Tim's Bits and Pieces

... apparently they favour the Coalition. Really? So how did you come to this conclusion? "The researchers measured bias by counting the number of mentions of left-leaning or right-leaning intellectuals." Like that's a valid measure; basically what they are saying is that the media was slightly more likely to write articles about the party that's actually in power. They also apparently rated the "slant" of various headlines, but that's too subjective to be valid. (Basically all it says is that the researchers where slightly more left-wing than the media as a whole) There was third a final measure they used which was the level of political donations, this is actually a valid measure, though it doesn't measure the slant of the articles in the newspapers, it just indicates that they support that party. The Coalition was in power at the time so it may have been an effort to buy the current government, I would like to see how this changes now that Labour is in power.

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I was at a for-profit campsite called Sharp Park - River Bend campsite yesterday, and I noticed something: the facilities where cleaner and better maintained than those in state-run, National Park campsites, but they still charged considerably less than most National Parks. Perhaps state-run isn't all it's cracked up to be?

Marko Kloos is so very good at expressing why gun control sucks, so rather than explain it myself I'll just link to him.

Their saying it as she got of murder, but really she's going to jail in China for defending herself against an attempted rape. Now I know almost nothing about the Chinese justice system except that it seems to be pretty harsh (execution for tax evasion for instance), but I suspect Ms. Deng will never leave jail alive. Also the Chinese have no qualms about using prisoners as slave labour, so you can thank Ms. Deng for the donation of her labour to the worthy cause of keeping the price down on your next pair of Nike shoes.

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The Chief Commissioner of the Victorian police force is suggesting criminal charges for cops who use offensive nicknames for their internal investigators (the Ethical Standards Department). I posted a comment on the article, but they never published it, which I've included below.

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Wonderful, looks like the Labour government wants to reintroduce compulsory student Union payments for university students. Back to forcing people to pay for services they don't want or need. The student union never did anything useful for me; the only time I was ever in a situation where I might have needed a union, I was forced to join a special "club" as part of being a student, the student union was the actual problem. Sure they called it a union, but it was basically just a special club I was required to join, even if I never used any of their facilities. Isn't the whole point of unions preventing such things? To my mind mandatory union membership is a violation of the very purpose of unions.

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Since I haven't posted for a while, I thought I'd share a couple of interesting posts from other blogs that are well worth a read:

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The Mises Institute presents and article on Underwriters Laboratories which is well worth a read, particularly if you're the kind that believes that without the Government there would be nothing stopping companies from simply producing unsafe products as a cost cutting measure. While the article in question is certainly biased, it is still worth giving the issue some consideration rather than simply assuming that there would be no protections in place without the Government. Also while such an organization would be prone to bribery and corruption, only the most naive believe that the Government is not prone to such things already.

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I've been thinking about censorship some more since I wrote my last post on the subject of "Censorship and Child Pornography". I was also to some extent inspired by an article by Albert Mohler on Pornography, where he quotes Roger Scruton, a British Philosopher, as saying that "[t]he idea that pornography is 'speech', ...and thereby protected by the [American] Constitution, is ...absurd...". Yet, we all naturally seem to refer to it as if it is. The purpose of the US' Constitution's first amendment was not to protect people's "right" to pictures of naked chicks, but rather to protect their right to communicate ideas the government disapproved of. It's purpose is the free flow of ideas, not of pornography, nor of "art" for that matter.

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The British government has banned a beer ad for, wait for it... "suggesting that the beer could increase confidence". Beer could increase confidence? What a silly idea; I mean it's not like five minutes of searching showed several pages that listed increased self-confidence as one of the possible effects of moderate alcohol consumption. Wait yeah it is, see the Drug and Alcohol Services South Australia and Wikipedia for example.

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