No, not by accident. Not as part of a war effort. Not as part of a biological weapons test. Rather, on purpose, as part of Prohibition enforcement efforts:
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
This is probably old news to people who follow German politics closely, but I just found out about it (via MetaFilter).
Karl Heinz Kurras was the West German police officer who killed student demonstrator Benno Ohnesborg in June 1967 during a protest against the Shah of Iran’s visit to Germany. This was one of the major radicalizing events of the period for the German left, and hugely influential. [more...]
Recently Clay Shirky wrote “A Rant About Women”, a piece essentially claiming that women needed to act more confidently, even or especially in situations where confidence would be unwarranted, in order to be more successful. There’s more to it than that, but that was what I took as the core message. I think there are some valid points in there, but I also think that Shirky radically underestimates the ways in which women are frequently punished for acting confident, and and that he appears to assume that a system which promotes self-aggrandizers is something that we all (not just women) should accept as the natural way of things.
I might write up a longer response to “A Rant About Women” at some point, but right now I want to bring some attention to a piece that’s probably more important than my response. [more...]
I was loving this article from The Economist until the final paragraph, and specifically the final line.
The article reports on a series of psychological experiments which strongly support the idea that power corrupts. The interesting wrinkle is that some people are corrupted less—and these are apparently the people who don’t feel deserving of their powerful position. [more...]
I found this New York Times article on “The Damage of Card Rewards” to be rather interesting. Basically, to pay for reward programs aimed at getting the better-off to spend more, credit card companies charge merchants more, and merchants reflect these costs in their prices—but everyone pays the same prices, while only the users of reward programs get offsetting benefits.
The article essentially concludes that there is no solution to this problem—and, unless I missed something, doesn’t address regulation. I’m not necessarily advocating regulation here—it’s likely the banks would simply use it to enrich themselves further somehow, although that’s a practical political problem rather than a theoretical economic one—but I do think it’s odd to set up a problem like this, that seems like it could obviously be tackled using an approach of tweaking market rules, while barely mentioning that approach at all.
This post at Yes Means Yes! is an excellent overview of how the profoundly unhealthy culture of American high schools socializes boys to have negative and domineering attitudes towards women. The post is a review of Dude, You’re a Fag, an academic study of student ethnography and behavior at a Northern California high school. While the degree to which the behavior in the school is typical can be debated, it certainly seems to me that it’s certainly not a total aberration. I think a key paragraph is this one:
[Male sexual aggression in this context] has little to do with sexual orientation or desire and everything to do with a gender performance that positions the boys in relation to other boys.
I found this architectural/sociological (sociospatial? psychospatial?) analysis of modern urban warfare, Die Hard, and cinematic portrayals of urban movement to be entirely fascinating. Tactics, psychology, Jason Bourne, parkour, and late-capitalist nonplaces—how can you go wrong with that?
Her response to the recent attempted underwear bombing:
Senate Intelligence Chairman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said a "very comprehensive no-fly list" would be "the greatest protection our country has." In an interview, she said the definition of who can be included should be expanded to include anyone about whom there is "a reasonable suspicion."
“The greatest protection our country has” is to be able to stop people from flying arbitrarily, even though a major problem with the current system is a lack of accountability around how one gets on the list. Also, of course, Abdulmutallab was on the FBI’s “Terrorist Screening Database” and it was some kind of bureaucratic error that prevented his name being added to the no-fly list—not any legal concerns over reasonable suspicion; it is concerns of this sort that Feinstein is attempting eliminate entirely.
One could accuse me of a similar but oppositely-directed bias. However, I don’t hide my views on the subject, whereas Feinstein doesn’t acknowledge her political views as being authoritarian and/or fascistic; in addition, I generally propose limitations on state power on the basis of principles and long-term benefits—not claiming that their abrupt removal will magically solve some current dilemma instantly.
As to its accuracy, who can say? But it seems as likely to be right as any other predictions I’ve seen, while having the benefit of being rather more entertaining. And I suspect it’s not far off in its depiction of how things stand right now.
Upon typing that title, I realized that it sounds quite like a modern fairy tale or children’s story. Of course, if it were a fairy tale, then the faithful sponsors would stick with Tiger as he attempted to slay the foul beasts of public opprobrium and frenzied media—but instead at least one major sponsor, Accenture, is walking away. [more...]
Naturally, as soon as it became popular to use Facebook to promote political causes, it became attractive to distort the practice. The ease of online ”participation”—clicking a button or, at most, filling out a form—makes it rather difficult to judge just how committed to their causes participants are.
Furthermore, if it’s easy to click, then it’s also easy to persuade people to click, which is not always a good thing. [more...]
I’ve come across what feels like another wave of articles related to bullying recently. I previously wrote about my thoughts on institutional responses, but this time my focus is on some of the causes, as well as how technical rules are unlikely to eliminate the problem. [more...]
Other Justice Department officials have said that even if Mr. Mohammed is acquitted, the Obama administration will keep him locked up forever as a “combatant” under the laws of war.
Specifically, “How Food Preferences Vary by Political Ideology”—a poll that correlates self-reported political leanings and self-reported food habits. And verifies a whole pile of preconceptions you might have had… althought the polling organization itself does point out that e.g. much of the variance may be due to geographical rather than political differences.
Even allowing for those, though, the fact that “liberals” are much more interested in eating healthily than “conservatives” is interesting.
Arthur Silber has a typically to-the-point entry about the recent bill passed by the House:
[T]he bill’s primary purpose has absolutely nothing to do with providing "affordable health care." The purpose is to extract as much money as possible from "ordinary" Americans … and shovel it directly to already-engorged insurance companies.
No, not tax collectors. At least, in democracies, there’s a notion that collected taxes are disbursed according to the wishes of some significant portion of the populace. Here, I’m talking about the trend of the last few decades for police departments (and other law enforcement agencies) to confiscate property (and cash)—and then use it to fund themselves. Financial Cryptography discusses this issue, outlining its history in measure meant to crack down on money laundering. The Economist also has an article on the issue, and this line should make clear how dubious the whole thing is:
The 2002 Proceeds of Crime Act expanded these powers greatly, allowing courts to seize more or less anything owned by a convict deemed to have a “criminal lifestyle”, and introducing a power of civil recovery, whereby assets may be confiscated through the civil courts even if their owner has not been convicted of a crime.
The essay “Gay Imperialism: Gender and Sexuality Discourse in the ‘War on Terror’” examines the now-conventional idea that Western respect for the rights of women and gays drives concern for oppressed groups within other (especially Islamic) cultures, which in turn serves as a justification for imperialist projects. [more...]
Via Glenn Greenwald, this video of Congressional Representative Alan Grayson clearly exposing as unjust and unconstitutional the measures that the Republican party are trying to get passed targeting ACORN:
A recent University of Philadelphia study apparently shows that people in possession of guns were significantly more likely (4.46 times as likely) to be shot in an assault than people without guns. I’m particularly curious about some things that the study can’t really address—namely whether it’s causation or correlation. Is it the presence of the gun that increases the danger of confrontation? Is it that the presence of the gun makes the gun possessor more belligerent? Or is it that the kinds of people more likely to be belligerent are the kinds of people more likely to be carrying guns?
Another question is one of morality—if (as is strongly suggested by the study) resisting robbery or borderline situations leads to a higher likelihood of injury or death (on either side), does this imply that offering no resistance is the more moral act?