A mere reposting, as you were.

I've got nothing really to say at this point, I just wish to link this up because it tidily explains the kind of philosophical disconnect that's been bugging me in previous posts about law and law-making.

As you were.

The Society for Cruel and Inhumane treatment of Kitten-Burners

Cases of child abuse, and particularly cases of child abuse that end in the deaths of small children are big news here in New Zealand. They stir up a huge amount of public opinion, and due to the glories of social networking this means that my Facebook news feed is occasionally dominated by my internet-friends (as opposed to actual-friends) signing up to sites and events like this one.

Now, that link will only work if you're on Facebook, so for those who aren't (or can't be bothered to click through) here's a brief rundown on where it goes: Norefjell Davis is a 36-year old woman who was sentenced earlier this month for killing her 2 year old daughter in a particularly horrible way.

The Facebook "event" I've linked to is an attempt to prevent her from being eligible for parole, and in fact an attempt to somehow get judges to give people convicted of this kind of crime mandatory life sentences. It's also full of the usual rage and hatred that random people on the internet feel entitled to dish out, including the traditional "hanging's too good for 'em" and "if I had a chance I'd rape/torture/murder/lynch that awful person" sentiments, and the classic "how dare our culture let people like this get away with their crimes" plaint.

When I see this stuff, it creeps me out on a number of levels.

Firstly, it's just not very smart. The whole point of our legal system is that it can't be swayed by random people on Facebook. Just imagine, for a second, if these people actually had the power they think they have - anyone who was publicly unpopular for some reason would be virtually guaranteed to have an unfair trial.

People can already get convictions overturned on the basis that the jury was biased against them from the start - and if judges, juries or parole boards started listening to Facebook petitions, that would happen all the time. Anyone who could afford a sharp enough lawyer (and in this case that would simply mean "not currently dead") would be basically unconvictable.

I understand that people are very angry about this woman's actions, but that's part of what worries me. See, there's a reason why Schopenhauer, in his 38 Ways To Win An Argument said:

"Make your opponent angry. An angry person is less capable of using judgement or perceiving where his or her advantage lies."

Basically, angry people - particularly angry people en masse - are stupid, and it's best not to have legislation and public policy dictated by stupid people. This is why it always annoys me when the media get in the faces of victims of crime on the court-house steps, incidentally. I think people should be given a chance to get back in their right minds before being forced to give a public opinion they'll end up feeling obliged to stick to later.

One of the things that this particular angry mob is currently ignoring is that "our culture" (whatever that means) has already given the judiciary the power to deal with people who kill children. Killing people is always against the law, and children equally if not more so. If caught and convicted, people who do these things are sentenced to jail terms. That's how a legal system works.

Judges are already entitled to pronounce whatever sentence they feel is appropriate for the crime (within certain bounds). That means they can, if they choose, punish people more harshly if they feel they have been particularly awful, or reduce the sentence (or the conviction) to a lesser one if they feel there are extenuating circumstances.

I'm also concerned about the source of this anger. It looks to me like a case of what the Slacktivist called "The Anti-Kitten-Burning Coalition". Specifically this refers to an organised and vocal response to a non-existent "Movement of Evildoers".

See, I'm pretty certain that no-one, including Norefjell Davis, thinks that what she did to her daughter was admirable or that the world needs more of that sort of behaviour. I'm also reasonably sure that she doesn't belong to a group who meet up on Saturdays to swap child-abusing stories, and compare notes on the best ways to murder toddlers. I'd even go so far as to speculate that while she was in the process of bashing her daughter, she wasn't thinking about the effect her actions would have on public perceptions of her and people who commit similar crimes or the length of the prison sentence she'd be likely to face if she got caught.

There is a mythical creature referred to in the field of economics which is known as the Rational Consumer. A Rational Consumer is someone who does all of their spending entirely rationally with the goal of "maximising utility" (for non-economists, the closest idiomatic approximation is "getting the most bang for your buck"). Now, while I won't deny that doing some cost-benefit analysis in the supermarket is a good idea, I think that if we're totally honest most of us will admit that that's not how we work 100% of the time. We make choices for non-rational reasons enough of the time that there is advertising specifically designed to appeal to us on that basis.

My point is that all of the people clamouring on the Facebook event that if Norefjell Davis "didn't want children she should have kept her legs shut", or screaming for harsher sentences to deter other potential child abusers, are assuming that people who commit crimes perform an entirely rational cost-benefit analysis before they do so. This is nonsense, particularly in the case of people who commit violent crimes.

