Category: Uncategorized

There are two kinds of countries in the world. The very rich and the very poor. On the one hand, you have North America, Europe, Japan, and some other Asian and South American countries. These nations have incredible wealth and an astonishing quality of life, including first-class health-care, transportation, education, and entertainment facilities. On the other hand you have the Sudan, Rwanda, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and other African and Asian and Central American nations. These nations can barely feed themselves, if they can feed themselves at all. They have mud roads instead of freeways. They have epidemics instead of hospitals.

Do you think we in the rich West are trying to help? We send them aid, right? We give them grants and loans, right? Wouldn’t it be incredibly absurd if those poverty-stricken nations were sending us more money than we send them! Preposterous! Unbelievable! And true.

Yes, indeed. Most of the world’s poorest nations are sending us money. Then we send a pittance back, to ease our consciences.

How could this happen? Very simple. In the 1960’s and 70’s, these countries, almost always ruled by dictators at the time, borrowed billions of dollars from banks in the West (like Citibank). What did they use this money for? To build roads? To build hospitals? To improve education? No. They used it to buy weapons. Why did they need weapons? Because their own starving people, perceiving that their dictatorial and illegitimate government cared nothing for their welfare, rose up in rebellion and tried to evict these vampires.

It only adds insult to injury that they had to buy these weapons from large Western corporations as part of the deal. So, in effect, these were loans to Boeing and McDonnel Douglas and other American and European arms manufacturers. Except that they didn’t have to repay them. Countries like Peru and Brazil and Rhodesia had to repay them, with, of course, compound interest.

The result is that more money flows from the poor nations of the world to the rich than the other way around. This is a scandal. It is an outrage. It is an outrage of a scandal of a disgrace.

You ask, why don’t these nations simply state the obvious: that they (the people) didn’t borrow this money– the dictators did. If you want your money back, go call on Idi Amin or Doc Duvalier or whomever, and leave us alone. Why don’t they do that?

Because the pimps for these banks, the Western governments who often helped arrange these deals, will destroy these nations if they refuse to pay.

You may ask, well, what about the countries that don’t have dictatorial governments, that just borrowed too much and can’t repay it?  I would argue that banks that go to poor countries and offer them fabulous amounts of money which they know will be spent unwisely on military equipment or vanity projects and then discover that those nations can’t repay those loans without doing terrible damage to their own economies should just suck it up: that’s the price of doing business.  No government should step in to enforce repayment of those loans, especially when they are made to an unelected government.   This, my friends, is NOT what happens: instead, the western governments step in to enforce repayment.

You don’t believe that Western governments have these kind of perverted priorities? Consider China. After the government of China massacred hundreds, perhaps thousands of students in Tiananmen Square, President Bush squawked a little but the U.S. continued to renew China’s “most favoured nation” trade status on an annual basis. Oh, but when it was discovered that factories in China were manufacturing pirated copies of software and music CD’s, the big guns came out blazing: cease and desist or else! And China complied.

What is really bizarre about this whole debacle is that Americans, as people, are among the most generous in the world. On a personal basis, they tend to give a lot to charities, including charities that help poor nations over-seas. So while the average American citizen is moved by compassion when he or she sees pictures of starving children, his/her own government and banks are pimping away on a grand scale undoing all of the good that those well-meaning gifts would do.

The Jubilee 2000 initiative is an attempt, by churches, charities, and human rights organizations, to persuade Western Banks and governments to stop profiting from the misery of millions of people. It asks Western governments and banks to forgive most if not all of the massive debts that prevent any of these nations from pulling themselves out of poverty. It deserves your financial and political support.

There is an ad in the latest New York Times Review of Books (November 20, 1997) that really shook me up. It is for a book called “The Feminist Interpretation of Immanuel Kant”. It is edited by Robin May Schott, in case you want to order it.

