Ranting and Roaring

Natalie Solent went to check up on the tugboat under the bridge pictures. Looks like we all absolutely fecked the guy.

The best Lomborg article I’ve read in a while: here. “The environmental movement does not defend “science,” as [Scientific American] editor Rennie would have it. Rather, it uses science as a weapon to advance the cause“.

I was trying to resist this for as long as possible. Rand at 100% and ordinal #2? How the hell did that happen?

1. Aristotle (100%)
2. Rand (100%)
3. Kant (88%)
4. Nietzsche (86%)
5. Sartre (84%)
6. Mill (82%)
7. Hume (81%)
8. Aquinas (79%)
9. Spinoza (78%)
10. Stoics (77%)
11. Bentham (74%)
12. Cynics (66%)
13. Epicureans (66%)
14. Hobbes (58%)
15. Prescriptivism (57%)
16. Ockham (56%)
17. Augustine (52%)
18. Noddings (48%)
19. Plato (45%)

Iain Murray, upon reflecting on the evil nature of serial killers and Daniel Perl’s murderers, has had a change of heart about the death penalty. He writes: “I have been forced to confront the reality of evil. Evil, as I now understand it, is the absence of the possibility of redemption. … I can therefore no longer oppose the death penalty for those who are truly evil. In the past, my anger has been tempered by pity. Now it shall be tempered only by regret for what was lost. I do not view that as a bad thing“.

I agree with Iain’s assessment that there is an irredeemable evil nature of certain individuals. Nonetheless, I remain opposed to the death penalty, for the following reasons:

• The issue of wrongful convictions

  The most serious crimes, those that are death penalty eligible, are by their very nature those that cry out for convictions. I cannot turn on CNN for 30 minutes without hearing about Daniel Pearl or Andrea Yates. Yesterday, at an Irish bar in Vienna, I picked up the English newspaper The Guardian and read a two page spread about prostitute killers in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. Do you know where Port Coquitlam is? Did you ever care about the crime news from there before? The public and media outcry lead to an incredible amount of pressure on police and state prosecutors to get the killers. And unfortunately, as Canadian lawyer Eddie Greenspan one said: the police’s mind is always open — until it’s closed.

  There have been a number high-profile wrongful conviction cases in Canada in the last decade: David Milgaard, Donald Marshall, Guy Paul Morin … and as they say, that’s just the Ms. Some of these cases involved the police tampering with evidence or withholding it altogether. Why not? They were guilty, why confuse the jury? One case, that of Steven Truscott is of particular issue, as it had rape and murder and there was a death penalty conviction (that was later stayed). Now, does this case reach Iain’s standard of irredeemable evil? Many in society would claim so. If the death penalty was in place today, and an adult had committed the crime, prosecutors would certainly seek the death penalty. Just as they did in the first place, when they were mistaken about who the killer was. We are rightfully outraged because of the crime, but too often we let that outrage blind us to fundamental issues of justice.

• The issue of publicity

  Clifford Olsen and Paul Bernardo, confessed serial killers and inarguably irredeemable monsters, will spend the rest of their days pacing within tiny caged cells, isolated from humanity and even from their more mundane prisoner brethren. Except for a summary hearing at some point in the future under Canada’s “faint hope” laws, there will be no good reason to put their mug shots on the front page of the Toronto Star again. If Canada had the death penalty, there is little doubt in my mind that Bernardo’s case would be stilll winding its way through the courts and through the media. And why not? If we are going to strap someone to a cross and inject them with poison, they are entitled to the highest standard of justice we have to offer.

  Compare and contrast to all-American cop-killer Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (or whatever his name is), formerly of death row, hero of college students and activists everywhere: He was against the Man, man! Proof of systemic racism of Amerikkka! Bla bla bla! I have no doubt that the man deserves the death penalty, but can you argue that the symbol deserves obscurity.

• The issue of cruelty

  This is a two part issue, but I will be brief with it. While George W. Bush was governor of Texas, 152 people were executed. There is little reason to believe that Bush spent more than a few seconds contemplating their fate; in one case, he mocked a prisoner’s pleas for leniency. The second half of the issue comes from the question I heard once from a death row inmate: is the lethal injection any less cruel than throwing someone from a plane? A prisoner knows the hour and day of his execution, and the clock never stops ticking. Now, consider taking a prisoner up in a plane. Toss him out the door over the ocean — death is about as instantaneous, the period before is without physical pain, and the outcome is as as certain.

  These points make me ask the questions: does the death penalty make us callous? does it make us cruel? does it lessen us? Too often, it seems that we take pleasure from the putting down of dogs.

I believe that many criminals deserve death. But I don’t believe that society should be in the business of giving people what they deserve. If I was to sum up my opposition in a single sentence, I would say I am against the death penalty for what it does to us. The killers? They can rot in jail.

