If you’re going to play legal footsie with pirates over paying for music, best you pay your internet domain fees. This site used to belong to these guys. Jacqui Cheng at Ars Technica has the story.

(Hat tip: Bretton Vine.)

With those immortal words, Dirty Harry Callahan confronts a scumbag with a gun of some size (”Freeze, cop! Now, left hand, pull out your gun. … My, that’s a big one!”). It is a movie classic. It makes you grin with a deep sense of sympathetic satisfaction.

Why? It’s horribly violent, is it not? Would you let your kids see ol’ Clint deliver sweet extra-judicial justice through the barrel of a .44? If not, why not?

I can’t help thinking that we used to handle violent behaviour in children far more elegantly than we appear to do today. In the old days, violence was simply punished, often with moderate violence. Usually, it just became a non-issue.

Today, we have zero tolerance school policies. Kids get suspended for even talking about violence, or drawing stick figures with guns. We have films rated inappropriate for children not only because of sex, nudity and bloody extremes, but for common violence, language and all manner of prejudice.

We’re extending the repressive psychology of taboos. Did it work for sex? Weren’t the free love generation exactly the kids who grew up when prudes and censors were all over the media industry? And with our conservative nanny approach to violence in the media, do we have any less violence among children today? Do we have less bullying?

I don’t know, but I can’t remember any school stabbings or shootings when I was young. These days, they’re regular tabloid fare.

Ever thought that violence may, in fact, be quite normal? When do you react violently and hit the keyboard? When you’re frustrated, and have exhausted rational options of dealing with a problem, not so? Wouldn’t the same logic go for violence in children? Wouldn’t they succumb to violent outbursts when they’re unable to deal rationally with problems? Yet we keep getting told that violence in the media — films, computer games, news bulletins — is what causes violent behaviour. That it somehow teaches children that violence is okay. This simply doesn’t make sense to me.

What makes far more sense to me is research described in Scientific American, which suggests what most parents probably know already, but some no doubt will not admit about their little angels: violent behaviour in children is perfectly normal. It is to be expected, as a natural expression of frustration when they struggle to communicate, or are unable to affect their circumstances through rational action. Proclivity to aggression varies not by what kids see on television, but by their genetic makeup, early development and social skills.

Moralistic and over-protective policies, whether imposed by parents on their children, teachers on their pupils, or governments on their citizens, not only constitute a dangerous infraction against individual liberty, but they’re probably counter-productive too.

When they told me I was too young to see Year of the Dragon, they should have known they’d only provoke a violent reaction.

(Hat tip: Jonathan Davis.)

This is a little psychopathic perhaps, but then, fantasies of how we’re destroying the planet (and how we can “save” it) appear to be fairly common, so perhaps indulging our inner psychopath isn’t so abnormal after all.

LiveScience.com has a thing about lists. So they put together a useful collection of techniques they think might be destructive on a planetary scale. Things you and I might be able to pull off. From messing about with strangelets or black holes to hacking away with planetary-scale earthmoving equipment, from building a self-replicating earth-eating machine, to being a little careless with the energy trapped in a lightbulb. Don’t let your kids read them: I have no doubt that a suitably geeky six-year-old with a chemistry set and an electronics kit will figure out a way to make this stuff happen.

One often hears, from moderate, socially-conscious capitalists such as John McCain, why climate change — or at least the emissions they think might cause climate change — can be dealt with most effectively using “market oriented” means, such as a cap-and-trade system. The idea has merit, in that the market will indeed most efficiently allocate the government-mandated cuts in emissions. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the idea, however, since the cap is not imposed by the market, but rather by politicians. It’s a bit like imposing price controls not directly, but by requiring a given average price from all producers. It’s better than capping all prices, but it’s still price control.

Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw takes McCain to task on exactly this issue. McCain favours cap-and-trade, but disfavours carbon taxes. Mankiw clearly and concisely points out that there is no economic difference between the two policies, other than that taxes raise revenue for the state.