Now, hey, I’d be the first person to say that it’s about time someone over-hauled the old transcendental critique of pure reason, I mean, after all, it’s only been out of date since about fifteen minutes after it was printed, but even I would never have guessed that the feminists would be the ones to put the last nail in the coffin. I’m not sure Immanuel would be pleased. I think he said something like “feminism is destroying our society” or something like that at one point in his career, probably just after his wife left him.

But you know, the next time some dark-minded pundit goes on and on about how our society is just falling apart and things have never been so bad and our youth have really lousy manners, and Hollywood sucks, and so on, I’m going to think about those feminists out there reinterpreting Immanuel Kant and breathe a quiet little sigh of relief. If there is one thing more amazing than any other about our society, its our ability to chew up and regurgitate almost any idea, any image, any concept, and spit it out again as lively and ripe as if it were new.

Like Immanuel Kant. It would have been audacious enough if the feminists had taken on Wittgenstein or Popper, but Kant? So what do the feminists have to say? I don’t know. I haven’t read the book yet. But I’ll bet they accuse Kant of building his entire rigid, rational system of thought on some misdirected patriarchal impulse to rule reality with an iron fist. And I’ll bet the feminists believe that a view of reality more harmonious with natural, empathetic impulses would have worked better. If I remember my college philosophy correctly, Kant was trying to rescue Reason with a capital “R” from Descartes’ radical critique, which consisted of declaring that the only thing you could know for sure was that you existed. Both of them sound a little anal retentive to me. The women probably point out that doing the laundry, cooking, and cleaning, require some pretty fundamental ontological conclusions about cause and effect that can’t be justified by going for a walk every day trying to think up new categories of existence.

Then along comes Sartre who believed we don’t exist in a static sense at all. We are constantly in the state of becoming, and that’s why we are free, unless, of course, your wife expects you home for supper. I’ll bet Simone De Beauvoir had a few precious thoughts about this herself.

Wittgenstein thought we basically constructed a reality in our language, and so our society is really nothing more than a construct of the words we imagine to describe it with. I think the feminists might find a home there. You know how they love to get together and talk. Then there was Martin Heidegger. He believed that mankind had forgotten something very, very important about existence, but what it was we had forgotten he couldn’t seem to remember either, so he joined the Nazi party and continued to teach at a university in Germany throughout World War II. Nothing like a philosophy that stimulates you into positive action! I think the feminists wouldn’t like him. They would think that it’s not that hard to remember the important things, as long as you care about people.

Microsoft Philosophy 1.01

You can tell what philosophy Bill Gates believes in by running a spell check on little known recent philosophers in Microsoft Word and then analyzing the results. Watch:

Hannah Arendt is the only woman on the list, and I don’t think most philosophers would place her next to Heidegger or even Imre Lakatos in terms of importance, but she did come up with one great idea. While in Jerusalem covering the Eichmann trial (Jewish agents had kidnapped Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal, from Argentina and spirited him away to Jerusalem for a show trial), she found herself at a loss for words to describe the utter mediocrity of this minor functionary who was partly responsible for the deaths of six million Jews, so she coined the phrase “banality of evil”. Later on, she was sorry that she became so well known for that phrase alone. I have to admit, that’s about the only thing I know about Hannah Arendt myself, but I like the phrase, because it captures the idea that incredibly evil things can result from the actions or inactions of people who perceive themselves as being only minor cogs in a big machine. Raul Wallenberg was a minor functionary, but he saved hundreds of lives. Eichmann claimed that he was only following orders. The crew of the Enola Gay were only following orders when they dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima (victors get to write history so we don’t seem to regard them as villains the way we regard the Germans, Italians, or Japanese). The crew of the Titanic sent lifeboats away half-filled because their orders were “women and children first” and the third-class women and children were still below decks, and the only other people present were men.

That’s the way most people behave– just following orders–and that may be the tragedy of the human race.

So if the feminists find a new way of thinking about reality that can convince most people that they should always do the right thing, even when it goes against orders or policy or whatever, then, hey, I’m all in favour of it.