What ethical issue does this raise? Did I miss the ethics bus somewhere? Saying the doctors shouldn’t allow her to have children because she’s going to lose her mind in 10 years is just a new incarnation state eugenics. Hell, she might be hit by a bus in three years: that’s life for you. Or is the ethical issue the fact that science rather than random chance is selecting her children? This is amniocentesis in advance, without a lot of the unpleasantness. Though my understanding is that “ethicists” want to ban that test also.

Fortunately, we have our sophisticated European friends to engage them in talk.

Here are some results from this Gallup poll of residents of nine Muslims countries (Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, Turkey, Lebanon, Morocco, Kuwait, Jordan and Saudi Arabia):

• 61 percent did not believe Arab groups carried out the September 11 attacks (though most respondents say the attacks as unjustified),
• 77 percent said U.S. military actions in Afghanistan were morally unjustified,
• by a 2-to-1 margin express an unfavorable opinion of the United States,
• 58 percent indicated displeasure with President Bush,
• 16 percent of Saudi Arabians and 14 percent of Iranians had a favorable view of the United States; the most favorable country was Lebanon at 41 percent; the least was Pakistan, at 5 percent.

The CNN article also notes: “They also view American values as deeply materialist and secular and American culture as a corrupting influence on their societies, the poll found.“.

Lawrence Garvin‘s comments. Ben Sheriff‘s comments.

It’s right here.

Max Power has written a lengthy and interesting response to my Game Theory/Tiananmen Square article of several days ago. I’ve been meaning to get to this for several days, but I do get paid to work!

I’ll still maintain the Chinese move in the Tiananmen Squares game is effectively a final move in the game the Chinese leaders were playing, which is more centered toward internal politics than to external opinion. Obviously, this is debatable, and the larger question is: are there any final moves in the real world? Unless you’re talking about all out nuclear war or something, one could claim there really isn’t. That said, there are effective final moves — that is to say, there’ll be no more moves played in that particular “local game”; and other games in-progress are not overly effected by that “final move”. This is similar to the Furniture Store game: screwing your first-and-only-time customers gives you final move advantage in the “local game”, and they’re safe until someone moves the game into the courts or late-night firebombs.

BTW: I know there is no “s” on the end of Tiananmen Square; I’m making a joke on the name of “Hollywood Squares”, with the difference being the wrong one ends up in tanks and gunfire.

From Reason Online.

Or maybe not. The Liberal Government is the master of saying one thing to please one group, and doing exactly the opposite because anything else would be insane.

My WWW server is broken; does anyone have an FTP server I could use for about 48 hours?

Lawrence Garvin responds here to my defense of SloboGoogling. I will concede one point in particular: saying he was accused of being a stalker was over the line, even if it was factually correct. In my defense, I was trying to draw attention to the whole legal fight he was in, which I think is worth pointing at, and I did give a link to where one could read the argument yourself. That said, my comments below make the case look much worse than it actually is. There’s much more on Lawrence’s site; plus there’s Damian Penny’s response here.

All points well taken. This e-mail was also sent to Damian Penny.

PS. I’m not responding to anything in length today until I get some work done!

(Via Buzz Machine).

I think Lawrence raises some interesting points here, which I’d like to address in point form, below.

• Blog Chill and Censorship

  While I believe that government censorship is a much more important issue any other kind, I will agree with Lawrence that private individuals can have a “censoring effect” on other’s speech. Furthermore, I will agree that this has the possibility of being a bad thing if it significantly lessens the quality or quantity of public debate. That all said, the question is, have we crossed a line here (with SloboGoogling)? I say, no, for a simple reason: I don’t think we’ve uncovered a single word that the petition signers would repudiate. We are defeating them with their own words, on their own terms.

• Should speech be without consequence?

  Obviously, from a strict legalistic point of view, the answer should be no (beyond the “yelling ‘movie’ in a crowded firehouse rule”). The point Lawrence is driving at is (I believe) in civil discourse, at what level do we stop? There is no clear answer to this — it depends on what is being said. Inherently however, signing a petition is a public act; it is saying: I want you to know that I support this. When what is being supported is reprehensible, the bar has been set fairly high for response, and I believe SloboGoogling falls well under that bar. Under the “public act” rule, I don’t think there’s a lot of difference between what we are doing and stating certain embarrassing historical facts about Walt Disney, Henry Ford, or Lucky Lindbergh. Note how high the bar can be raised though — I have no issue with people saying that Sunera Thobani, Judy Rebick or the ugly NAC should be kicked off the government tit, even though this is effectively an attack on their very livelihood. Why? Because, besides advocating mass extermination of Ukrainians, I find it difficult to distinguish their political views from the monster Ioseph Stalin.

  Note what we’re not doing: we’re not publishing their home addresses and phone numbers; we’re not organizing demonstrations in front of their places of work. And, without belaboring the point, the type of people who are signing this petition are exactly the type of people who do these sorts of things.

