Don’t diss the Dog, bro - guest post by DeusExMacintosh

July 24, 2008 – 1:48 am
By skepticlawyer

[Regular commenter DeusExMacintosh has been noting with some interest commentary around the intertubes on the relationship between Islam, the disabled and - most important - disabled people who need Assistance Dogs to help with independent living. This is something about which she is uniquely well qualified to comment. DEM lives in the UK, where British dogliness and Islamic intransigence are clashing in all sorts of ugly ways. This post offers a few of her thoughts on the issue - SL].

WHY SHOULDN’T IT HAPPEN TO A MUSLIM?

The normally excellent Channel 4 ‘Dispatches’ strand of documentaries recently featured one called “It Shouldn’t Happen to a Muslim”.

Three years after the July 7 bombings in London, Peter Oborne reports on whether the attacks, combined with fears of terrorism, have fuelled the rise of violence and intolerance towards the Muslim community in Britain. Oborne meets British Muslims who live in fear of being attacked, and investigates whether press coverage of terror incidents has had the side-effect of portraying Islam and British Muslims in a negative fashion.

Had you asked me earlier, I’d have agreed that he might have a point. But then SkepticLawyer pointed me to an article in The Daily Mail:

A postcard featuring a cute puppy sitting in a policeman’s hat advertising a Scottish police force’s new telephone number has sparked outrage from Muslims… The advert has upset Muslims because dogs are considered ritually unclean and has sparked such anger that some shopkeepers in Dundee have refused to display the advert. Dundee councillor Mohammed Asif said: ‘My concern was that it’s not welcomed by all communities, with the dog on the cards… They (the police) should have understood. Since then, the police have explained that it was an oversight on their part, and that if they’d seen it was going to cause upset they wouldn’t have done it.’

For those familiar with the UK media scene this sounds suspiciously too good to be true (like the unfounded story of Lambeth council renaming their Xmas celebrations “Winter Festival” to appease the Muslim community in particular) but having checked around the interwebs it seems Tayside police have indeed apologized for not thinking it was necessary to seek diversity advice when putting their star police pup Rebel on a postcard. It’s fifty-fifty on which sector of the public is more offended – those Muslims who have complained about the ad or the wider British community who love their dogs. (Message to Scottish Muslims: If you thought you were a minority before…)

A cringing trustee of the local Dundee mosque quickly pooh-poohed the idea in a local paper.

“I’ve not heard anything about that from members of the community,”… Mr Sarwar said that religious sensitivities would prevent him from displaying the postcard on a building of religious significance but there was nothing to stop them being displayed in shops. “There is not a dog—it is just a picture,” he said.

No real story, then. No great surprise.

The funniest feature of “It Shouldn’t Happen to a Muslim” was Peter Oborne’s outrage that parts of the British media might deliberately distort and misrepresent Muslim views. (No, really? Unlike their typical dedication to accuracy and fairness, you mean?). Personally, I think Mr Sarwar protests too much. As someone who gets around town in the company of a large black Assistance Dog I know that an overwhelming number of Muslims have a genuine revulsion when it comes to even the professional canine corps. I know this because I regularly get full grown adults doing the ‘girl germs’ cringe with sound effects even when we’re metres away which, incidentally, I find bloody offensive (though admittedly useful when faced with a crowded pavement during the Edinburgh Festival – it’s like the parting of the Red Sea). One of the reasons I find this so offensive is because I am very much identified with my dog and can never be entirely sure the disgust is entirely due to him.

Having done a little research it doesn’t appear that Islam is another of the Hoddlesque ‘disability is a curse from God’ school of medievalism – at least officially. That said, the fact that Sikhism officially gives full rights to women hasn’t prevented honour killings in that community either. There are some pretty rank cultural traditions that have managed to survive the imposition of religious principles, and in the case of Islam I do know that lameness can be grounds for divorce under Shariah law. Teacher friends have also told me how many disabled Muslim children, whilst loved and well treated, are kept home and away from public gaze rather than being sent to school. Is that in shame?