Moreover, if we look more deeply at the specific factors surrounding Davis's crime, we see something far darker and nastier than a simple case of an evil woman who needs to be punished. We see someone who was in an abusive relationship with a man many years her senior (if you're thinking "Well, why didn't she just leave him then?" go here, and then come back wiser.) We also see that both of them had abused both alcohol and methamphetamine (aka "those ANGRY drugs") for an extended period.

So, are we looking at a Rational Criminal who decided "Well, I want to bash my daughter to death, and the jail term won't be too bad - what the hell, let's do it!" or are we looking at an angry, stressed, mentally unbalanced person with a severe emotional detachment from her child and her situation in general? Because if we factor in a total lack of normal emotional attachment to her child, and severe emotional control issues, launching an assault of that kind looks less and less like a rational conscious action, and more and more like the reflex of a wounded animal biting who or whatever comes within reach.

Once we look at the situation from that perspective it becomes a simple either-or. Either someone had to to intervene in that family in some way, or either Davis or her partner were eventually going to attack that child for some reason. And since killing a child is trivially easy for an adult, even by accident, the outcome of that was always going to be horrible.

Let me make something abundantly clear. I think that what Norefjell Davis did to her daughter is terrible. I think it's tragic that a young child died in such a horrible way, and was betrayed by someone in such a trusted position. She shouldn't be excused responsibility for that, and importantly,  I don't think she has been.

However, I also believe that the Society for the Cruel and Inhumane Treatment of Kitten-Burners are after something different from justice. They  want revenge for the assault against their principles, and above all they want their righteous anger to remain intact.

Why do they need the anger? Because it's that righteous fury that protects them from the realisation that, in almost all cases, violent child abusers are made, not born. And if that's the case, then the appropriate response is not "How dare she?!" but rather "There but for the grace of God, go you or I."

The Colour of Markets

In the high and far off times when the world was new and all, before Monteiths went to the Dark Side, my friends and I purchased a 6-pack of their beers (the Summer Ale, if I remember correctly) to consume on our back porch. On getting home and opening the first beer, we noticed a strange "chemical-y" taste.

Naturally enough, we rang the supermarket where we'd just bought the aforementioned beers and told them what had happened. Commendably, they invited us to return the beers and take away some others in place of the tainted batch, which we did. All in all, it was a fairly satisfying transaction.

This is the same basic event as that which befell users of the "legal high" Kronic Pineapple Express recently, but with two important differences:

1. Because we were drinking the beer, we noticed the odd taste immediately, and ingested so little of the contaminant (whatever it was) that it had no noticeable effect on us. Kronic smokers would, on average, have had a just-lower-than-therapeutic dose of the contaminant (in this case the sedative phenazepam) before they even felt the effects.
2. Because we were indulging in a white-market drug, we knew pretty much what was in it (the makers, after all, had put the ingredients on the packaging) and what we could expect from various levels of dosage. In the case of Kronic, there is information about the ingredients and expected effects, but it's not available from the manufacturers - you need to have internet access and know where to look.

People were doing the equivalent of drinking meths while expecting beer, but without the twin protections of a) being able to taste that it was meths instead of beer and b) knowing what beer was in the first place without having to look it up.

This is the advantage of indulging in a white-market drug, where the manufacturers feel no particular need to obfuscate regarding their ingredients and methods (you can go on guided tours of breweries and distilleries if you want to - try asking Matt Bowden if you can tour his factory and see what happens!) and there are widely understood qualities that the finished product is supposed to have.

The factors that led to the Kronic debacle have their roots in our current Misuse of Drugs Act (which labels specific substances as being illegal, therefore marking all others as legal by implication). Specifically, I think the secrecy regarding the ingredients of legal highs flows directly from the historical situation where the government have banned substances like GHB, BZP, the 2Cs etc., and the grey market have had to go out and find alternatives. By not mentioning the active ingredients up front, I suspect the manufacturers are hoping they can spin their window of tenuous legality out that little bit longer. Often, these novel substances are marketed as a safer alternative to illegal drugs (for example BZP being touted as "safer, legal ecstasy/speed") but in the case of Kronic and its sister products it's abundantly clear that the only selling point over actual cannabis was their legality.

