body-piercing enthusiasts obviously excluded.)

Yeah, it’s a nice thought, but it sounds awfully rose-coloured. (Go read some of the articles from Reason Magazine or Homeland Stupidity, and see if I’m not joking.)

It doesn’t help that the FBI’s cranking up its Internet surveillance programme. Right: that’s going to help your credibility.

So what does one do about this sort of thing? Well, maybe the present set of governments could take a hint from the Eighteenth and Twenty-First Amendments and step the fuck off of my right to put stuff in my body as I damn well see fit. Just a thought, there. Drug control is a relatively recent innovation, and to be honest we did reasonably well without it.

Next, perhaps we can start asking some questions about whether municipal police departments really need to be organized as paramilitary units. Yes, it makes for much more effective SWAT raids against drug houses and the like — and before I go any further: I fully support police departments’ efforts to get their officers home safely at the end of the day — but the notion that cops are “soldiers lite” operating against those damn civilians is destructive and polarizing.

While I’m on this rhetorical rampage, let’s wake up and smell the fucking reality at airport security these days. Okay, I can’t take my sweet little Swiss Army Knife through security these days — but anyone who’s even mildly interested can find a full arsenal of sharp pointy things on the other side of the metal detectors. (At Vancouver International Airport, one could reasonably expect to walk off with a beer glass, smash it into long sharp pointy fragments in the appropriately-sexed bathroom, tape up half of the longest shard, and walk onto an airplane with the equivalent of a Gerber Mk. II. Feeling safe yet?)

Look, folks: we have the answer, and it’s been staring us in the face and shouting at the top of its lungs since September 11th, 2001: it’s us. The fine folks on United 93 did exactly what needed to be done — and if they’d done it sooner, the flight could have continued to San Fransisco unmolested. (Don’t for a second think that I’m suggesting that the folks on United 93 fucked up.) We can’t count on anyone but ourselves to assure our own safety — but if we look after ourselves, we can win!

Those nifty little take-off-your-shoes metal detector emplacements are delightful pieces of window dressing, and they probably deter a good number of less-inventive terrorists — but it all comes down to the people on the plane. A properly motivated individual could wreak havoc on the passengers of any flight in the world — provided that those passengers let themselves become victims. On the other hand, in the confines of an airliner at thirty-five thousand feet, six goblins with assault rifles would have a hard time fending off 150 angry — furious — passengers and crew who didn’t want to ride their aircraft into a skyscraper.

As has ever been the case, the people are the government’s — the state’s, the nation’s — best defence against aggression foreign and domestic. Give us a fucking chance!

Fair warning

If you’re American, you should probably read Homeland Stupidity on a regular basis:

• Homeland Stupidity

If you’re not American, it’s probably worth your while, too.

Language and politics: what does it mean to “take responsibility”?

Remember when George W. Bush announced that he was going to take responsibility for mistakes made in Iraq?

• “Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me”

(Oh look, passive voice! Nobody made these mistakes, they just sort of “have been made” by some poorly-understood mistake-generating process. And upon further reflection, I lied: Bush II didn’t actually take responsibility, he just pointed out that “the” responsibility rests with him. Maybe it’s smoking a cigarette and making pillow talk?)

Further to this Iraq business, we are all (I’m sure) pleased to note that Hillary Clinton takes responsibility for her vote in favour of the invasion of Iraq:

• Clinton in DM: ‘No do-overs’ in Iraq

To wit:

“I’ve taken responsibility for my vote. But there are no do-overs in life. I wish there were,” she told the group.

Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but what does it actually mean?

….

Yeah, I don’t know either. Oh, wait, here’s a clue:

Clinton pivoted away from her position about the politically touchy war in Iraq during the forum, and talked more about veterans health benefits.

Mmm hmm. “Taking responsibility” basically means “let’s shut up about it and talk about things that make me look good instead”.