Before I had an assistance dog, being disabled hadn’t seemed much of a problem in itself. Using a mobility scooter meant passing by the local mosque down a street dominated by Muslim families and I’d play with the kids – they’d pretend to block the pavement until I gave them money, I’d pretend to run them over. It was very good-natured until the London bombings. The last boy I saw (months later, after acquiring my Assistance Dog) was about six and had seen me coming. He darted out the front door to taunt me “You’re not a mother, you’re not a wife!” before his mother shooed him back indoors. I never saw any of the children again, though I continued to use that route every week for two years. How do I know whether this was due to a fear of reprisals post 7/7, or because their parents didn’t want them mixing with the disabled girl? If my dog is ‘untouchable’, am I?

Last year it was finally declared acceptable for a non-salivating Guide Dog to accompany his blind master into a UK Mosque (though not the prayer hall) but blind people are regularly being refused service by Muslim taxi drivers the world over despite formal advice to the contrary. (At least in Australia they’ve been fired for it).

British women resent being generalized as drunken ‘slags’ as much as Muslims resent being generalized as terrorists but given time both communities will have to come to an accommodation. It has already happened with the Jewish community, who were amongst the first wave of immigration into the UK early last century. Their Orthodox community also has some religious beliefs that don’t sit easily with secularism but it’s been almost a century since Jews were considered an alien and potentially hostile presence in Britain.

Muslim extremists made a mistake in assuming that terrorism would have the same effect in the UK as it had in the US – as local boys who’d grown up during the 30 years of ‘Troubles’ with Northern Ireland you’d think the London 7/7 bombers could have explained this to their Afghan trainers. Perhaps the sorry state of British education explains why they thought suicide bombing for religious reasons was something novel in a country that has been burning Guy Fawkes in effigy most Novembers since 1606. On 7/7 the resigned reaction of a London friend was typical. “So who was it this time?” she sighed. “The rag-heads or the bog-trotters?”

The major fault in the Dispatches documentary was its refusal to acknowledge that there are genuine points of cultural incompatibility between British secular law and Islamic cultural practice. Abuse and vilification of Muslims is a fact, but so is abuse and vilification by Muslims. Hostility seems to be part of the accommodation process for any large group of immigrants; in this case, however, a goodly part of the hostility is coming from the immigrants themselves, apparently in the expectation that the host culture will make all the changes and do all the accommodating.

Why shouldn’t it happen to a Muslim? It happens to me.

By skepticlawyer | Posted in Human/Civil rights, Media, Terrorism | Comments (0)

From Genocide to Altmed

July 23, 2008 – 4:09 am
By skepticlawyer

You could say that Radovan Karadzic successfully treated over 7,500 Bosnian Muslims with his ‘alternative therapy’. One bullet to the brain and the men never experienced health problems ever again.

That’s his business card. And no, I’m not kidding.

Gives new meaning to the MBA phrase ‘interesting career progression’.

By skepticlawyer | Posted in Fark!, Skeptics | Comments (2)

Women as means to an end

July 22, 2008 – 5:53 am
By skepticlawyer

A few days ago, Don Arthur drew my attention to the latest ‘rebuild the busted GOP from the Ground Up’ tome, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s Grand New Party: How Republicans can Win the Working Class and Save The American Dream. I spent today treating Blackwell’s as a library and read about half of it (you’ll be pleased to note that I did, in expiation of my sins, spend a considerable sum on other books). This book is immensely irritating. I was going to write a review, but can’t in good faith do so since I’ve only read half the sucker. I can, however, quote someone else’s review - one with which I substantially agree. Libertarian feminist Kerry Howley nails why I found the half I read so irritating:

I don’t think I am overstating the R&R position when I say that my friends would like to return us to a more traditional and less pluralistic concept of family life. Through social and tax policy, they would privilege heterosexual two-parent families, fund marriage promotion programs, encourage the stigmatization of single parenthood, subsidize motherhood among married women, increase taxes on the childless, and so on. In short, they would structure incentives to encourage women to use their bodies in the one way most appealing to social conservatives.

