Some people just can’t see the good in anything.

Marketing a product at children when there is increasing evidence that it may be causing them both short-term and long-term harm is at the very least highly irresponsible.

So says Alasdair Philips of consumer group Powerwatch. (By the way Alasdair, you idiot, they’re not marketing the phone at children, they’re marketing it at parents. How many 4-year-olds do you know who can walk into The Link, sign a two year contract and hand over their credit card?) Say what you will about hard-nosed businessmen, at least they occasionally make sense. As Teddyfone Ltd. managing director Paul Liesching says:

This is a basic parental decision. If you see the utility and benefits of your child having a mobile phone are greater than any potential risks, give your child a mobile phone. If you don’t, then don’t.

Groups like Powerwatch would be harmless enough if they didn’t, as they say on their own site, “work closely with decision-makers in government”. No doubt they’ll be attempting to use their influence to relieve parents of the need to make one more basic decision.

Posted by Rob Fisher as News at 1:16 AM EST

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Mark Steyn has a very wide-ranging rant in today’s Telegraph. After having a go at the Olympics which are going to cost a gazillion times as much as Tessa Jowell said they would (but by the way don’t worry because, “The city’s mayor, Ken Livingstone, assured Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that any overruns would be met by Londoners” — thanks Ken!), he turns to that expensive white elephant, the Kyoto treaty.

Well, by the end of 2003, Canada’s greenhouse-gas emissions were up 24.2 per cent.

Meanwhile, how are things looking in the United States? As you’ll recall, in a typically “pig-headed and blinkered” (Independent) act that could lead to the entire planet becoming “uninhabitable” (Michael Meacher), “Polluter Bush” (Daily Express), “this ignorant, short-sighted and blinkered politician” (Friends of the Earth), rejected the Kyoto treaty. Yet somehow the “Toxic Texan” (everybody) has managed to outperform Canada on almost every measure of eco-virtue.

How did that happen?

Actually, it’s not difficult. Signing Kyoto is nothing to do with reducing “global warming” so much as advertising one’s transnational moral virtue. America could reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by 87 per cent and Canada could increase them by 673 per cent and the latter would still be a “good citizen of the world” (in the Prime Minister’s phrase) while “Polluter Bush” would still be in the dog house, albeit a solar-powered one.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Enviro-Mentalism at 1:03 AM EST

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ThePresentOccupier sent me a link to a story in the Times about the DVLA’s respect for the data protection act.

The DVLA…

…has been forced to hand over its list of the 157 companies registered to buy personal information about drivers — the list includes bailiffs, debt collection agencies and financial services companies. DVLA bleats that it is obliged — under an undebated Statutory Instrument of 2002 — to sell the information to anyone with “reasonable cause”. Well, almost anyone can claim that a car might park in their space. Thus a credit company, which bombards us all with mailshots offering loans, is on the list because it’s got a company car park. Nor does DVLA check that it is not selling the list to people with criminal records: it deals with Aquarius Security — clampers whose management were found guilty of blackmail at Bristol Crown Court and given prison sentences. One of them was already on an ASBO after being accused of driving his truck into a 60-year-old man, breaking his knee. They clamped one young woman’s car in the middle of a three-point turn. But the DVLA saw nothing wrong in selling that company addresses for £2.50 each so that they could find other citizens to harass.

And here’s the nub:

But what is less amusing is that this piece of roughshod arrogance, done in the interests of tackling only the moderate nuisance of bad parking, throws a lurid light on what could happen to our privacy if we get ID cards to boost the “war on terror”.

As TPO pointed out, it’s not a matter of could, but will.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Privacy at 12:51 AM EST

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There are many things I don’t like about the Guardian, but one thing in their favour is that they understand the Internet and they get blogs: They’ve run blogging awards and have many articles on the subject.

Oliver Burkeman has written a decent article in the Guardian about blogs that I found via Brian Micklethwait, featuring none other than the proprietors of Samizdata.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Links at 3:13 PM EST

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I’m coming round to the opinion that Wife Swap (mentioned here before) is actually very good television. Having just watched an episode on ABC, I can say that the Americans have executed it with finesse.

