News That's Fit To Punt - 07/Mar/2016

A Snapshot Of Sweden And Refugees

Here's a rather scary article about how Sweden is doing with its refugees. What's scary about it is that it flies in the face of the picture of tolerance and open-mindedness as being the absolute norm in Sweden. The demographic breakdown in the article goes into some depth, but I found this little bit of the interview a little startling:

ET: So why is all this happening? We have seen this dire situation unfold over many years, and yet the government seems intent in doubling down, bringing in even more immigration in recent years. The majority of the Swedish population even seems to be supportive of this policy.

TS: That’s actually not true. We have a biased media here that likes to portray the situation as you described, but we have serious scientific polls that clearly state that the majority or plurality of Swedes support reducing refugee immigration, even going back as far as the 1980s. There has always been more saying that Sweden should take in less refugees and this number has probably skyrocketed in recent months.
One recent poll I have seen, and it excludes the past months, shows very high opposition: only 8% said we are not taking enough immigrants, where 58% said we are taking too many. It’s the elite opinion that forms the consensus that Sweden should take many more immigrants – it’s almost like a religion, but it is not the popular view. 

ET: But that consensus correlates with election voting right? There is only one party that is openly against immigration and they scored very low in the last election. 

TS: Yes, it’s because that party has its roots in racism and it was taboo to vote for them. Despite that they went from 3% around ten years ago to perhaps 20% now. What’s also happening in the last few months is that the right wing moderate party, the Swedish “Tories” if you like, has shifted to the right on immigration very rapidly. You know in Sweden things shift very rapidly, it’s a consensus society. Now they are saying close the borders, deport a large number of migrants, very vociferously. The Liberals and the Christian Democrats are following suit. And even the Social Democrats, the ruling party, closed the borders in the end.

The picture we get from this interaction is that Swedish society reached some kind of saturation point whereby immigration policy overwhelmed the social capacity for Sweden to take in the refugees. Correspondingly, the vote for the far right leapt from 3% to 20% tells us that this issue is adding fuel to the rise of the far right. The tide the discourse has overwhelmed the polity to the point that Sweden has all but closed its borders to refugees. For the Swedes, as it is the case in Australia, the incredulity became, "what are they coming all the way to Sweden?"

ET: There is a huge number of male migrants that went to Sweden last year, vastly more than women. We read that the demographic imbalance in Sweden is now even worse than China. Is this correct? 

TS: Maybe in some age group, but not in overall terms of course. Some 92% of those unaccompanied migrants were male last year… 

ET: … Wait a minute, 92% of them are male? 

TS: Yes, there is definitely something strange going on. More than half of the world’s refugees are women. In World War II, when Sweden took refugees from Finland, they were children and 90% were below the age of 10. But now almost all of them are late teenagers – supposedly; we know many are older for a fact. When other countries age test it turns out that the majority are not children. And when there are crimes committed and the age is investigated, often we get these absurd reports where some of these guys are older than 30 and yet the government puts them with other real minors in schools or housing, and this is creating a lot of anger now. The media created this taboo where because they are officially supposed to be children we can’t question it, and you are fascist if you do. Yet most people can see that many are adults.
Now I’m not moralizing this. If you have an open door policy and you are incentivizing Afghans to take advantage of the system, can you really blame them? But it is an idiocy to equate anyone who questions the claim of being a minor with being a fascist.
You know, it’s really funny that the tale about the emperor having no clothes is a Scandinavian tale. Everybody can see many are not children, but then the political and media consensus will fire or at the very least censor the people who point out this plainly obvious fact. Because how can you question children running from war, using circular reasoning that anyone who claims to be a child escaping war is one and cannot be questioned. You know, a self-reported 70% are not even coming from Afghanistan but safer countries like Iran, seeking a better life.

And there you have it, the gnawing suspicion by Swedes that Sweden's good nature is being taken advantage thereof. I dare say these 92% male asylum seekers who are actually economic migrants are hoping to catch on with some nice Swedish blonde and live happily ever after on Swedish social security. I mean, heck, if I'd got thrown out of my country and had nowhere to go on the planet, I'd probably want to claim asylum in Scandinavia - it's not that hard to imagine why that number is skewed the way it is. 

In a way, it was easy for Sweden to be tolerant and preach tolerance because Sweden was - for quite some time - mostly homogenous in culture. The sorts of problems that arise from intolerance were geographically distant. It was easy for Swedish society to be progressive in the context of its own population being homogenous because it never had to be tested. The moment it became overwhelming, the society shut its doors. When confronted with the reality of what that tolerance actually meant in the wider world, the country had second thoughts. 

This is a scenario that will likely repeat itself in the rest of Scandinavia. it may well repeat itself in Germany as Merkel's policy of taking in 800,000 asylum seekers turns into a kind of social demographic bomb. The argument that the first world can afford to take on any number of refugees is never really put under the scrutiny. 

