Category Archives: Society

Slutwalking is stupid

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Now I realise I’m courting extreme feminist abuse by this post, but so be it.

Australian popular culture always seems to follow North American examples no matter how silly e.g. “gangsta rap”.  So I suppose it was inevitable that the phenomenon of the “slutwalk” would rapidly be emulated here, mostly by young women with little or no feminist consciousness for more substantive issues like equal pay.

Apparently the “slutwalk” movement arose after a Toronto police officer dared to suggest that dressing in a “sluttish” manner on the streets, especially late at night, might not be a really great idea.  Many young women reacted with outrage and began street demos where they dressed in “slutty” outfits.  I guess it has some kinship with the “Reclaim the Night” demos that have become an annual event in Australia, or the public reaction to Muslim cleric Sheikh Hilaly’s remarks about scantily dressed women as “uncovered meat” (who, implicitly, were courting rape).

However, I can’t help questioning the commonsense rationality of “slutwalking”.  Certainly the proposition that the primary responsibility for curbing aggressive responses to women who may be dressed in a highly sexualised way rests with the blokes exhibiting those aggressive responses is undeniably true.

Conversely, however, does it make sense to deliberately and unnecessarily behave in a way that a predictable proportion of aggressive, testosterone-driven males with poor impulse control will treat as an open invitation for a root?  How does “slutwalking” differ in substance from the hypothetical example of a middle class person of either gender parading around the streets of a notoriously poor and violent inner city suburb displaying their iPod, iPhone, iPad and a wallet obviously stuffed with money?  For a police officer to suggest that this might be unwise behaviour isn’t in any sense condoning the actions of the thieves who will almost certainly proceed to commit an opportunistic mugging.  It’s just commonsense advice.  “Slutwalking” isn’t a courageous political act, it’s just mindless, imitative, populist stupidity.

Nuclear madness in Idaho

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When the SL-1 nuclear reactor exploded in Idaho releasing a radioactive plume and killing three workers, a local paper reported the accident on page 12. That was 1961. Today some residents of Idaho are so worried about the nuclear accident 8000 kilometers away that they’re buying potassium iodide pills.

According to a history by Susan Stacey: "Editorial comment in Idaho and other newspapers categorized the SL-1 accident as a regrettable mishap, an inevitable occurrence if society were to accrue the benefits of a new technology." Today experts argue about whether the thick concrete containment around Fukushima Daiichi’s reactor vessel is safe enough and residents of inland American states worry about nuclear radiation from the accident. But the low-powered SL-1 boiling water reactor in Idaho had no containment. It was designed to be light weight — a prototype for reactors that could be shipped to the Arctic Circle to power remote military radar stations (pdf).

During the 1950s the US military looked to nuclear power as a practical way to solve problems. One problem was how to extend the range of its bombers. It sounds outrageous today, but the air force had plans to power aircraft using nuclear reactors. As a General Electric engineer, told Congress, a nuclear powered aircraft would be "limited in range only by sandwiches and coffee for the crew".

General Electric was one of a number of contractors engaged on the military’s aircraft nuclear propulsion program. At the National Reactor Testing Station (NRTS) in Idaho, GE’s engineers tested a nuclear power plant that sucked air directly into the reactor with the exhaust streaming out of a pair of specially modified jet engines. To test this ‘direct cycle’ engine, GE needed an outdoor test pad. According to Stacey:

Contaminated air could not be allowed to blow out the nozzle indoors—or near work areas. Rather, the reactor-cum-engine traveled back and forth between an assembly area and the test pad, a distance of a mile and a half. A man driving a shielded locomotive hauled a dolly carrying the eighty-ton assembly on four-rail tracks. At the test pad, the engine connected to a "coupling station"where the exhaust was filtered, went up a 150-foot stack, and was released to the open air (pdf).

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Crime and punishment – umpteenth chapter

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Recent NT News discussion on the perennial topic of crime and punishment seems to have generated more heat than light.  Chief Justice Trevor Riley wrote an excellent piece pointing out basic facts about the NT criminal justice system, not least the fact that NT judges and magistrates are actually tougher on crime than any other part of Australia.  However, that hasn’t stopped a succession of subsequent correspondents from asserting that judges are “out of touch” and adopting an excessively lenient approach.

Former Chief Minister Shane Stone even weighed into the debate with a piece advocating re-adoption of an expanded mandatory sentencing regime, ignoring the fact that crime in relevant categories actually increased while the last version of mandatory sentencing was in force and fell when it was repealed.

Territorians are justified in being worried about crime.  Crime rates are twice as high here as the Australian average in most categories; in some they are significantly higher.  Moreover, things are getting worse in some categories.  Crime rates for homicides, house break-ins and sexual assaults have not changed over the last 6 years, but non-sexual assaults have increased by a disturbing 73% from already high rates, armed robberies by 58% and commercial break-ins and vehicle thefts by 71%.

