Owen Jones: Buffoon

In the Independent Owen Jones* rightly praises the words of Norway's Prime Minister after the massacre of last year:

Even when the country remained in a state of shock just five days after 77 civilians were murdered, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg struck a defiant note that would have been unthinkable in many countries. "The Norwegian response to violence is more democracy, more openness and greater political participation," he said. No crackdowns on civil liberties, but a pledge not to allow a fanatic to succeed in eroding Norway's democracy.

Praiseworthy indeed. This is how his article opens:

Would the British political establishment have been able to resist demands for the restoration of the death penalty if such a horrifying massacre had taken place here? Support for capital punishment remains largely passive, but widespread; it occasionally surges in the aftermath of horrifying crimes, particularly when children are involved, such as the Soham murders in 2003.

Uh huh, isn't the establishment "resisting demands" of the public pretty much the direct opposite of "more democracy"?

* Think 1970s ideas in a 21st century wrapping.

Being On The Same Side As Idiots

I am against reintroducing the death penalty to the UK for reasons which I have stated before- executing innocent people is inevitable and I don't want to be party to that. Arguments that we would only use it if we were "really 100% sure" are silly because we think we are 100% sure when we lock anybody up. So to argue for the death penalty is to say that the deaths of innocent people are a price worth paying.

In addition I have to say I find many of those on the same side as me to be smug and stupid. Take Ian Dunt from Politics.co.uk for the first example from google news who manages to combine all the worst traits of opponents in one article:

• Self congratulation: "The capital punishment argument is particularly unsatisfying because it is so easy to refute."- It is not easy enough for him it seems.
  
•  Ignorance: "the US is the only developed, supposedly civilised country which still conducts executions."- Japan is not a developed and civilised country according to Dunt.
• Bad Stats:  Too long to quote but he cherry picks studies to conclude that all reputable research refutes the idea that the death penalty deters crime when in fact most recent evidence point to a small but real deterrent effect although it is difficult to be certain with the social sciences.
• Hypocrisy: "Once the deterrent argument falls apart, capital punishment proponents have very little to fall back on but their own sense of emotional outrage"- after sneering at the "supposedly civilised" USA he wants to accuse other people of relying on emotional outrage?
• Stupidity:  "In 1996, those US states with the death penalty had an average murder rate of 7.1 per 100,000 of population. Those states without had 3.6 per 100,000."- Lesson 1 of statistics is "correlation does not imply causation" and even if it did you could equally argue that the political support for the death penalty is due to high murder rate. In reality the southern states have been about twice as violent as the northern ones since the days when they were colonies and both hanged people with gusto and enthusiasm.

 I hate being on the same side as people like this.

Update: I am now feeling slightly bad about being so harsh on Mr Dunt, so if you come here via a vanity search, then please ignore all the insulting points and just not the facts.

Guardian: Bring Back The Death Penalty

Okay they don't exactly say that, but Alexander Chancellor writes about the relative treatment of murderers in the USA and Italy (referring to the recent conviction of Amanda Knox for the killing of Meredith Kercher):

The good news is that disillusion with all these methods, and growing evidence of their unjust application, continues to weaken America's faith in capital punishment and could lead one day to its abolition. In the meantime, if convicted of murder, justly or not, I would much rather be in Perugia than the US.

So the deterrent effect of the death penalty is established then.

[via Ambush Predator]

Experts Better With Hindsight Than Foresight

To mark the execution of Beltway sniper John Allen Mohammed in a few hours, I decided to look up some of the most inept speculation as to the identity of the killer before he was caught. My favourite is Philip Kerr's article that appeared in the Daily Mail on October 21st 2002, 4 days before the snipers were caught:

If the Washington Sniper is taken alive, it is more than likely that he will be not some Al Qaeda terrorist, or even a cackling nutcase like Scorpio, but a quiet, white- skinned male, aged 40-55, who is a stalwart member of the National Rifle Association.

It may even be found that somehow, the key to the whole spree is the first shooting, on October 2 - a single shot fired through the window of Michael's Craft Store in Washington's Wheaton district, that fizzed through a display of silk autumnal flowers, smashed the lamp over the cash register and ricocheted off a shelf of prayer books called Inspiration For The Heart.

OR PERHAPS the answer lies somewhere in the identity of the first victim, 55-year-old James Martin.

Like Martin, several other victims have been fairly heavyset men in their 40s and 50s.

Equally, four of the men had beards; and if I were an FBI profiler I'd be working on the possibility that our man is also heavyset, with a beard, and that he may have shopped at Michael's Craft Shop, where a second shot was fired two days after the first.

Bearded, white, craft shop aficionados are notoriously dangerous.