The Green Party in Germany has some really interesting ideas. In the past year, they have proposed the following:

• no one is allowed to make more than one trip by aircraft every five years
• all men must be inside by 10:00 p.m., to make the streets safe for women
• the gas price should be tripled

Don’t you wish that we had a Green Party? Actually, I think we do, but they never seem to win any seats. Maybe their ideas are different from the German Green Party, adapted for North American sensibilities, and thus too drab and boring to attract serious attention. But think about this: Joschka Fisher, the leader of the Green Party, has just quit smoking, changed his diet, and now jogs six miles a day. I think that’s the kind of guy I would like to have as a leader. Lots of self-discipline and self-control.

I really think we could learn from the Green Party of Germany. We need to have more imagination. We need to think of more different things that we haven’t tried before. Like, instead of one leader for as long as the party stays elected, why don’t we rotate the leadership among five or six colorful individuals? Do you think we’d ever have a black or a woman as prime-minister or president otherwise? Not a chance. Well, wait, we did have a woman prime-minister– Kim Campbell– for about six months. Maybe we’re crazier than I give us credit for.

But how about these for some imaginative new ideas for the next election:

• let’s all drive on the left side of the road for a year or two. Why? I don’t know. Just to see how we like it. For one thing, we’re missing all the scenery on the left side. This would give us a year to see it. Then we could go back to normal.
• ban bicycles and pedestrians from our downtowns. Let’s let cars use the sidewalks and bicycle paths and see if it improves the traffic flow. Let’s make a rule that you can only drive on the sidewalk if the road is really busy, otherwise pretty soon the sidewalks will be crowded too. This goes for parks too– what are we saving the grass for anyway? The dogs and geese? And so what if it gets muddy: at least the SUV owner’s will finally have a reason for that four-wheel-drive, if they actually know how to engage it.
• Did you know that once they make a law, it never goes away by itself? It practically never goes away at all: they just keep amending and adding provisions and stuff. This worked fine when countries only lasted a hundred years or so, but we’ve been around a long time and we still have all those laws from ages ago, plus all the new ones they’ve added since them. So none of us really understands the law anymore. Let’s get rid of all the laws and start over. On a chosen Friday, we will announce that all of the laws are cancelled. Then we’ll take a whole weekend and write up new ones. And no lawyers will be allowed to take part, so everyone can understand the rules. No more “whereas” and “notwithstanding” or any of that crap. Let’s just clear them all out, burn the law books, and then sit down and make up the new laws that we really need.

I’ll bet we only need about five:

No stealing. No killing. No cheating. No lying. If you make a mess, you have to clean it up yourself.

• ban polkas. This would be great. All the polka-lovers would be out there demonstrating, marching with their tubas and accordions. Then we could look real stern and say “maybe”. After a year or two, we could pretend to give in and allow some polkas. Why? Because I think our society would be safer with people demonstrating for polka music than with people demonstrating for more grunge or punk rock, or, heaven forbid, guns, or abortions, or stuff like that.
• no chief executive can earn more than ten times what the lowest-paid employee earns. Do you really think that any chief executive is worth more than ten times what you’re worth? Well, what exactly are you worth?
• declare a statute of limitations on all crimes, injustices, wars, and sexual harassment. A woman recently sued her cousin for sexual harassment that occurred 45 years ago. The native peoples keep asking for money for treaties we broke hundreds of years ago. Japanese-Canadians didn’t get compensated fairly for having their property comfiscated and being moved into camps during World War II. And women keep complaining that in the times of the Romans they were treated like property. Fine. We acknowledge your status as victims. But if we go back far enough, even the Dutch have a few gripes. It’s getting too complicated to figure it all out. If everybody has a gripe, then we’re all even. Let’s promise not to do it again and get on with our lives. My statutes of limitations:
  • broken treaties – 50 years
  • murder – 25 years
  • assault – 15 years
  • robbery – 10 years
  • harassment – 7 years
  • pay equity – 5 years
  • polluting the environment: for as long as the effects of the pollution are detectable. If the corporation responsible is defunct, the shareholders are responsible. If they are dead, their descendants are liable.