This is why I tentatively support the current proposed law change that would put the onus on importers and producers of novel psychoactives to prove their safety and chemical composition before they can be marketed and sold in New Zealand. However, in order for the new law to function, it needs to be possible for someone to demonstrate that the new recreational drug they wish to manufacture is safe. If all novel recreational drugs are going to be viewed as inherently unsafe, then all novel drugs will go straight to the black market - which, as any junkie will tell you, is far worse than the grey market when it comes to product safety and quality control.

And once again, I think we will be back to the question I raised in my last post - namely "on what basis do we decide that these drugs should be legal, and these other ones should not?"

The philosophy of the War on Drugs

On Friday 6th May, the New Zealand current affairs show Close Up ran this report about the "legal high" known as Kronic. As the Law Commission's report on reviewing drug law in New Zealand came out a mere three days before, it seems like an appropriate time to write a post on this whole thing.

Now, I don't want to get too caught up criticising Close Up's coverage (though I do have some problems with that article - for one thing, why focus only on Kronic? It's hardly the only such substance, or even the most common - did the manufacturers perchance pay for a little advertising work the same way KFC did more recently?) or on the debate over whether cannabis should be decriminalised - a point also raised in the Law Commission's report. I'm much more interested in what the sale of legal highs seems to point out about drug policy in New Zealand and overseas.

Kronic and its sister products are all synthetic cannabinoids - that's the active ingredient in most smokable legal highs nowadays. The fact that cannabis is illegal, while a compound which does more or less the same thing to your brain is currently for sale with nothing but a voluntary age limit (the packets say "R18", but retailers may or may not enforce this) points out to my mind that there's something fundamentally wrong with official thinking about drugs and drug law at the moment.

One of the recommendations of the Law Commission's report (linked above) is that the sale of legal highs is halted, and all new compounds becoming available start out as illegal by default until they have been reviewed and tested by a central authority of some sort to ascertain what their effects are and what dangers are associated with their use. As much as I usually don't support the banning of things (on general principle - not just in the case of drugs) I think that this represents some of the first clear and logical thought on this topic in a long time.

Up until this point, governments have simply banned particular substances, and the manufacturers of legal highs have been able to bypass these rulings by manufacturing close analogues of banned substances - essentially playing the "I'm not touching you!" game familiar to schoolchildren everywhere. This is what happened with the 2C family of chemicals (2CA, 2CB, 2CI, 2CE and so on) with Fantasy (aka GHB) and with BZP and the other piperazines. Sure, these chemicals are eventually banned in their own right, but the people who make this stuff undoubtedly factor this into their plans.

The banning of BZP didn't halt the sale of "party pills" - it just means that the ones you see now contain mephedrone, caffeine and other currently legal stimulants. If cannabinoid smokables are banned, I would be willing to bet that there will be an alternative in the pipeline. And the chemistry to make this stuff is not simple - unlike the chemistry involved in making many illegal drugs. It would take a significant R&D budget, and pretty solid manufacturing costs to stay in the game, but the companies who make legal highs have more than proven they're willing to make that spend.

The good thing about the Law Commission's suggestion, from a law-enforcement point of view is that it gets out of this arms race, by simply claiming that all novel drugs are illegal until declared otherwise, whether they're cancer cures or legal equivalents to LSD. The good thing about it from a philosophical point of view, is that it's the first step to a coherent formulation of a coherent societal stance on drugs in general, and I think this is long long overdue.

By "a coherent societal stance on drugs," I mean an accepted philosophical position on the place of chemically altered states of consciousness and consciousness-altering chemicals in our society. What I'm interested in here is not which drugs are legal and which aren't, but the basis on which we make that decision. I think that basis needs to be explicit, so that people can discuss it without falling into the trap of pushing their own personal favourite high, or attacking their favourite social bugbear.

As I see it, there are 3 positions we could logically adopt:

1. "Getting high" is a socially undesirable and/or morally incorrect behaviour. We do not wish members of our society to do this, and we therefore ban all drugs which have purely recreational use, and regulate medical drugs and industrial substances which have recreational abuse potential (e.g. morphine, arguably cannabis) so that they don't fall into the wrong hands.
2. Some drugs provoke dangerous and/or anti-social behaviour, and some have dangerous side effects. We will regulate drugs in the same way that we regulate driving speed on our roads - with a view to prevent people causing harm to themselves or others.
3. People's psychology is their own to mess with/mess up as they choose. Some drugs provoke dangerous and/or anti-social behaviour, and some have dangerous side effects but people who are affected in this way can be dealt with by appropriate agencies as and when these problems occur - i.e. people who commit crimes are dealt with by the Police, people with mental health issues by the mental health system, people with physical problems get medical treatment and so on.