Okay, I’ll quit bashing the poor widdle Amewican powiticians and start bashing the poor widdle Canadian powiticians like baby Harp seals. Maybe you’ve heard of Maher Arar? Well, Stephen Harper just took responsibility for his nation’s part in the deal. How’d he do it? Let’s ask the CBC:

• Harper’s apology ‘means the world’: Arar

“Here, I’m sorry, take this money, now please leave me alone.” I’m pleased that Mr. Arar is satisfied with the gift basket he got, and I wish him well, but I’m more than a little bit annoyed that Harper’s idea of taking responsibility is taking money out of my fucking pocket:

Earlier Friday, Harper apologized and offered a $10.5 million compensation package to Arar and his family, along with money for legal fees, for the “terrible ordeal” they suffered after Arar spent nearly a year in a Syrian jail.

Oh, and that apology? It’s not much of an apology after all:

“On behalf of the government of Canada, I wish to apologize to you…and your family for any role Canadian officials may have played in the terrible ordeal that all of you experienced in 2002 and 2003,” Harper said.

“I’m not actually going to address the question of whether Canadian officials did anything to condemn you to a year of torture in a Syrian prison, but leaving that aside — on the off-chance that we were responsible, I’m conditionally sorry.”

Here’s the part that would be funny if it had happened in a different country: Harper wasn’t even Prime Minister in 2002! He’s apologizing on behalf of Paul Martin’s Liberal government. Perhaps Paul Martin should apologize instead?

That’s a pretty neat trick. Maybe I can get Steve-o to apologize for me the next time I get drunk and do something stupid.

Forget the War on Terror and the War on (Some) Drugs, we need a War on Shirkers of Consequences. Saying “Okay, you got me, my fault” and blithely moving on is not “taking responsibility”, it’s brazen evasion thereof. Responsibility is meaningless without consequence.

Think, don’t feel

It occurs to me that the bulk of my complaints against the present (or past) state of the world can be summed up as:

People keep doing things without evidence that what they’re doing works.

This is related to magical thinking, but while magical thinking is mostly a confusion of causation with correlation, the phenomenon I’m trying to describe includes just about all of the usual cognitive biases.

Two aphorisms come to mind:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.

and

A fool redoubles his efforts when he has lost sight of his objectives.

That satisfies my triteness quota for this month. Let’s move on.

Suppose you want to get something done. (A laudable goal, to be sure.) Perhaps you want to lose some fat and gain some muscle. Perhaps you want to reduce crime in your city, or stop your citizens from partaking of certain kinds of drugs. Perhaps you even want to bring liberty, safety, and (of course) democracy to an oppressed people in a foreign land.

These aren’t problems with blazingly obvious solutions.

Now, many people would disagree. It’s obvious to some that if you want to cut fat from your waistline, you should cut fat from your diet. It’s obvious to others that if we make pot illegal, kids will stop smoking it. And — alas — it’s obvious to still others that the best way to make any country safe for democracy is to invade it, topple the tin-pot despot, and allow æons of pent-up sectarian hatred to boil unchecked to the surface. Er, I mean hold an election!

So back to you and your goal. Your task is a long one, but you have an idea of how to go about it. So you pick a plan and stick with it.

How do you know whether your plan’s working?

There’s the rub: most people never bother to find out. They stick with their first idea, because it makes them feel good — or simply because they can’t think of anything better to do. They stick with it so long that it becomes part of them, that changing The Plan would deny their very identities (or involve admitting they were wrong, which is often a smaller form of the same problem).

Imagine investing all that time into a plan that doesn’t work! Much more comforting to risk wasting more time, but never to risk the awful chance of finding out that you were wrong.

When people do this, it’s unfortunate — worthy of sympathy, perhaps some gently-worded advice, and a quiet moment of honest introspection (am I doing that, too?). When governments do this, it’s at best a waste of money, and at worst wholesale slaughter.

Not to mention par for the course.

So how do you know whether your plan’s working? Well, look at the question: you need some criteria to tell you how you’re doing. If you’re trying to lose fat, one of those criteria may be the circumference of your waist. If you’re trying to reduce crime, you might look at crime rates. Other examples will occur to you. These criteria need not be numerical: if you want to improve your general well-being, you could jot down how you feel upon rising every morning.

Now you can track your progress. If your criteria are moving in the right direction, then your plan works — for now. (Circumstances have an irritating habit of changing without notice.) If not, you need to change your plan.