Hey– if the descendent of writers and musicians can collect royalties on their works, then the descendants of shareholders can pay for the cost of cleaning up their messes.

But I see I’m being inconsistent. The effects of other crimes also obviously last a long time. So I say even pollution will have a statute of limitation of, say, 25 years after the pollution occurred. But in return, all shareholders of any company that creates any kind of toxic substance as a result of the processes used to create their products must put a bond to guarantee any possible clean-up costs if the company goes under. Better yet, they all pay into a clean-up insurance fund.

You buy a new computer.  You turn it on.  A screen pops up:

Installing Windows 98

You may have told the computer vendor that you didn’t want Windows 98: that’s just tough.  Microsoft essentially taxes every computer purchased at mainstream outlets by forcing the vendors to buy a copy of Windows for every computer they sell regardless of whether or not the purchaser wants it.

Anyway, suppose you are going to install Linux instead.   Suppose that when the copyright notice pops up asking you to click “OK” to agree to the terms, you just click “NO”.  Will you get your money back, like they promise?  Not if you buy your computer from Dell.

More importantly, if you do click “OK”, have you made a contract with Microsoft in which you agree to their copyright terms?

Maybe.  Maybe not.

You see, it is well established in law (under Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code, which governs interstate commerce in the U.S.) that whenever you buy a product from any vendor, there is an implied contract, a “warrant of merchantability” that states that the product is fit for ordinary use.  Now, I don’t think anybody in their right mind would say that Windows 98 is fit for “ordinary use”.  One of the most profound miracles of modern consumerism is the way everyone just accepts that Windows is the best we can do, because, after all, it comes with the computer, and the computer people must know about these things…     Just today, for example, on my computer, it messed up the graphics in a computer game, and disabled all the hotlinks in my web browser.  This is only about the 744th problem I’ve had with Windows.  This month.

So, can you get your money back?  No.  Because Microsoft, in their software agreement, disclaims all “implied warrants of merchantability”.  Well, wait a minute…  maybe you can.  You see, such disclaimers are not valid unless they are agreed to before purchase, by the vendor and the customer.  So maybe you can.  But you won’t.  Microsoft will simply refuse to give you your money back.

Now I imagine that if you got your lawyer after them and made a lot of noise about it, you probably would get your money back.  But how is that possible?  Don’t these big corporations know what the law is?  And how can Microsoft get away with making it a condition of purchase of Microsoft Agent that none of the little animations may be used to “disparage” Microsoft Corporation?

* * *

If you listen long enough to people like Jack Valenti (the Motion Picture Association of America) you might get the impression that Copyright has existed forever, and, indeed, was passed down to us by God himself on Mount Sinai.   Jack Valenti is the guy who had incredible fits about the fact that the Canadian government tried to encourage a home-grown film industry when Hollywood was quite capable of providing culturally enriching products like “Earnest Saves Christmas” without any help from Canadians, thank you.

Something like copyright was first invented in 1557 by the Guild of Printers in London, England, and made into law by Queen Mary.    What she did was give complete control over all printed text to The Stationer’s Company.  It was more in the nature of a monopoly than legal protection.  These printers even had exclusive rights to print the works of dead authors like Plato and Aristotle and Gore Vidal.  In exchange for this monopoly– get this– the printers were to assist the Crown in preventing the distribution of seditious and heretical works.  That includes works that question the application of copyright law.   Sounds like the FCC’s philosophy of television licensing.

They were addressing a real problem.  According to Adrian Johns, of the University of California, there were 80 pirated copies of Martin Luther’s work for every legitimate one.

In 1710, after the pleadings of noted writers like John Locke and Daniel Defoe, Queen Anne revised the law to give more rights to the authors.  The monopolies didn’t give up without a fight: they took their case to court.  They won a few concessions.  The important thing is that such a thing as “copyright” now existed.