In this episode a sun-gazing, raw-food eating, vegan PETA campaigner from Arizona swaps homes with a wife from Arizona whose family hunts and eats game. In one classic scene the husband of the hunting family comes home to find that the vegan hasn’t cooked any dinner because she “forgot” to take the meat out of the freezer. He grabs his rifle, goes outside and shoots a rabbit, which he then butchers and presents for cooking.

To her credit, the vegan doesn’t make a fuss and is not judgemental about their hunting lifestyle. She just bursts into tears every time she thinks about the poor little animals happily running around with their friends and family when they are cruelly shot.

The hunter gets it right when he points out that the vegan is taking the weight of the world on her shoulders. She has a kind of substitute catholic guilt complex and is always stressed and upset, despite all the yoga and sun-gazing. She agrees with him, saying that there needs to be a balance, and it can’t be good for people or animals who think about things too much.

Much is made of attempts by the hunter’s wife to get the veggie family to eat meat. Despite the fact that the daughter has been a vegetarian since she was three and therefore probably didn’t have much real choice in the matter, it’s clear that she is now a committed vegetarian and these efforts were doomed to failure.

Both sides of the hunting family were cajoled into going handing out leaflets for PETA, with similar success. Perhaps someone should point out to the vegans that PETA kills animals…

Ultimately, though, both families learnt something from each other. The vegan dad is now spending more time with his daughter, and the hunting family… well I’m not sure they really did learn anything. They should have picked up some parenting tips (letting your hyperactive ten-year-old son eat a pound of sugar at breakfast is a bad idea) but it’s not clear that they made any changes. The vegans, meanwhile, are now eating cooked food and talking to each other more.

It wasn’t quite the bloodbath I was hoping for, but it was interesting to see how well people with such different lifestyles and opinions can get along.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Reviews at 7:43 AM EST

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Oooh, so Mother Nature needs a favor?! Well maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys! Nature started the fight for survival, and now she wants to quit because she’s losing. Well I say, hard cheese.

– Mr. Burns. As spotted on the sidebar of The Cosmic Pilgrim.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Enviro-Mentalism at 9:53 AM EST

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I’ve had a series of somewhat exasperating discussions recently with various people about the UK’s proposed ban on smoking in pubs and restaurants.

There seem to be two things people are confused about. The first is the delusion that pubs in particular, or businesses in general are somehow public spaces. Because the public are allowed in the pub, the logic goes, that makes it okay for the government to use force to control what goes on in there. It’s not true: despite the name a pub is private property. The public may be allowed in, but they’re there by invitation at the discretion of the owner. The government has no more right telling people they can’t smoke there than it has guests at a house party.

The second thing people are confused about is what the law is for. It’s not a set of arbitrary rules designed to ensure your personal comfort. If you don’t like it that pubs are smoky, don’t go in pubs. If the market has failed to provide non-smoking pubs it’s only because people are loathe to solve problems themselves, preferring instead to whinge and moan about them to an obliging government. Remember that the law is only the law because of the threat of violence against those who would disobey it. (Or as Eric Raymond puts it, “the threat of lethal force is what makes politics and law more than a game out of which anyone could opt at any time.”) If you support a smoking ban because you prefer your pubs smoke-free, you are using force to threaten people into providing for your preference. Ask yourself: if you entered a room and found a group of consenting adults smoking, would you happily throw them in jail?

A discussion about the private-ness of pubs is to be found in response to an article on Samizdata about another bit of government meddling into what goes on between consenting adults on their private property. Robert Speirs hits the nail on the head:

And why, just because a premises is open to the public, does the owner therefore lose all right to control who enters? He still owns it, his money is still at risk, he still pays taxes. Why are his preferences and his judgment of no value whatever? Under what collectivist theory is this valid or good?

Posted by Rob Fisher as Civil Liberties at 9:25 AM EST

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