Day: April 18, 2004

NRA Shoots Itself in the Foot

As a pro-gun, anti-campaign finance reform libertarian, I was actually excited to see the National Rifle Assocation debut its NRA News web site. But the actual implementation of the site just plain sucks.

In case you haven’t followed the story around NRA News, the latest campaign finance reform bill places additional restrictions on the ability of groups like the National Rifle Association to take out advertisements, etc. against candidates. So the NRA is routing around the damage of the Supreme Court’s gutting of the First Amendment by essentially establishing itself as a news media organization. It’s started web broadcasts of a talk show and is looking to buy a radio station to carry its message as well.

Great intentions, but the website is horrible on a number of counts.

First, it requires you to give your name, e-mail address and zip code every time you want to visit the site. This isn’t a “register and the login” system, this is a “give us your personal details” everytime you visit the site. This from a group that has fought vigorously and successfully to prevent the creation of any sort of national database or registration system for guns.

Second, it requires Flash. The PSAs and the video of the talk show are broadcast in Flash media player. Ugh. Sure Flash is common, but I hate it being required (and it’s not currently installed in my main browser).

Third, because of this, it isn’t obvious how to save the video to my hard drive. An advocacy group like the NRA should both a) make it easy to download video to the users hard drive and b) encourage users to redistribute said video. After all, the point here isn’t to make a profit but to get the NRA’s message out. Building barriers to that makes no sense.

Consider a group that I personally detest but that has an excellent web strategy — People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Unlike the NRA, there’s no registration or request for personal details. Unlike the NRA, the site uses HTML and doesn’t require Flash except for some interactive applications. And unlike the NRA, PETA makes almost 300 videos — all its PSAs and quite a bit of other video — available for viewing in three different formats and offers a high bandwidth download of all of its video. Moreover, PETA encourages people to distribute and share the video files which widens their audience and saves on bandwidth costs. I have hundreds of megabytes of video from PETA on my web site at the moment. If the NRA were smart, it would make it easy for me to do the same thing with their video.

British Study: Men Who Never Marry Happiest

In December the University of London released a study of 4,000 Britons that found women who married the first man they had a relationship with were the most emotionally healthy women, while men who had multiple cohabitating relationships without getting married were the most emotionally healthy men.

The study claimed that following the breakup of a relationship, men tended to suffer a brief period of depression which waned as they became involved in a succeeding relationship. For women, however, there were longer term effects and the women with the most breakups also had the poorest emotional health.

If true, then the UK is an ideal place to become an emotionally healthy man as the marriage rate there is at its lowest level in more than a century.

Source:

Men happiest as ‘serial monogamists’, says study. Maxine Frith, The New Zealand Herald, February 23, 2004.

New Zealand Police Vow Crackdown on False Sexual Assault Claims

Police in Palmerston North, New Zealand have become so exasperated at the level of false reporting of rape, that they are promising a crackdown and prosecution against people who make false statements about sexual assaults to police.

The Manawatu Evening Standard quoted Detective Sergeant Dave Clifford as saying that the volume of false reports had reached the level where it was diverting too many needed resources to investigate the false claims,

It would be close to one a week now and that’s too much. It’s got to the stage where we have to start locking them up.

. . .

It’s not unusual to have up to six staff investigating a complaint. We put all our resources into major investigations and rape is a major investigation.

Also, if someone is pointed out to us as an alleged offender, there is a stigma attached with that, too, because these things inevitably get out. And if the complainant does become a bona fide rape victim, their history of making false complaints can come back to haunt them. Police need some cynicism to help elicit the truth, but deepening that cynicism does a disservice to genuine victims.

Maybe we could transplant a bit of that common sense to this country.

Source:

Police sick of false sex complaints. Manawatu Evening Standard, January 14, 2004.

Effigies of Taslima Nasreen Burned in India

In January, Muslim protesters burned effigies of writer Taslima Nasreen who has been in the sites of Islamic extremists since the early 1990s.

In 1994, Nasreen received death threats and was forced to flee her native Bangladesh over her novel, Shame. That book, and both of Nasreen’s subsequent novels, have both been banned in Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal for their allaged anti-Islam content (Shame is about a Hindu family mistreated by Muslims).

Nasreen’s major offense has been to declare herself an atheist and protest that the Koran is inimical to women’s rights. Like a Muslim version of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (who made similar arguments about Christianity in the U.S., though without the fatwas). She has called for Bangladesh to drop its Islamic sharia law. In return, a number of Islamic groups put out fatwas offering rewards for her death.

Since 1994, Nasreen has lived in self-imposed exile in Europe and the United States.

Source:

Effigies of writer burned. The BBC, January 21, 2004.

Pakistan Vows to Crack Down on Honor Killings

A day after Pakistan Prime Minister Musharraf issued a public call to end honor killings in that country, the BBC reported that two women in were murdered in what were believed to be honor killings.

In one incident, a man murdered his 21-year-old sister and her husband for marrying without first gaining the consent of the family. In the other incident, a man murdered his 17-year-old sister based on his belief that she was having an affair of some sort.

Estimates by human rights organizations suggest that 400-500 women are victims of honor killings every year in Pakistan. On February 10, Musharraf said that such murders were a “curse” and that his government would prosecute people accused of such crimes (Pakistani police have been accused in the past of doing only cursory investigations into suspected honor killings). Musharraf also called for more debate on Pakistan’s Hadood laws that, among other things, require four male witnesses for women to pursue rape charges against men.

Sources:

Pakistan ‘honour killings’ arrest. Paul Anderson, BBC, February 11, 2004.

Musharraf plea on ‘honour killings’. BBC, February 10, 2004.