This position is not wholly without statistical motivation. Children do better on average, along a variety of dimensions and across all income groups, when raised by both of their biological parents. Poor children are more likely to be born out of wedlock, and those that are born to married parents are more likely to see their parents divorce later. But as women have spent some time trying to establish, they are in fact distinct from children. The class of women is also conceptually distinct from the class of mothers; while most, but not all, women will become mothers within their lifetimes, the years spent actively caring for small children will comprise only a small percentage of her total lifespan. Even if it were possible to improve the lives of children by enforcing reactionary gender norms, it would be wrong.

Memo to conservative social engineers: using free citizens as a means to achieve your preferred ends is immoral. No ifs or buts about it. It was immoral when ‘progressives’ did it in pursuance of their grand vision of the common good and group rights. It’s just as immoral when you do it in the name of helping teh kiddies.

Read the whole thing

By skepticlawyer | Posted in Feminism, Personal liberty | Comments (11)

Broken Windows and World Youth Day 08

July 20, 2008 – 8:27 am
By skepticlawyer

I’ve been watching the ongoing debate (and sometime irritation) over Catholic World Youth Day with interest from afar, noting both the Pope’s clear humanity and dignity and the state’s heavy-handed responses to protest. I think Heath G over at Catallaxy is right when he argues that the various state interventions helped poison the well of goodwill for World Youth Day. What should have passed by as a positive and attractive part of Sydney’s ongoing participation in world events was rapidly mired in ugly debates about the loss of civil liberties. This (inevitably) segued into arguments about complicity in both the laws’ passage and the Church’s troubled history with pedophile priests.

While I’m a skeptic and don’t believe any of it (insert random joke about invisible pink unicorns here), I also don’t expect Catholics to adopt my perspectives, either, or to modify other positions that contradict their core beliefs. Take abortion, for example. Catholic opposition to abortion is of a piece with the Church’s opposition to the death penalty. It is quite possible for Benedict XVI to endorse environmentalism, eschew relativism and abortion, all the while still arguing for ‘life-affirming’ policies - without engaging in self-contradiction.

I’ve felt torn in odd ways, too. I take Currency Lad’s point that Cardinal Pell is a target simply by virtue of his refusal to hew to a ‘progressive’ line on many issues. No doubt, however, Pell’s position was made worse by the Iemma government thundering around like a bull elephant waving the ‘Laura Norder’ flag for all it was worth.

What I found most interesting, however, was the state’s determination that pilgrims not be ‘inconvenienced’ or ‘annoyed’. As we all know, the Federal Court rolled the latter part of the emergency law - it being incapable of reasonable definition. One would hope that this will help cure governments of one of the sillier aspects of the Laura Norder bug, but I doubt it.

The desire to use police power to protect people not from crime but from ‘irritation’ or ‘annoyance’ has its origins in George Kelling and James Wilson’s seminal piece of criminological writing, Broken Windows. Interestingly, however, the likes of Iemma (and Britain’s ‘ASBO-boosters’) have never implemented key parts of their original recommendations.

The essence of the first part of Kelling and Wilson’s argument is sketched out early in their piece:

But how can a neighborhood be “safer” when the crime rate has not gone down—in fact, may have gone up? Finding the answer requires first that we understand what most often frightens people in public places. Many citizens, of course, are primarily frightened by crime, especially crime involving a sudden, violent attack by a stranger. This risk is very real, in Newark as in many large cities. But we tend to overlook another source of fear—the fear of being bothered by disorderly people. Not violent people, nor, necessarily, criminals, but disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed.

People - as a general rule - do not respond well to difference outside a certain ‘range’ in their community. Of course, a given community may have a wide ‘range’ - central Oxford, where the University dominates the Town, has a wide ‘range’ when it comes to accepting difference - in clothing, politics, attitudes, activities. However, woe betide any ‘Townie’ who wants to accompany his hoodie and tattoos with a boom-box in the Cornmarket - he’ll be moved on rapidly, and if he persists, ASBOed. Central Oxford’s ‘range’ does not extend to a common feature in American cities - youths playing ‘private’ music in public. I explained this to an American colleague who visited me last week (and noticed the lack of boom-boxes), and he was incredulous. Similarly, a Gownie who strays too far from the Centre while wearing academic dress (especially at night) is in grave danger of being beaten up. The Townie ‘range’ does not extend to oddly dressed members of the (purported) ruling class.