Here is where a very interesting debate took place, and a signal ruling was made by the British courts.  The monopolies argued that intellectual property belongs absolutely to whoever “owns” it.  They argued that intellectual property is essentially similar to physical property.  If I own a table or a chair, I can keep it, or I can sell it to someone else, or I can burn it so no one else can ever use it.  And the same goes with my words and ideas.  If I choose to, I can stop anyone else from ever using them.  On the other side, Samuel Johnson argued that society rightly benefits from the free distribution of ideas, therefore, it is in the public interest to limit the scope of copyright.  The products of the human mind belong to humanity.  Samuel Johnson didn’t argue, but should have, that ideas are by nature a communal activity, and therefore, cannot be imprisoned by one individual under the name of “copyright”.

In 1774, the House of Lords agreed with Johnson and declared that, for the general good of society, intellectual property belongs to the general public.   However, to promote the creation and improvement of these works, some temporary rights over distribution of these works can be granted to the author.

The Founding Fathers of America didn’t like copyright as a matter of principle, because, again, they believed that ideas belong to everyone, but agreed that a short-term monopoly over distribution served the greater public interest of increasing the store of knowledge, so they also agreed, in 1790, to a 14-year copyright period with the option to renew for one more 14-year period.

Those wild and crazy revolutionaries in France had the cool idea– 200 years before Wired Magazine– of abolishing copyright altogether.  But this had the peculiar effect of reducing the number of published works.  Since a publisher couldn’t prevent others from copying his works, he couldn’t make money, so he simply wouldn’t publish.  So many important works fell out of print.  Eventually, Robespierre and his gang restored the old copyright law– probably just as they were about to pen their own memoirs.  It’s too bad they gave up so soon.  It would have been interesting to see who things would have worked out over a period of fifty or one hundred years.  Chaos theory, you know.

Well, publishers and authors didn’t just sit back and accept the current state of affairs.  Over the years since 1790, they have been wheedling away at Congress seeking greater and greater copyright protection, and they’ve succeeded to a large extent.  Copyright now extends to the life of the author plus 50 years, and has been extended to everything from music to computer chip diagrams.  The descendants of the great writers of the early 20th century are especially keen on extending this period: they get to collect royalties from Grandpa’s work as long as the copyright is in effect.  The copyright on “Gone With the Wind”, for example, would have and should have expired in 1993.  Congress has generously extended it to 2032.  Generously to somebody (the author, Margaret Mitchell, is long dead.).  And don’t assume they’ll stop there– the trend is clear.  By the time 2032 rolls around, they’ll have extended it again, because they are not listening to consumers or the average citizen or those really smart people who insisted all copyrights should be temporary.  They’re out on some yacht owned by Houghton Mifflin.

Richard Stallman at MIT founded the first anti-copyright organization, since the Reign of Terror, in 1984, the Free Software Foundation.   John Perry Barlow founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is an advocacy group for electronic civil liberties.  Barlow used to write for the Grateful Dead.  The Grateful Dead defied the more anal-retentive music establishment by encouraging their fans to record their concerts and copy their tapes for personal use. The interesting result was that they increased their audience, sold more concert tickets and albums, and did quite well, thank you.

Facts cannot be copyrighted.  DNA, according to the U.S. patent office, can be copyrighted.  Data bases could not be copyrighted until recently, because they were believed to be collections of facts.  So if you published a list of phone numbers of people on your block, anybody could copy it.  What an outrage!   Then everyone would know who lived on your block!  Well, Congress is in the process of fixing that one up: they will allow publishers to copyright their “collections” of facts.

What does this mean exactly?   The publishers argue that it means that instead of just copying someone else’s list of your neighbors and their phone numbers, you will have to go door-to-door yourself and collect the information over again.   Why do I have a feeling that pretty soon, that won’t be legal either.  The copyright police will be out there beating up Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Some companies in the U.S. have won the right to publish court verdicts exclusively.  So, in essence, they are copyrighting the law.  This could have some advantages.  The next time someone charges you with infringing on their copyright, tell them that that law is copyrighted and they can’t use it. If that fails, tell them that you have copyrighted the story of how you stole their copyrights and they can’t use this information without your permission.

