Reading Lounge

1. “Craft distilleries are like assholes, everyone’s got one, and what comes out of them tastes like shit.” IOW, let’s read about gin.

2. "You want the truth? It’s hopeless. It’s completely hopeless.” 

3. My life as a bargain-bin Cyrano de Bergerac

4. Sex bias in bird conservation plans

5. LEGO - The Toy of Smart Investors

6. Cinnanyms

7. It's like the vaginal version of "do not back up; severe tire damage."

How Germany (Accidentally) Created a Prototype for Global Online Censorship

Cross-posted from JUSTITIA

BY JACOB MCHANGAMA ON 5. NOVEMBER, 2019

Global Internet freedom is in decline. Authoritarian states manipulate the Internet to serve their own illiberal ends. But liberal democracies have also limited Internet freedom to counter contemporary scourges such as fake news, hate speech, and terrorist content.

Germany´s Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) is the most prominent weapon in the online arsenal of democracies. NetzDG obliges social media platforms to remove illegal content within 24 hours or risk huge fines. But in a global free speech race to the bottom, the NetzDG matrix has been copy-pasted by authoritarian states to provide cover and legitimacy for digital censorship and repression.

A new report by Jacob Mchangama and Joelle Fiss documents that at least 13 countries have adopted or proposed models similar to the NetzDG matrix. According to Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net (2019), five of those countries are ranked “not free” (Honduras, Venezuela, Vietnam, Russia and Belarus), five are ranked “partly free” (Kenya, India, Singapore, Malaysia and Philippines), and only three ranked “free” (France, UK and Australia). Most of these countries have explicitly referred to the NetzDG as a justification for restricting online speech. Moreover, several of these countries, including Venezuela, Vietnam, India, Russia, Malaysia, and Kenya, require intermediaries to remove vague categories of content that include “fake news”, “defamation of religions”, “anti-government propaganda” and “hate speech” that can be abused to target political dissent.

“Authoritarian states are copy-pasting illiberal laws designed by liberal democracies. Whereas Germany’s initial goal was to curb hate online, the NetzDG has provided a blueprint for Internet censorship that is being used to target dissent and pluralism. This development creates a regulatory race to the bottom that undermines freedom of expression as guaranteed by international human rights standards” says Jacob Mchangama, Executive Director of Justitia and co-author of the report.

Read “The Digital Berlin Wall: How Germany (Accidentally) Created a Prototype for Global Online Censorship”

The report is presented in Foreign Policy: Germany’s Online Crackdowns Inspire the World’s Dictators

Reading Lounge

1. NASA’s Grueling Underwater Test for Astronauts

2. Notes on Camping and Fashion

3. Carbon taxes and carbon pricing are not solutions to the climate crisis

4. Skate Gaze

5. Masa Son's Masterwork Is A PowerPoint Presentation About WeWork That Will One Day Hang In The Louvre

6. Who was responsible for the introduction of toilets on trains in India?

7. How to Stop Crying

8. The Vaporfly 4% Edition

Weather Report

always good with this band

AEON

Øystein Sture Aspelund

Who was responsible for the introduction of toilets on trains in India?

If Lord Dalhousie, the then Governor General of India, is hailed as the father of Indian Railways, the father of toilets in railways is a dhoti-clad Indian named Okhil Chandra Sen from the then undivided Bengal (Bengal Presidency).

An aggrieved Okhil Chandra Sen’s letter of complaint, in broken English, to the Sahibganj divisional railway office drew attention to the discomfort and inconvenience of passengers for the lack of toilet facility during train travel in 1909-1910 when the nationwide protests, including Swadeshi Movement, against the Partition of Bengal were in full swing. The letter reads:

“Dear Sir,

I am arrive by passenger train at Abmedpur station and my belly is too much swelling with jackfruit. I am therefore went to privy. Just I doing the nuisance the guard making whistle blow for train to go off and I am running with lota in one hand and dhoti in the next. When I am fall over and expose all my shockings to man and woman on platform. I am got leaved at Abmedpur station.

This too much bad, if passengers go to make dung, the damn guard not wait train five minutes for him? I am therefore pray your honour to make big fine on that guard for public sake otherwise I am making big report to papers.

Your’s faithfully servant,

Okhil Ch. Sen”

This November 19 is the World Toilet Day.

more here

A carbon tax will prolong the climate crisis

The UK's Richard Murphy has a good post on the folly of the carbon tax. Actually, it is not  a folly,  it is rather what government is all about (see left). (underline and bold by me)

Carbon taxes and carbon pricing are not solutions to the climate crisis

I have for some time resisted writing about why I found the issues of carbon pricing and carbon taxation so difficult. I think the time to address those issues has arrived.

At its core the reason why I dislike both those notions is that they miss the point of the climate crisis. What they presuppose is that we can price our way out of an emissions crisis that we now know threatens the future of life on earth. And the simple fact is that we can’t do that. There is no way we can be priced out of this issue. We can only solve the emissions crisis by stopping emissions. And taxing them won't do that, any more than taxing tobacco has ever stopped smoking. Other measures - like bans - have been needed to make progress on that goal. That is even more the case for carbon.

As importantly, the essence is that what both carbon tax and carbon price arguments suggest is that business can carry on supplying products emitting carbon as before, but that those products will simply suffer a price differential when compared to lower or non-carbon emitting products and what we are then supposed to rely on is the price mechanism of the market to alter consumer demand. I suggest that logic is wrong.

First, this assumes that none of the responsibility for the climate crisis rest on the manufacturers of the products that have get us into this mess. That's definitely wrong. They are primarily to blame. They have known for decades what they have been doing with regard to carbon emissions, and have carried on doing it regardless. And we can be quite sure that they will carry on doing so into the future if they can pass the blame to us as consumers who, they will say, clearly indicate we still want their polluting and life-threatening products if we still buy them after carbon taxes are added. What this ignores is the fact that much of that demand will be driven by an absence of alternatives, which business will have no incentive to promote if there are carbon taxes, and that consumer behaviour is anyway heavily influenced by supplier behaviour through advertising and other market-distorting activities.

Second, this assumption presumes that we, as consumers, know as much about the products that we buy as those who sell them do. It is presumed, therefore, by the proponents of carbon taxes and carbon trading that we can make rational, informed decisions on this issue after tax is added to a price.  That, though, is clearly absurd. The makers of products known massively more about the carbon impact of what they are doing than a consumer might ever do. The asymmetries between the two are enormous. In that case to presume that the consumer can make an informed choice on such an issue, even after a tax is added, is just wrong.

And third, there is no market for carbon. There has never been. It’s a fictional creation that pretends that something is being done when that is not true. No one wants to buy or sell carbon. It’s an externality that cannot be priced. That’s partly because no one wants it. That essential quality of a market - a willing buyer - does not exist.  But it’s also because you cannot price something that we know has to be unavailable to any market. A market presumes that there will be demand. The reality is that we have to eliminate that demand to ensure there can be life on earth.

...

Carbon taxes also shift the whole blame for carbon consumption from the manufacturers, who willfully create the carbon outputs, to consumers, who are offered few or no alternatives to polluting products.

In addition, carbon taxes, by shifting the blame to consumers, put no responsibility for innovation or change on manufacturers. The result is that they will still sell polluting products, knowing they will still be bought.

read on at RM