CNN International was running a story today about Italy setting up a court with explicit jurisdiction over sellers of fake designer products. The idea is that because companies like Gucci and Armarni are losing billions of euros a year to sales of fakes, Something Should Be Done(tm). Something, in this case, is jailing and confiscating the property of street traders. The following obvious facts seem to have escaped everybody:

• People buying fakes know what they are doing - consumers are not victims.
• A sale of a fake Gucci bag is not a lost sale for Gucci - the people buying fakes would not otherwise be spending thousands of euros on a genuine bag. The big designer houses are not victims.
• People scraping a living by selling their wares on the streets aren’t doing anything wrong. They are not deceiving anybody. They are selling material goods that have intrinsic value. Just because they look like more expensive versions of the same thing does not make them the same thing - there is no theft involved. And yet these people are being victimised.

A classic example of big business trampling over the rights of the little man.

Posted by Rob Fisher as News at 1:05 PM EDT

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The title of the show I ranted about previously turns out to be 7th Heaven. The episode I saw was season 4 episode 16. The sheer number of websites devoted to this show reveals that far too many people take this trash seriously. I was surprised to find the show is so recent - I had assumed it was from Little House on the Prairie era. As an antidote, I found a much better article about why prayer can be a dangerous concept.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Imaginary Friends at 10:00 AM EDT

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I caught a really awful TV show on TV2 in Norway this afternoon. It was an American show, but the title had been translated to Den Syvende Himmel. The [something] Heaven. I will have to get one of my Norwegian colleagues to finish the translation for me on Monday!

The main character was a preacher. He had received a letter from a boy who said that his dad beat him up regularly, and would the preacher mind praying for him? So the preacher spends most of the show trying to find the boy. It became obvious fairly early on that this was one of those shows that exists purely to teach its viewers lessons in morality. The theme of the episode seemed to be prayer, and most of the characters were praying for something or other. The little girl prayed for a pony, and was most upset when one didn’t arrive.

In the end the preacher finds the boy, and the boy says (I’m paraphrasing from memory), “I didn’t ask you to come. If my dad finds out you came he’ll beat me up. And by the way, the reason I didn’t sign my name on the letter was because I’m not selfish. I sent the letter to churches all over the world. I figured that if they didn’t know who they were praying for, the prayers would help all kids in my situation.”

Shockingly, the preacher just leaves! In the next scene, the last scene of the show, the scene that’s supposed to convey the moral of the story, the preacher is giving his Sunday sermon. He says, of all the children who are suffering from violence, “The least we owe them might be the most powerful thing we can give them: Our prayers.”

For a show that seems to be aiming to teach good Christian values, and is probably watched by good God-fearing people everywhere, what kind of morality is this? The message seems dangerous: Don’t worry, just pray, and everything will be all right, as long as it is God’s will. Never mind about actually doing anything for these kids. All you have to do is pray.

This got me to thinking, and all I am left with is questions. What is praying all about anyway? Do people really believe that God listens to prayers? Do they really believe he answers them? What kind of cruel god would ignore a child’s plight, even though he has the power to do something to help, just because no-one prayed for that particular child?

Adrian Barnett has an interesting article about prayer from an atheist’s viewpoint. He seems just as bemused as I am about it. I thought I would look at the viewpoints of religious people. An article at explorefaith.org answers Christians who are wondering, “What if I don’t know how to pray?” Another site puts prayers into four categories.

It seems to me that if someone believes in a personal god, and talking to him makes them feel better, then that’s fair enough. But grovelling for forgiveness from a super-being can’t be good for one’s sense of self-esteem, and expecting God to solve problems in the real world sounds like a good way to make sure those problems don’t get solved. Making a TV show that encourages people to feel good about themselves by praying for victimised children, thereby relieving them of the need to actually do anything to help, is just wrong.

The Onion has a characteristically insightful take on prayer, in the article God Answers Prayers of Paralyzed Little Boy. “No”, Says God.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Imaginary Friends at 11:27 PM EDT

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This hilarious announcement announcement reveals that Microsoft has finally realised the superiority of Linux! The way the article uses M$-speak to turn all the disadvantages of Windows into advantages is sublime. “They want me to be a whore!” complains Linus Torvalds.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Links at 7:21 PM EDT

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Following a recent conversation over a beer with some Norwegian friends, I have compiled a small list of things foreigners find wierd about the UK:

• The two taps. I have to agree with this, to a point. Mixable tap technology has been with us for, ooh, at least thirty years. It’s about time the UK caught up. Some rather scoldingly suggest that this is because the UK is steeped in tradition, with the attitude that if “…it’s always been done this way, it had better go on being done this way.” Rather more convincing, is the argument that it’s due to a law that the hot and cold water may not be mixed inside the tap for fear of contamination from the water tank. Hmm…
• Carpets in bathrooms. I agree completely. There’s just something wrong about carpets in bathrooms.
• Pipes on the outside of houses. Yes, we have pipes that go out through the wall and down the outside of the house. What’s so wierd about that?
• Round doorknobs. This one took me by surprise. I’m keeping my eyes open for round doorknobs here in Norway, so far I haven’t seen any. Strange… It could be because round doorknobs have accessibility implications.
• Driving on the left. People seem to think that the UK is the only country that does this. Actually, about 34% of the world drives on the left. Sweden drove on the left until 1967, when they amazingly switched sides. Presumably this was because Norwegians kept crashing into them when they crossed the border.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Introspection at 1:01 PM EDT

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Any half respectable weblog has links to other weblogs that the author thinks are worthy, so I stayed up waaaay too late last night checking out what there is. The links at the top of the page are the best I found.