Note that this principle works the other way around as well. If you’re trying to convince someone to do something, or trying to prevent them from doing something, it really helps to have data to back up your assertion.

Bait cars and language

We begin this little jaunt with an article about crime:

• Pilot project aims to protect cars from petty thieves from, of course, the CBC

Upon further examination, we find that the project doesn’t protect cars; rather, the idea is to use bait cars to catch petty thieves. (What happens to the petty thieves once they’re caught remains somewhat obscure. I suppose many of them will be sent to jail for a short while, and some of those will decide not to continue their criminal careers upon release.)

In any case, the bait car programme seems to have cut down the rate of auto theft rather significantly:

Vancouver police say the number of stolen cars has dropped by 40 per cent from two years ago, thanks in large part to the bait car program.

I heartily approve. However, we should keep in mind that this is not “protection”, it is rather enforcement and deterrence. While this programme may reduce the number of petty thieves who think that breaking into cars is a good way to get cash, it does nothing to prevent a petty thief who has decided to break into your car from doing so.

This is an important point, and it deserves repetition. Many programmes that are intended to reduce crime are touted as “protection”, but they are not. Protection is a specific thing: a house may be protected against a forest fire, for instance, or an individual against an attacker, but protection must always deal with specifics. Laws against antisocial acts — murder, for instance — do not protect individual people. (You may convince yourself of this fact by examining a newspaper.) What they do is deter the goblins from committing whatever pops into their heads, with varying degrees of success.

There is a great deal of enthusiastic discourse about crime and the prevention thereof. This would all be easier to discuss if we could bring ourselves to say exactly what we mean, rather than what sounds good.

Dear Internet: please stop abusing the English language

This handy comparison was originally introduced to me by Logan Shaw, and it bears repeating:

Whose? Mine, yours, his, hers, ours, theirs, its

Who’s? I’m, you’re, he’s, she’s, we’re, they’re, it’s

Please take note of the emphasis in the above: it’s there for a reason.

Homophones are in fact trivial to master, though you wouldn’t know it by what passes for prose on the Internet. I am tempted to suspect that those who confuse, for example, “they’re/there/their” are deliberately inconveniencing their audience for the sake of shirking a few minutes of learning, but of course one should not attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance. I find it difficult to accept that they’re unaware of the distinction, but there you are.

The last time I wrote against the abuse of language on the Internet, I was showered with enthusiastic, if atrociously written, complaints. I don’t flatter myself to think that this post will achieve the same notoriety, but just in case I remind my readers that sloppily-written comments will be deleted with neither explanation nor remorse.

Pointing out the elephant: Canada’s drug policy fails

Putting aside the question of whether any government is justified in telling its citizens what they can and cannot do to themselves: do harsh laws against some drugs actually work?

• Canada’s anti-drug strategy a failure, study suggests from our old pals at the CBC

What’s going on?

Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent to enforce Canada’s drug laws, with little to show for it, suggests a new report from the country’s largest HIV/AIDS research and treatment facility.

Illicit drugs remain cheap and easily available, and are used by more people than ever, says the report by the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS.

“In 1994, 28.5 per cent of Canadians reported having consumed illicit drugs in their life; by 2004, that figure had jumped to 45 per cent,” said a news release from the group.

I’m a little bit pleased to discover that the feds are having trouble enforcing an ethically questionable set of laws — but that’s a lot of money we’re wasting, there. Given that ten years of increasing anti-drug spending has seen the rate of drug use nearly double, one might be forgiven for suspecting that those hundreds of millions of dollars could have been better spent elsewhere… buying a six-pack of premium beer for every man, woman, and child in the nation, perhaps. (Don’t drink? Okay, I’ll have yours — wouldn’t want it to go to waste.)

But there’s more at risk here than “just” a waste of money:

“Having politicians pretending they know what is going to fix the drug problem in the absence of objective indicators is a recipe for disaster,” [Dr. Julio Montaner, one of the authors of the study] said. “It’s a recipe for hidden agendas, recipe for ideological agendas and a recipe for people to try to impose a world on you as opposed to what the world really is.”

Quite.