This is going to be rather unpopular to even question this but I've often wondered about the validity of somebody who makes their way to Scandinavia or Australia hoping for asylum when there actually are other safe countries along the way. If you ran from Syria to Turkey and Turkey gives you safe asylum, is it really valid to then travel to Scandinavia (or Australia) in hopes of a better deal? Understandably, everybody wants the better deal, but does that make it into a human right? 

Peter Costello - Tax And Spend Liberal

Here's something for you to ponder. Peter Costello thinks he should have taxed the internet. 

I'm not quite sure how he would have done it. 

Speaking to Fairfax Media in his new role as chairman of free-to-air broadcaster Nine Entertainment Co, Mr Costello recalled sitting in his Parliamentary office in the 1990s in the early days of the web, and pondering the vast future revenue such a levy could generate.

"I was Treasurer at the time. It would have been the easiest thing in the world, by the way, for governments around the world to have put a charge on the internet. It wouldn't have had to be very big but it would have raised a motza," said Mr Costello. 

"Governments would all have to agree together to do it, and the OECD was looking it at the time. It would have been hard to police but once (former US President) Bill Clinton came out and said the internet would be free that was it. Once the Americans said the internet was going to be free, the rest of the world was going to follow suit." 

Mr Costello, Australia's longest-serving treasurer, who went on to introduce the goods and services tax with then-prime minister John Howard, said an internet access tax "could have been a fraction of a cent a year and it would have raised governments' unbelievable amounts of money".

We've got to be happy that crappy plan never came to fruition.

When Even Peter Reith Calls You Out

Peter Reith was an awful minister in the Howard Government. He had the charm of a dyspeptic shark and the compassion of a broken bottle of single malt scotch. All teeth-gnashing and ideological gumboots and all. Since his retirement from Federal politics, he's turned into a sometime columnist for the SMH, and forms a rather unappealing Tory-Tag-Team duo with Amanda Vanstone. I've noted before Amanda Vanstone has written a piece telling Tony Abbott to go disappear into the night. Now Peter Reith has penned his own version.

The next election is just around the corner. Abbott is not about to win back the leadership. The only issue now is who wins the next election. And one big issue is whether the Coalition can erase Labor's claim that the Coalition lacks unity. 

The first thing Abbott has to do is to shut down his handful of supporters in the Parliament and the Turnbull haters in the media. And, by the way, it wouldn't do any harm for Turnbull to try talking to Hadley, Jones and Bolt, just to even up the conversation. 

If Abbott cannot or will not stop the destabilisation, it could be a bad result for the Coalition and more importantly very bad for Australia if Labor were able to return to the government benches.
The only other option is for Abbott to leave Parliament before the election, and to stay out of the campaign.

What I don't understand is why some people who were exasperated by Abbott's paid parental leave and its new tax, his support for changes to the Constitution, his captain's picks and many other shocking decisions now want him back, with Credlin and all.

It's because they're stupid, Peter, but then that would be a concept you would not countenance. Unfortunately for Peter Reith, this brand of stupid is particularly pervasive in the Coalition ranks. It's the special brand of stupid that forms from the fermentation of entitlement & smugness.

Sign of the Times - 01/04/10

Stephen Conroy - Recalcitrant Censor

Look I get it that it's very possible somebody's kids might log onto the internet and might find objectionable material. I know of one parent who was supervising his kids in the living room as he read the newspaper. The kids went straight to Google Image Search and typed "big naked bums". You can imagine the rest.

I understand that a certain kind of person would like the problems of the world to simply go away with a wave of a hand or a casting of a magic wand. Clearly Stephen Conroy is one of those people.

In an on-camera interview with Fairfax Media's national Canberra bureau chief, Tim Lester, Senator Conroy dismissed the torrent of criticism directed at his policy as "misleading information" spread by "an organised group in the online world".

Asked what percentage of all of the nasty material on the internet his filters would block, Senator Conroy dodged the question, responding that his filters were "100 per cent accurate - no overblocking, no underblocking and no impact on speeds".

But Mark Newton, an engineer with ISP internode, said: "Censorship will not catch a single pedophile, will not cause a single image to disappear from the internet, will not protect a single child."

Senator Conroy also brushed aside concerns from leading academics and technology companies that the plan to block a blacklist of "refused classification" (RC) websites for all Australians was an attempt to shoe-horn an offline classification model into a vastly different online world.

"Why is the internet special?," he asked, saying the net was "just a communication and distribution platform".

"This argument that the internet is some mystical creation that no laws should apply to, that is a recipe for anarchy and the wild west. I believe in a civil society and in a civil society people behave the same way in the physical world as they behave in the virtual world."