There are limits to the extent any NT government can reduce crime rates, because we have a very young population with a high indigenous component and high levels of alcohol consumption.  All are factors associated with higher crime rates.  However that doesn’t deny that we can do better than at present.

Research and practical experience indicate that crime is not deterred by longer and longer prison sentences, but that increasing the certainty of being caught and meaningfully punished has a measurable crime-reducing effect.  On the other hand, imprisoning young first offenders for short periods tends to increase crime rates.  Most first offenders never commit another crime, but for some the “school for crime” effect of prison may outweigh any deterrent effect.  That’s why judges view imprisonment as a last resort for young first offenders, even where the offence committed may seem one that warrants imprisonment.  It depends whether you view crime reduction or “just deserts” as the main aim of sentencing.

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Why unemployment benefits need to be increased

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One of the more surprising newspaper stories of recent times was Peter Martin’s article of November 15 on OECD takes aim at Labor policies which quoted the OECD Economic Survey of Australia as saying that Australia’s unemployment benefits are too low. Along with a number of other people I couldn’t recall the OECD ever previously saying that any country’s unemployment benefits were too low – and I worked there for eight years. Continue reading →

Tuesday plagiarism bashing

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Under the wonderful post title “Copyright Infringement And A Medieval Apple Pie”, the blogger Jane Smith (not her real name, one would guess) has documented the history of an online copyright infringement. Hardly unusual, you would think, indeed the internet is supposed to be not only rife with plagiarism, but host to vociferous defenders of the practice.

However the person committing the infraction, one Judith Griggs, has been subjected to the modern equivalent of the mediaeval punishment of being thrown into stocks and pummelled with garbage in the town square. In this case it was a viral and vicious Facebook and Twitter campaign accompanied by calls for a “Googlebombing”, which Wikipedia defines as “practices intended to influence the ranking of particular pages in results returned by the Google search engine”.

Judith Griggs did seem somewhat unbelievably naïve and self serving in her attitude, pretty irritating one might say, but not perhaps entirely deserving of the massive backlash against her. Fortunately for the offending author, after venting their collective spleens, bloggers, commenters, twitterers and the like eased up, and the general discourse turned into something humorous.

What I found interesting however was that the whole campaign was not only the opposite of the open source community stereotype of borrowings, mashups and samplings, but despite frequent invocations of the law of copyright by the hunting pack, there seems to have been only one person who actually threatened legal action. All the rest was entirely the old fashioned coercion of social opprobrium and shame, which writers like Thomas Scheff,* (who is an intellectual descendant of Norbert Elias) find so fundamental to social control.
*Scheff, Thomas J. 2000. Shame and the Social Bond: A Sociological Theory. Sociological Theory 18, no. 1 (March): 84 – 99. doi:10.1111/0735-2751.00089.

X marks the trust spot

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Here is a story about the internet working the way tech utopians think it should. Technology is as good or as bad as the social conditions of which it is a part, but this is one of the good stories. It can be read either as a perfect example of self interest working well in the aggregate, or less cynically as a kind of altruism when there may not be a payoff.

Some years ago I subscribed to a Firefox addon called Xmarks (which used to be Foxmarks). This program syncs bookmarks not just to the cloud but to other computers, cross platform. Kind of useful, but for me it soon dropped into the background like teapots or car keys; used frequently but not very front of consciousness.
I was surprised therefore to get an email from the company a couple of months ago. Sorrowfully, it informed me that the service would be discontinued as from January next year. Could I move to one of a number of competitor alternatives as they were shutting down the whole service?   Continue reading →

Islam debate at UWS

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This is a belated report on a debate on Islam versus Atheism at my campus. It was part of Islamic Awareness Week, orgainsed by the Muslim Students’ Association.

The official question for debate was ‘Should God have a place in the 21st Century?’, and the format was pretty standard for this kind of thing: two speakers on each side, a fifteen minute opening speech, rebuttals, cross-examination, and a Q&A session to round off. The arguments were pretty standard, too, for anyone who has seen a few of these debates (there are scores on YouTube). For some fairly partisan accounts, see here and here.

Wassim Doureihi spoke first for the affirmative and got the evening off to a bad-tempered start by announcing that he had very low expectations of his opponents. This was ironic as he was easily the weakest of the four, with little to offer except the observation that without God there would be no objective morality — more wishful thinking than an argument — and some unsubstantiated hyperbole about ‘atheism’s two embarrassing children — totalitarianism and liberalism’. Continue reading →

Burn after reading

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Alex Stewart has had his 15 minutes of fame, but may live to regret it. Earlier this week he posted a video on Youtube. It showed him smoking lawn-clipping cigarettes that were fashioned out of pages torn from the Bible and the Koran. He compared the taste “scientifically” and was statistically astute enough to regret not having smoked a page of Bertrand Russell’s complete works as a control.

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