As an aside, I’ve come to the conclusion that the width of liberal societies’ ‘range’ has constricted in recent times thanks to minority demands for acceptance rather than tolerance. The two words have very different meanings, yet proponents of the latter often confuse it with the former. Something of this difficulty may be gleaned from reading the Wikipedia entry on the term. It is possible to be homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, sexist or what-have-you (insert rotten attitude du jour here) while still maintaining tolerance. Intolerance comes about when people act on their prejudices.

Where the likes of Iemma and the architects of the ASBO have departed from Kelling and Wilson’s formula is in their desire to formalise the whole process - to enact laws codifying ‘annoyance’ or ‘harassment, alarm or distress’. As I’ve already argued, this is part of a general ‘ban-happy’ (and very statist) trend in many Western democracies. By contrast, Kelling and Wilson - in a proposal that shocks many liberals - argued that police maintenance of order should be kept extralegal and informal:

The people were made up of ‘regulars’ and ’strangers’. Regulars included both ‘decent folk’ and some drunks and derelicts who were always there but who ‘knew their place’. Strangers were, well, strangers, and viewed suspiciously, sometimes apprehensively. The officer—call him Kelly—knew who the regulars were, and they knew him. As he saw his job, he was to keep an eye on strangers, and make certain that the disreputable regulars observed some informal but widely understood rules. Drunks and addicts could sit on the stoops, but could not lie down. People could drink on side streets, but not at the main intersection. Bottles had to be in paper bags. Talking to, bothering, or begging from people waiting at the bus stop was strictly forbidden. If a dispute erupted between a businessman and a customer, the businessman was assumed to be right, especially if the customer was a stranger. If a stranger loitered, Kelly would ask him if he had any means of support and what his business was; if he gave unsatisfactory answers, he was sent on his way. Persons who broke the informal rules, especially those who bothered people waiting at bus stops, were arrested for vagrancy. Noisy teenagers were told to keep quiet.

These rules were defined and enforced in collaboration with the ‘regulars’ on the street. Another neighborhood might have different rules, but these, everybody understood, were the rules for this neighborhood. If someone violated them, the regulars not only turned to Kelly for help but also ridiculed the violator. Sometimes what Kelly did could be described as ‘enforcing the law,’ but just as often it involved taking informal or extralegal steps to help protect what the neighborhood had decided was the appropriate level of public order. Some of the things he did probably would not withstand a legal challenge.

This process involves trusting the state to police a given community’s ‘range’; it also involves trusting citizens to understand the limits of ’self-help’ when confronted with ‘annoying’ or ‘harassing’ behaviour. I think there is a fair argument that attempting to set these boundaries legally infringes peoples’ rights more notably than allowing ‘order’ to be placed outside the law. Far better for ‘annoyed’ World Youth Day pilgrims to be able to tell gay rights protesters, say, to pull their heads in than to come to a sanitised Sydney swept clean of the very wide ‘range’ of difference that makes the city so remarkable. Low level confrontation may even have the benefit of enriching both groups’ conception of ‘tolerance’; perhaps it may even teach the state that attempting to hide people or ideas others find offensive or annoying is actually a form of deception, in that it pretends that neither difference nor conflict exist.

Kelling and Wilson recognise that this is a difficult balancing act, and - to my mind - come down too firmly on the ‘Laura Norder’ side of the debate. That said, their comment on using the law to always and on every occasion circumscribe policing is very telling:

Once we begin to think of all aspects of police work as involving the application of universal rules under special procedures, we inevitably ask what constitutes an “undesirable person” and why we should “criminalize” vagrancy or drunkenness. A strong and commendable desire to see that people are treated fairly makes us worry about allowing the police to rout persons who are undesirable by some vague or parochial standard. A growing and not-so-commendable utilitarianism leads us to doubt that any behavior that does not “hurt” another person should be made illegal. And thus many of us who watch over the police are reluctant to allow them to perform, in the only way they can, a function that every neighborhood desperately wants them to perform.