Vote Green!

There is a campaign in Mexico to reinstate the death penalty to combat their horrific homicide rate. This isn't surprising what is surprising is who is behind it:

But scattered among them are huge black posters calling for the reintroduction of capital punishment.

"Because we care about your life - death penalty for murderers and kidnappers," they demand in bold yellow letters.

The campaign, somewhat incongruously, is paid for by Mexico's Green Party. The organisation's mascot, a large toucan against a green backdrop, appears prominently on each poster.

This isn't a universally supported policy of course:

But according to Juan Francisco Torres Landa, a lawyer who represents Mexico United - a non-governmental organisation campaigning against crime - there is no evidence that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to criminals.

This is an empirical claim and can be tested. unlike most arguments surrounding the death penalty which are moral or ethical. There is in fact an abundance of evidence that the death penalty acts as a deterrent.

I'm not actually enthusiastic about reintroducing the death penalty in the UK, because regardless of the utilitarian benefits I would rather not risk being directly responsible for an innocent person's death, but if we were having 10000 ,murders a year like Mexico, I'd feel differently.

Now That's What I Call "Moral Hazard"!

There has been a lot of talk about how the US bailout of the financial sector might remove the "moral hazard" for mismanaging the institutions in question. Did our system ever have any real moral hazard to begin with though? Compare the West to the East, in this case Vietnam:

There cannot be many places in the world where you can get shot for losing money on a foreign exchange deal, but Vietnam is one of them.

That is the situation potentially facing Nguyen Thi Quynh Van.

Until March this year, she was the deputy head of trade financing at a branch of one of Vietnam's biggest state-owned banks in the port city of Hai Phong.

Now she is under arrest, having been charged with "losing state resources through economic mismanagement" - a crime that carries the death penalty in Vietnam.

If "losing state resources through economic mismanagement" is a capital offence we ought to send Gordon Brown over to Vietnam right away.


ps. In case you are wondering, I don't think they did execute her. I wouldn't make light of it they had killed her. Probably.

Comprimise

Who said comprimise with Al Qaeda was impossible?

Appearing in public for the first time after five years in captivity, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told Col Ralph Kohlmann, a US military judge, that death was "my wish".

It's my wish that he dies too, it's amazing how much common ground there is between us.

Ethical Preening As A Substitute For Evidence.

Earlier in the week I got into a discussion on another blog about the death penalty, well I say a discussion but it was more me slapping around a half witted and abusive troll, but having done so I want to elaborate on one aspect of the anti death penalty argument. That is the claim that it does not act as a deterrent, unlike most of the other arguments this makes an empirical claim rather than an appeal to moral judgment which means that it can be looked at objectively, unlike fatuous assertions that it is "uncivilised" or "cruel".

Some opponents of capital punishment such as Amnesty International say "It has never been shown to deter crime more effectively than other punishments", this can only be described as a bare faced lie. The evidence that scholars who have examined this over the last few years tends strongly towards the likelihood that it does in fact deter would be murderers. Some studies have suggested that up to 18 murders are prevented for each execution, with other studies finding smaller but still impressive effects of 4 or 5 murders prevented per execution. Of course the studies aren't conclusive, with such a small data set (the USA which is the subject of these studies only executes around 60 murderers a year despite having more than 15000 murders.) but very few people actually care about the evidence. On a purely utilitarian basis the case for letting killers swing (or fry) is very strong.

As it happens I'm not currently in favour of restoring the death penalty because personally I dislike the thought of actively taking part in an innocent persons death (miscarriages of justice will always be with us), more than I dislike a far larger number of innocent people being murdered by those who would have otherwise have been deterred. This is a common psychological trait in which actively participating in a death is felt to be worse than passively allowing it to happen. My opposition isn't categorical and if our murder rate were to increase somewhat the balance of moral values would for me change somewhat, certainly I believe that countries with murder rates as high as those in Jamaica would be right to bring it back.

Most of the discussion of the Sun's recent reports on the by the enlightened classes has consisted of denouncing Sun readers as ignorant, knuckle-dragging fascists who are too stupid to form a sensible opinion, yet the empirical evidence strongly suggests that they are better informed than the nation's leading opinion formers.

Execution & Corruption.

The Chinese don't bugger about when it comes to anti corruption drives:

The former head of China's State Food and Drug Administration, Zheng Xiaoyu, has been executed for corruption, the state-run Xinhua news agency reports.

It seems harsh, particularly as he confessed, but from a utilitarian perspective his corruption made him more of a menace to society than most mass murderers. If his death makes officials who allow deadly food to go on sale or who give clean bills of health to coal mines which later turn out to be death traps, think twice then it could save thousands of lives.