First up is, of course, Mr Raymond’s Armed and Dangerous - which I’ve mentioned already is what got me started on this. There’s more there than the title suggests, the quality of the writing and the thinking makes it well worth a look.

True Porn Clerk Stories is the journal of a woman far too lucid and intelligent to be a video store clerk. The fact that the video store in question rents porn movies does make for some great stories though, and the author is very insightful when it comes to analysing human behaviour with respect to porn. Not only is it hilarious - you might learn something too!

Just Add Brains is a British flavoured rant site. If you’ve ever wondered how car manufacturers decide which side to put the filler cap on, why they have special parking spaces for parents and children, or just how many people go to the toilet without washing their hands, read this one.

Finally, it would be an incomplete links list if I didn’t include the kind of weblog that started it all. Kottke.org is a traditional filter weblog, with otherwise hard to find links and commentary on their content, updated daily.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Links at 8:18 PM EDT

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I’ve been living in Oslo for the past 3 and a half months. You really start to get to know a place in that time, but there are some things that still confound me. Oslo is a pretty cosmopolitan place - in that sense it’s like most capital cities. In the day there are street performers and frequent special events. Just last weekend was the Summer Parade, an event that emulates Berlin’s Love Parade. In the evenings the city teems with life until the early morning, there seems to be no shortage of any kind of bar or restaurant. In that sense, Oslo can be a far better place to be than my home town of Southampton.

In other ways, Oslo seems like a small town in the middle of nowhere. The pace of life seems too laid back for a major city. Just today, I was waiting to cross the road as the traffic lights went green. The driver at the front of the queue failed to notice, and sat there for at least twenty seconds. None of the four or five cars behind so much as beeped their horns. In London, such behaviour would have been met with frantic beeping and attempts to squeeze past.

Opening hours continue to astonish me. The reason I had gone to central Oslo was to buy a new power supply for my PC. I arrived at the shop at ten past three. The last thing I expected was for it to be closed. The opening hours were a paltry 10am - 6pm Monday to Thursday, 9am - 3pm Saturday. It wasn’t open at all on Fridays! Such hours would be completely unheard of for all but the smallest businesses in the tiniest villages in the UK, never mind a major computer store in the centre of the capital city. And this kind of thing is not uncommon. The Photo shop where I hoped to get my film developed was closed too.

I am also constantly tripped up by the lack of credit card acceptance. That same PC shop does not accept credit cars, neither do most supermarkets, so I have to carry around large amounts of cash, and frequently have arrived at the checkout with no money, having to run to the nearest minibank.

So despite Oslo being such a modern, exciting city, I frequently feel like I’m living thirty years ago. It really is bemusing.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Introspection at 9:00 PM EDT

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My friend Mike raised some points about my views on abolishing gun control laws that I would like to address. He said, “You are describing America against the UK. I think the facts speak for themselves when you look at how many more armed robberies, deaths by shooting, accidental shootings etc, even if you adjust for the population difference.”

I don’t know what facts these are - but it’s irrelevant. America has not abolished gun control laws. In many states it is illegal to carry a gun on you, and guns kept at home must be locked in a safe. A University of Chicago study published in 1996, entitled Crime, Deterrence and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns, showed that states with liberalised concealed-carry laws had significantly lower violent crime rates.

Mike continues, “Practically if I was armed and on a plane and shot at a terrorist, even if they were not watching, I would most likely hit something or someone else as I have no experience of using a gun.” Driving cars requires training and experience, but this doesn’t mean that cars have to be illegal. In a society where people carry guns as a matter of course, I would think that they would learn how to use them. And what’s worse - a small chance of being hit by a well intentioned but stray bullet, or a 100% chance of hijackers succeeding?

The article 10 Myths About Gun Control does an excellent job of dispelling most common arguments in favour of gun control.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Self Defense at 4:21 PM EDT

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I thought I would start by linking to the site that gave me the idea to start a weblog. Eric Raymond’s blog. He is a well known open source software advocate, and libertarian. Libertarianism is a political ideal that I find myself particularly attracted to - it asks for minimum state intervention. One of the things libertarians are interested in is abolition of gun control. They believe that gun laws simply disarm the victims of crime - making them easy targets. I agree. It would require a particularly dim view of humanity to suggest that if everyone carried a gun people would go around killing each other on every whim and fancy. Rather, violent criminals being a tiny minority of society would find themselves overwhelmingly outnumbered. For an evocative example of this kind of thinking, read Eric’s essay Arm the Passengers. It makes perfect sense. I would strongly recommend reading everything else he has to say, too.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Self Defense at 9:49 AM EDT

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Welcome to my weblog! I really have no idea what this will become, but I quite often get the urge to write down what’s on my mind, and this lets me do it in a safe way without harming others! Expect some philosophy, random musings, occasional links to things I think are cool, that kind of thing. And completely random updating, just to keep you on your toes…

Posted by Rob Fisher as News at 12:16 PM EDT

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