Assorted Links: July 27, 2005

More On Aboriginal Crime Stats

I previously linked to Kate and Darcey's comments on my post.  Two new links on this topic from "Blank Out Times" and Polyscopique.  The latter provides a straight forward statistical analysis involving only the two variables I included in my chart.  Obviously there are more than two variables at work here but I do appreciate Laurent efforts.  I took stats, once. I just forgot how to do stats.

Breach of Contract

As I understand it Telus is preventing its own customers from accessing websites that back a strike against the telecommunications giant.  While some bloggers are protesting this as a violation of freedom of speech, and others supporting the blocking as appropriate tit for tat, it should also be added that Telus' actions might violate the contracts they signed with their customers.  I am not a Telus customer but I can assure you if my provider ever prevented me from accessing any part of the Internet they'd be hearing from old Publius.  I'm paying for access to the Internet, not portions thereof, as decided upon by the ISP.  If I wanted a filtering service I'd ask for one.  Also, which executive has such a tin ear for PR?  Unions certainly engage in such bully-boy tactics, indeed they excel at them, but sinking to their level simply makes both parties look at best petty at worst desperate. 

Remembering Mises

The great man's greatest pupil recalls his life and works.

For Mises was able to demonstrate (a) that the expansion of free markets, the division of labor, and private capital investment is the only possible path to the prosperity and flourishing of the human race; (b) that socialism would be disastrous for a modern economy because the absence of private ownership of land and capital goods prevents any sort of rational pricing, or estimate of costs, and (c) that government intervention, in addition to hampering and crippling the market, would prove counter-productive and cumulative, leading inevitably to socialism unless the entire tissue of interventions was repealed.

Monte Waves Red Flag In Front of Several Bulls

Over at the Solblog the Member for Medicine Hats decides to French Kiss one of the third rails of Canadian politics.  Good thing he doesn't have a comments section, or else you know who would show up.  But she'll probably show up here instead.  Just saying.

Many people, especially people who are of aboriginal descent, have received a raw deal in the past, but I think we make a huge mistake when focus on that victimization instead of emphasizing that we are all moral free agents and that we all have the power to choose how we respond to our situation.

So yes the government can help. The government can help by not suggesting or hinting, even for a second, that because you are a person of aboriginal heritage, or come from a tough background that you cannot fully participate in all that a free society has to offer. Millions of immigrants to this country who come to us from some of the worst hell holes on earth have decided that their past is past and they have moved on. Secondly the government should be a resource to those who make the choice to not be defined by their circumstances, and not an enabler to those who do.

"A Stern and Silent Pride..."

Elgar's tune and A.C. Benson's words are being sung again with pride by the people of Britain.  One of my pet theories, which isn't entirely mine, is that the twentieth century was a terrible detour in the course of human history.  In the long upward rise (Yes, yes, Whig history, I know.  I'm a Whig, sue me.) of western civilization from the late middle ages onward the year 1914 marks the year of derailment.  It wasn't just Liberal England that died a strange death but much of the best of western civ.  Spare me the preaching about the suffering of the innumerable oppressed groups of the time, both real and imagined. 

History is mostly blood and oppression, fin de siecle society at the very least was striving against those evils, indeed defining them as well, rather than passively accepting them.  What Edwardian Britain projected to the world was a sense of optimism about human nature and about the institutions western man had constructed to improve human life.  1914 shook that confidence and replaced it with the nil that is much of modern culture.  Visual art marked this change more eloquently than any other field.  From the rich splendor of academic painters like William Bouguereau to the glorified nonsense of Jackson Pollock & Co. 

This was mirrored in the politics and ideas of the time and since.  It was a process that was something more than a questioning of the systems that lead to the holocaust of 1914-1918; it was the near complete dismissal of what had come before.  It was not asked where we went wrong it was merely asserted that we were wrong.  After 9/11 the need for that old sense of confidence is being more widely understood.  The fact that several of the 7/7 terrorists (oops, if I was working for the CBC I'd be in trouble just now) were British born is making clear to many that assimilation in the values of a free society is not an imposition but a necessity.  Be proud to be British, there is so very much to be proud about.  And now in full chorus:

Dear Land of Hope, thy hope is crowned.
God make thee mightier yet!
On Sov'ran brows, beloved, renowned,
Once more thy crown is set.
Thine equal laws, by Freedom gained,
Have ruled thee well and long;
By Freedom gained, by Truth maintained,
Thine Empire shall be strong.

Land of Hope and Glory,
Mother of the Free,
How shall we extol thee,
Who are born of thee?
Wider still and wider
Shall thy bounds be set;
|: God, who made thee mighty,
   Make thee mightier yet. :|

Thy fame is ancient as the days,
As Ocean large and wide:
A pride that dares, and heeds not praise,
A stern and silent pride:
Not that false joy that dreams content
With what our sires have won;
The blood a hero sire hath spent
Still nerves a hero son.

Women and Coffee

Too much of both, particularly at the same time, can hurt like hell.  But does prolonged exposure to both make you less of a man?  Enlightenment Britain asked that very question.  This week's TLS explores their answers. 

For Lovelace, the female of the species is a biologically inferior version of the male: a “softer Man”, as Pope contemptuously terms her, or a body grotesquely buttressed between corsets, cosmetics and frippery, as imagined by Swift. As such, women incline towards “corruption, weakness, cowardice, luxury, immorality and the unbridled play of passions”. But there was an antithetical heresy that taught that sexuality was, in fact, bipolar; women, a separate sex, embodied separate virtues: “sociability, civility, compassion, domesticity and love of family, the dynamic exercise of the passions and, above all, refinement, the mark of modernity”. To a nation determined to be modern, these qualities would prove as vital as business acumen and a stomach for the high seas.

Richardson himself does not distance Clarissa from the bustle of the real world. Indeed, she is almost saved by Mrs Townshend, “a great dealer in Indian silks, Brussels and French laces, cambrics, linen, and other valuable goods”, and takes her last refuge, in her dying days, with the family of John Smith, a glovemaker in Covent Garden. Nor does Richardson associate commerce with villainy. He could have conventionally reduced Lovelace to the easy stereotype of an unthinking spendthrift. But Lovelace’s affairs turn out to be well ordered, and he has “spared nothing for solid and lasting improvements upon his estate”. No Restoration or Hogarth rake, his dissoluteness runs to sex but not money.

Richardson breaks the connection between misogyny and materialism.