The trouble is that Congress chooses to accept loads of input from owners of various copyrights, like Disney and Time Warner, but almost no input from consumers or consumer groups.  Or, more accurately perhaps, they ignore the input from consumers.   Consumers, you see, don’t put out the big bucks for election campaigns.  The new laws being passed all favour copyright owners.

What really irritates me is way these “improvements” are presented as if they will help the poor, struggling “artists” to be paid fairly.   That’s the pr campaign.  This is completely untrue.  These new laws will help big corporations, who have been ripping artists off for years, rip off the consumer as well.  The artist, you see, only gets about $1.00 or so per CD, if they are really lucky and established and they had a good lawyer when they signed their first contract.  The record company gets a much bigger chunk, so they will gain the most.   Some of the most successful recording artists are, in fact, up to their ears in hock to their record companies.  How can that be?  They are selling millions of recordings?  Well, it’s those clever little contracts.  You’re a young artist.  Your fondest dream is to be a “recording star”.  A record company says, “we’ll make your dream come true.  All you have to do is… sign… here.”

In Canada, they are about to impose a .50 per cassette “tax” on blank tapes in order to compensate copyright owners for the money they are supposedly losing through home taping.  This stinks for several reasons.

1. nobody has proven that they have lost a penny through home taping.   If the experience of the Grateful Dead is any indication, they have, in fact, made more money through home taping, through the “free advertising and trial product” effect.  Check out your own collection: don’t you own a lot of CD’s by artists you first heard on tape?  Now, maybe people who listen to Celine Dion and Walter Ostanek are not as honest as people who listen to the Grateful Dead.  That’s their problem.

2. a lot of these tapes are used to make copies of CD’s so the user can play the music in the car, or make “compilation” tapes, of selections from various CD’s.  This is perfectly within the rights of the consumer under established copyright law.  And remember– it is the publishing industry that wants to insist that copyright applies to the intellectual material, not the physical disk (so they could argue against piracy in the first place).  If that is true, than anyone certainly has the right to make as many copies as he or she wants to for personal use.

3. what if I happen to like taping my own original songs?  Not only do I have to pay extra for my blank tapes even though I’m not stealing anybody’s music, but I don’t get a share of the booty.  You might argue that I don’t have any recordings out there that people won’t buy because they can tape my music off the radio instead.   But the truth is, they don’t know if anybody would have bought a Celine Dion record either.  They really don’t.

So what we have is a bunch of big powerful businessmen making a money grab, and the government goes along with it because the average consumer doesn’t have a high-priced lobbyist in Ottawa to argue our case.

[more later…]

For a terrific discussion of software licensing, click HERE.

Canadian Men’s Hockey Team Represented the Spirit of the Olympics

Sure, they didn’t win Gold or Silver, or even Bronze. But I was proud of the Canadian Men’s Hockey Team.

• They stayed in the Olympic Village with the other competitors, even the ones who didn’t make six figure salaries.
• They played selflessly, with heart and determination, and they played well.
• They simply got beat by teams that were a tiny bit better than they were.
• They made no excuses, and blamed no one but themselves for those heart-breaking defeats.
• They showed up at other Olympic events to cheer on other Canadian athletes.
• They played good, clean, skate-pass-shoot hockey: showing the sport at its best.

Why didn’t they win? It’s hard to fault Clarke, Gainey, or Crawford. They chose solid, two-way players, and those players generally performed up to expectations. The one deficiency in this line-up was players with a deft touch around the net… like Kariya and Sakic(!). Gretzky played well, but he’s not 25 anymore. Lindros also played well, but he’s not a finesse player. Once they knew Kariya was in doubt, I wonder if they shouldn’t have added Vincent Damphousse or someone else with a deft touch around the net. But, again, I’m not quibbling. The team was well-chosen. Unfortunately, I think Canadians simply have to face the fact that the rest of the world has caught up to us and we are no longer the dominant hockey power. We were close– the games were thrilling– but we’re going to have to work hard and develop new talent if we hope to ever reclaim the World Championship or the Olympic Gold Medal.