Each of these is, I think, logically valid (if not necessarily fully sound) and serves to point out a flaw in the current system - namely that that system is not philosophically valid:

1. While I think that this view may be close to one espoused in the law enforcement and lawmaking communities, "getting high" is the problematic part here. The only sensible definition I can come up with is "deliberately altering one's own consciousness and/or perception for a recreational purpose". If we take the view that all such behaviour is socially undesirable, we're left in the position of banning coffee and tea along with cigarettes and alcohol.In fact, given the symptoms some people report from ingesting food containing capsaicin (chili oil) we should probably consider banning curries and Mexican food over a certain threshold of "hotness".
   If we try to arrange matters so that having a second or third cup of coffee in a row does not constitute illegal drug abuse, we are left with a serious problem in terms of figuring out what we mean by "getting high". We can't fall back on saying that some drugs are good, and some are bad inherently, because they all get you high in some way. We could arguably decide that some sorts of highs are OK (stimulants like coffee, for the sake of argument) and that some are not (hallucinogens like LSD, for example). The problem we then face is that methamphetamine is a stimulant and therefore OK, while nutmeg is a hallucinogen and thus verboten. You could regulate additionally on the ease of abuse - you need to eat a lot of nutmeg to trip, but you don't need all that much speed to get high - but that seems to me to be a slippery slope.
   
2. If we are to take this view - that there's nothing inherently wrong with taking drugs per se, but that some drugs are too dangerous to be readily available - then we need to be regulating on the basis of harm caused. The problem here is that some currently socially acceptable and legal drugs appear to be as harmful as some illegal ones and in some cases more so. There would need to be some arbitrary threshold of harmfulness above which things were illegal and below which they were not. If we were to regulate on this basis, nicotine and alcohol could not logically remain legal while drugs such as cannabis, LSD and psychedelic mushrooms remained illegal.
   
3. This is the view currently most commonly aired by Libertarians - although they often couple it with entirely privatising the health system so that everyone becomes personally responsible for the things they do to their own bodies. There's actually nothing wrong with this viewpoint so long as we are willing to label drug-crime simply as "crime" drug-deaths simply as "accidents" and so forth.

My point here is that current approaches to drug regulation appear to be morally timid, and philosophically confused. Morally timid in that the basis on which we decide whether a particular substance is or is not allowable is not clear, and is therefore not open to debate. Philosophically confused in that whatever that basis is, it appears to be so undermined by exceptions (e.g. harmful drugs should all be banned, except for alcohol because the majority of our society has culturally accepted its use and would protest strenuously at its banning) as to be now completely inconsistent.

I don't wish to try and make a case at this point for the banning or decriminalisation of any particular drug or family of drugs. I do however suggest that any response to the Law Commission's report by government should include a firming up, and a vastly increased transparency over the philosophical basis on which some drugs are banned, while others are tacitly permitted.

RIP Osama Bin Laden

As I write this, so the radio informs me, crowd of people are outside the White House, chanting "U!S!A! U!S!A!" and generally celebrating the death of the man most of them consider the most evil person previously alive in the world. Osama Bin Laden has been killed by a group of U.S. and Pakistani troop in a ground operation, we are told.

I for one am not convinced that this celebration is appropriate or useful.

I'm not comfortable with celebrating anybody's death, for one thing. I tend to side with Gandalf when it comes to deciding who lives and who dies, and I remain unconvinced that anyone at any point has ever actually deserved death. That's not going to make me any friends, I realise, but there you have it. I don't think death is a thing that can be deserved, quite frankly. Certainly Osama Bin Laden was as close as you can come to calling a person genuinely evil, but I even have difficulty with the concept that the world is inherently materially better without him as an active participant in it.

That aside, I also think that it's very easy to overstate the importance of successfully killing Bin Laden. Sure, he was hidden for 10 years, and his death robs Al Qaeda of an important figurehead - but I still don't think that amounts to all that much. In fact, I think this is primarily a PR victory - and will have very little positive impact in the long run.