• Is SloboGoogling a worthwhile endeavor?

  Absolutely, though maybe for the opposite reason that one may think. I only have a slight interest in Slobodan Milosevic: I’m sure he won’t get what he deserves at the end of a rope, but he will almost certainly get the next best thing we have to offer. What I am interested in is the type of person, Canadians in particular, who would support such an individual. When I started looking the SloboGoogles, I expected to see more “jurisdictional” type disagreements. Boy, was I wrong — they’re almost all capital-M Marxists.

  Why is this important? I’ve always made jokes about the left-wing trying to bring re-education and death camps to Canada, but the fact is these capital-M Marxists don’t seem to have any sort of issue at all with this type of atrocity. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. And the friendly public face of these people doesn’t fool me a bit. Without naming names (libel chill, you know), I think there’s a fair number of left-wing public personalities who wouldn’t have a problem with dragging you into a field in the middle of the night and putting a bullet in the back of your head if they thought it would further their political vision of a “new Kanada”.

• Blogging as new media; bandwagon jumping

  This may set me apart from some of my fellow bloggers, but I don’t really think blogging is much more than a frivolous (but amusing) waste of time. Yes, we can fact check your asses. Yes, I know that Mark Steyn and others pull issues, facts, and opinions from the blog world — a good thing, to be sure. But the fact is that to some degree we’ve formed a little self-congratulatory circle of opinion, chasing the same stories, expressing the same outrage, and trying to maximize our daily click count from each other. I like doing this, and I enjoy reading all your collective works, but I don’t confuse this with spending time with my family or friends.

  I started doing this primarily because I wanted to learn how to express my opinions better. That when someone says “why do you believe this?”, or “why shouldn’t we eat the rich?”, I should be able to say “Because of (a), (b), (c), and the meat is too fatty”. Post-September 11th, I decided that as a citizen of country that I wasn’t feeling particularly proud of, if my opinions were to have any value whatsoever, I should put them in a place where they could be developed, scrutinized and commented upon. I spotted Recovering Liberal, found Blogger, and here I am. Does it make a difference? I’m one person in a country of 30 million — if my opinion is worth at least 1/30,000,000th, I’m coming out even, if not ahead.

These guys are getting more pathetic by the second: “Russia, meanwhile, expressed contempt on the weekend for what it considered a rigged hockey tournament. After losing to the Americans on Friday, Russia’s coach claimed there was a secret, signed deal to make sure that Canada and the U.S. ended up playing for gold.”

There’s something scary about the 1986 story about women not getting hitched by 35 are as likely to get killed by terrorists as they are to get married. This initially got a lot of media play, but was then quickly refuted and should have been forgotten not long after. However, there’s one group that has been keeping this story alive long past its shelf life — feminists, using it to claim media bias and/or insensitivity against women. Or to make a long story short: feminists are complaining that this story won’t die, but they’re the only ones talking about it! Odd, if not duplicitous.

If you have the stomach to make it all the way through Rivers boohoo stories about what a rotten deal women are getting in the media, read this story by Wendy McElroy, about how statistics are almost always distorted to make women look oppressed beyond reason. Included are such long standing howlers such as how 150,000 women die of anorexia a year, or 1 in 4 college women will be victimized by rape. You certainly don’t see Rivers complaining that those “facts” are being over-played in the media.

And I’ve been in Vienna for almost three weeks! (Via Ben Sheriff, via Iain Murray).

The Network for Progressive Governance has more lectures for the US on “root causes” and the problems with reliance on simplistic solutions. This organization seems to be mostly European leaders, but Canada’s own PM Jean Chretien has made it into the mix also. The goal of seems to be hitching whatever the issue of the moment is to US cash, bossing the US around with oh-so-sophisticated European know-how, and having the US foot the entire bill.

European and Canadian governments want to fight poverty in Africa? Want to “urge” the Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate? Hey, go right ahead! I’m not sure what this has to do with the US fighting terrorism, and I’m sure the US doesn’t either;

For months, we’ve been showing Trinity-Anne how to wave her arm and say “bye bye” whenever anyone leaves. Today, as I walked out the door saying “bye bye” to her, she waved back on her own. She also made some sort of squealing noise, which I’m taking to be “bye”. Sigh, they grow up so quickly.

One last one, a Dr. Joseph Alexander Norland, from parts unknown in Canada, who writes in “The Jurist”: “I entirely agree with the writer, but, alas, I am already among the converted. The question is, how to reach those who are still under the spell of NATO’s propaganda. To the US hypocracy section one should also add the de facto support Pol Pot received from the US, not to mention the fact that Barbi was shielded for years by the US until brought before a French court for his war crimes. And then there is the list of arch-Nazis who became honourable US citizens, like Werner von Braun. Indeed, people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones!“. The Americans live in glass houses? I thought it was “little pink houses for you and me”? Maybe it’s a Frank Lloyd Wright thing…