The Toronto Star recently reported that 99% of the complaints made against the Metropolitan Toronto police force are resolved in favour of the police, according the “objective” civilian complaints review process. That means that either Toronto has the greatest police force in the world– truly, the most amazing, perhaps, in history– , or the biggest liars. An officer responsible for handling complaints against the police force, with a straight face, actually insisted that the police really are in the right 99% of the time.

What kind of a person are you that you would say something so preposterous to a journalist, on the record? What do you really think of the people out there, that would make you believe they would believe you?

Now, even if you support the police (and with the level of paranoia in our society as high as it is nowadays, that’s quite likely), and even if you believe the Metropolitan Police force to be the best trained and most well-behaved in the world, it is statistically impossible that they could be right 99% of the time. It simply cannot be true. This kind of statistic is reminiscent of the old Soviet Union, when year after year, “record breaking” crops were harvested, proving the superiority of the Soviet system, while the people continued to starve.

When you think about it, it’s pretty scary that the police can get away with pulling this stuff. How dare they claim to be right 99% of the time? Who’s making this judgment? Who is in control here? Is there no civilian authority that can call this guy up and say, “What? Are you out of your mind? Don’t you realize how stupid that figure sounds? Do you want people to think you’re delusional? Withdraw the figure immediately and come up with something more credible, like 70%.”

Let’s get real. Would you believe that 99% of the customer complaints against Walmart were false? Would you believe 99% of the complaints against a surgeon were false? Would you believe that 99% of the allegations of sexual abuse made against boy scout leaders or priests were false?

I don’t know what the actual number of legitimate grievances against the police force should be. The Toronto Star didn’t have any difficulty finding at least two representative cases that made the police look pretty bad but which the police resolved in favour of the police. (The investigating officer decided that the two police officers, who corroborated each others’ stories, were more believable than numerous civilian witnesses, who right out of the blue, for no reason at all, decided to make up a bunch of lies about two officers beating up an innocent civilian.) The point is, that even if you think the police are doing a great job, a terrific job, it is simply outside of the realm of human experience that they could be right 99% of the time, or that an honest judge would even think they were right 99% of the time even if, incredibly, they really were.

What this number really means is that if an officer pulled you over by mistake, dragged you out of your car in front of family or friends, kicked you and beat you with a club, and then tossed you into jail for a day or two until the mistake was realized…. well, who’s going to stop him? If he has any hesitations about exceeding the limits of “reasonable” force, they are swept away by his acute awareness of the fact that you have only a 1% chance of success in filing a complaint. This, my friends, is about the same percentage of success you could expect in a police state.

Or you might believe that there is virtually no chance that such a thing could happen, because our Toronto police are better, and more honest, and more virtuous, than any other police force in the world.

Some cops–and some civilians too—believe that we need to give the cops more latitude to deal with those hordes of criminals out there. They believe that most law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear. Right. Like Guy Paul Morin, Donald Marshall, Damien Echols, and David Milgaard. Anyway, the fact that a victim of excessive police force might be innocent is beside the point. The idea that police can use excessive force on anybody, criminal or not, with impunity, is repugnant to a democracy.

The solution is simple: a civilian review board should be set up to handle all complaints against the police officers. Appoint smart, fair, and dedicated people to the board. Tell the police that because we know they are competent and professional, we expect few complaints, but that even the most competent and professional people in the world make a few mistakes, lose their cool, and do stupid things sometimes. And if the police were smart, they would welcome the increased public confidence in them that would result from a fair and impartial review board.

Unfortunately, this is pretty well exactly what they did do a few years ago. The police complained so bitterly about actually having to be accountable to someone else that the Harris government, ever concerned about civil rights (ha ha) disbanded it.