Consider: if you were a terrorist, determinedly opposing the Great Satan America, would the death of this man - a potent symbol, admittedly, but for the last few years not much of a leader - fill you with despair, or righteous anger? To put it another way, if Al Qaeda managed to assassinate President Obama tomorrow, would the USA immediately cease to exist? Successful assassinations of previous presidents suggest that it would not.

I have a strong suspicion that Al Qaeda doesn't even exist in the way it's usually presented in news media. Seriously, this is the 21st century - do we really believe that because they operate on a sub-military scale terrorists are all in the dark ages? Those who manage to perpetrate effective outrages along the lines of September 11th 2001 are clearly at the very least computer literate. And it is hard to be computer literate in this day and age, and not aware of a much more effective model for pursuing dispersed guerrilla activism or terror - Anonymous.

If there genuinely is (as people are fond of implying) some sort of central conspiracy which coordinates terrorist action around the globe, I think it's far more likely to operate on the unfindable, unfightable Anonymous model than the classic evil overlord hiding in his secret lair. And if that's the case, no amount of killing people, no matter who they are, will stop it - not unless you're prepared to kill everyone, just in case.

My god, sir - you bloody read it, didn't you?!

Now, I'm aware that I've pretty much abandoned this whole interblag thing for quite a while. Stuff like that happens when you have to work in order to eat, and your only non-work computer is deceased. However, I am spurred to action because of an incredible occurrence - someone has reviewed Normality. Reviewed it very positively.

See, when Vish (my co-author) and I wrote Normality, we had high hopes but were actually not entirely convinced it was playable. We found out that it was when we ran it ourselves, but we still weren't convinced anyone but us could run it. I whacked it up on my own free site and the wonderful One Thousand Monkeys, One Thousand Typewriters because I thought it'd be interesting to see if anyone gave a hoot.

By in large, they didn't - which is fine. Normality is after all an extended angry rant, regardless of its merits as a game or a setting. Then I got an email from a fellow by the name of Wess, who called himself "Suicide Puppet". He was enamoured of the poor twisted thing, is (I believe) considering some companion work for it.

He's also started a blog called Blur about RPGs - specifically those he considers to be doing interesting conceptual things with the hobby. And he gave our little baby pride of place as his first review.

Thanks Wess. You guys should totally go check out Blur - it's shaping up to be something really interesting...

Self-Preservation? Over-rated! (or "Losing is fun!")

I was just reflecting on behaviours that annoy me as a roleplayer, when exhibited by other players. One of those is getting overly pissy when a character is killed, or is forced into an unfavourable circumstance. Now, on consideration it became clear that I'm occasionally guilty of those particular flaws myself. So, in an attempt to get around this, I tried an experiment - create a character built to fail. Put in no sense of self-preservation whatever, and some form of destructive character flaw that liable to destroy them sooner rather than later, and see how it goes.

Both of the characters I created in this way were created for old-Vampire, and both were far more fun to play than I'd hitherto expected. Both were built with personal priorities that guaranteed them quick Humanity loss, and had no sense of self-preservation in-character either. As it turned out, the chronicles in question ended before either of them did finally destroy themselves - but this was more luck on their part and short length of chronicles than anything else. This proved liberating in play, as it meant I was never worried about long-term consequences for my character, and never strayed into what I call "preservationist" play.
I define "preservationist" play as the over-consciousness on the part of the player of managing a character's resources and prospects. Not that there's anything wrong with having a character whose profit- or advancement-seeking behaviour can serve as a motivator. It's just that you need to remember that your character, their social standing and their resources are all entirely imaginary.

Again, I'm not in favour of deliberately shafting player characters as a matter if policy - but surely the odd shafting doesn't count as foul play? Let's go for a movie comparison - they're not always accurate in relation to roleplaying games, but I like 'em anyway. In both Yojimbo and the Western remake A Fist Full Of Dollars the main character gets beaten up, and has all his equipment taken. In response, he takes some time out to recuperate and train, then goes and kills his enemies using the resources he has to hand at the time.

If this happened to a character in the hands of a "preservationist" player, there'd be a strong chance of an instant rage-quit response. Even if they stay in the game, there's liable to be some animosity directed at the GM for fucking about with their character.

In my view, characters exist to be fucked about with. Not that this should be done maliciously or at the expense of genuine fun (there's a reason I hate Monopoly, after all) but in some games it is entirely appropriate to occasionallynail the little buggers to the floor. Even if I'm one of the little buggers concerned.

Remember: losing is fun!