Newton said this was a "gross oversimplification", pointing out that Australia Post and Telstra's telephone network were also distribution platforms but were not censored.

"Why should the internet, a distribution platform for all manner of intangibles, be censored as if it was a movie theatre? It makes no sense, the model doesn't fit," he said.

96% of the polls on the SMH say the internet is not a special case. 96% polled also do not support the government's internet filtering plan.  This leads me to conclude that 96% of SMH's web readership don't think *any* kind o censorship is acceptable. So Stephen Conroy has a really difficult sell here.

It's not that I don't accept the merits of the argument that maybe if there were  a targeted block done by the government, then it reduces the risk of the accidental discovery of nasty material by children. The bit I don't get is how Stephen Conroy refuses to see the overwhelming objection from a wide variety of parties as pretty much representative of the entire community.

What's fascinating in this whole non-debate is how Mr. Conroy seems so certain that his solution is going to a) work b) be accepted c) not circumvented by the highly motivated. Dare I say it, his position is so committed and inflexible, you wonder if he can ever come back from the far-out-on-a-limb position he has staked out.

I guess we'll wait and see, but Kevin Rudd is crazy letting this keen censor run with this idiotic, unpopular, irrational project.

Say Hello To My Little Friends

Then there's this article.

The two-minute clip begins with an exchange between a pint-sized Tony Montana and his, ah, young wife, on a set that includes a toy tiger, inflatable palm trees and a table covered with popcorn, not cocaine.

"Can't you stop saying 'fudge' all the time? It's boring, Tony," she tells him. "You deal coke and you kill people. That's 'wonderful', Tony."

Responds Montana: "I've got a fudging junkie for a wife."

"You son of a bee!" she retorts. "I'm leaving you, motherfudger."

The clip reaches its violent climax with a recreation of the final scene of Brian de Palma's 1983 gangster epic, where Montana, played by Al Pacino, pictured, falls face-first into a swimming pool after being shot. Or into a paddling pool filled with paper after he is hit in the back by a foam toy gun.

Many viewers expressed outrage at the post, while others - correctly - suspected the clip was not genuine. Its creator, Marc Klasfeld, a commercial and music video director, told CNN the video aimed to illustrate the pervasiveness of sex and violence in the media confronting children daily.

"What's interesting to me and my wife is that the video is shocking, yet every day we have to guard what our children view from television commercials or video game violence," said Klasfeld, an admitted fan of viral videos.

The thing is, like, as if the kids don't understand what's going on.

Here's the original video on Youtube. It's actually quite brilliant. It also goes to show just how infantile the dialogue was in that film, because it's working really well here. :)

So the question is, what exactly is Stephen Controy's net-nanny-filter going to do about this one?

RAM, Baby!

Something was wrong with my mac pro's RAM. I was only seeing the pair of 1 GB slots and not the other 3GB.2GB is the scraping the minimum for RAM when it comes to running Logic Pro and Final Cut Studio, therefore it was a real problem.

So I went and bought 2 sticks of 2GB to replace the faulty sticks and shoved them into the remaining 2 slots. I switched on the machine and what do you know? It now reads the missing 3, plus the 4 new gigs making the total... 9Gigabytes of RAM! Woohoo.

I think the 'A' tray the RAM sits on got knocked loose when I moved the current tower.

Google vs. China

Do No Evil

China's IT brigade tried hacking Google. In response, Google is going to stop its censoring of content as retaliation. In the mid-term Google is likely to pull out of China.

GOOD FOR Google. The company's decision to stop censoring its Chinese search engine is more likely to mean the end of its China-based service than a breakdown of Beijing's political firewall. But more important than the question of whether Google.cn survives is the larger issue that Google has now raised for other Western companies and democratic governments -- which is whether China's gross and growing abuse of the Internet should be quietly tolerated or actively resisted.

Google cited a major instance of that abuse in announcing its policy change: "a highly sophisticated and targeted attack" on Google and more than 20 other large companies aimed at stealing software code. "A primary goal of the attackers," Google said, was breaking into the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

This is shocking but unsurprising. Cyberattacks from China aimed at U.S. businesses, the Pentagon and other government agencies have become commonplace, if not epidemic, in recent years. So have Beijing's demands that Western companies collaborate in its efforts to censor political content on the Internet and snoop on the private e-mails of its citizens, several of whom have been prosecuted with e-mails supplied by Yahoo. China aims not just at eliminating the free speech and virtual free assembly that are inherent to the Internet, but at turning it into a weapon that can be used against democrats and democratic societies.

They have 24 million marriageable men with no access to internet porn. It's a powder keg waiting to explode out there! :) It's really strange how china keeps on making the news with such negative reports so regularly. Maybe not so much surprising - a bit like Mark McGwire's admissions of steroid use - but strange it's happening now. We're suddenly seeing bastards for what they are.