By skepticlawyer | Posted in Free Speech, Human/Civil rights, Law | Comments (20)

“We sail tonight for Singapore…”

July 18, 2008 – 7:14 pm
By Legal Eagle

Well, that’s not quite true. The family and I will be flying to Singapore tomorrow for a Conference on the Law of Obligations. I will be taking the laptop, but not sure whether there will be much opportunity for wireless access - if you don’t hear from me for a week, you’ll know why. Wish me luck!

So, in honour of my impending trip, I thought I’d post the Tom Waits song, “Singapore”. For those not familiar with Waits, he has a crazy growl and a tendency towards the surreal.

By Legal Eagle | Posted in Academia, Music, Personal | Comments (5)

Student, grade thyself…

July 18, 2008 – 4:18 pm
By Legal Eagle

Dave sent me this interesting post from Prawfsblog about law students grading their own answers. The author of the post was speaking to another law lecturer, who proposed the following idea for an exam:

…[H]e might give three questions on an exam and ask students to answer all of them. But he also asks them to choose one of the questions they think they did the best on so that will be worth twice as much. E.g., three questions worth 25 points each, but the one question chosen by the student to double up on will in fact be worth 50 points, while the others remain at 25 points each, for a total of 100.

update: I neglected to mention that the student also gets the choice to diversify, such that each of the n questions count for 1/n of the exam points, so students have the choice to avoid making a decision wrt their confidence levels.

I thought this was pretty interesting and hadn’t heard of its use in the annals of law teaching. As far as I can tell, the skill underlying the choice of which question to select is figuring out one’s own confidence levels in an answer.

I’m a little bit dubious about the use of such a method, partly because of my own experience as an undergraduate. Sometimes I was really confident about a subject, and I turned out to do not so well. Other times, I thought I’d barely passed and I turned out to have blitzed the exam. I think there was only one time where I made an accurate prediction of whether I’d done well or not.

There are a number of reasons for this.

First, I always did better in difficult exams. Difficult exams gave me a chance to show off my knowledge, whereas it’s much harder to differentiate one’s self if the exam is easy. But if the exam was difficult, I tended to think I’d done worse than I had.

Secondly, I tended to work harder for subjects where I thought I was going to bomb (Property, Corporations Law, Taxation and other “commercial subjects”)…paradoxically, the upshot of this was that I did really well at those subjects, and not so well in the ones where I just cruised on through.

Thirdly, I had no idea about what made an answer good or not. It is only now, after a few years of marking other people’s exams, that I have an idea of what examiners are looking for. I try to give my students an idea of this (well structured, mentions all relevant points, refers to relevant case law/legislation, emphasises the right issues, has an argument or at least a coherent thread if it is an essay question). It’s the emphasis which is the killer. Sometimes one makes a misjudgment and spends half a question on something irrelevant, or of marginal relevance. This means that the mark will naturally be lower because there’s less time to discuss the really important stuff. Or you stuff up the timing and end up with not enough time to deal with the really important issue. But you might not realise this at the time.

I always try to give students an opportunity to get feedback about their exams. I have discovered that often they are quite surprised about which questions they did badly on, and which questions they did well on. Sometimes, confidence is a bad thing, because it means that the student has blithely skipped over various issues, whereas if they are more cautious about a question, they are more likely to go through the issue thoroughly. Once I show the student why they received the mark, they are quite willing to accept it.

So, I think that students will often misjudge which questions they do well. There’s also a link back to my post on imposter syndrome, which tends to suggest that some people have great difficulty in judging whether they are really good at academic pursuits. Therefore, a marking policy such as the one above could be disasterous.

Furthermore, I do not think there is any real parallel between practice and exams. When one is in practice in a certain area, you live that area of the law every day, and have no doubt about your competence. And if you need to go and confirm your knowledge or check up on something, you can do that before you get back to the client. Exams call for a very different skill-set.

Dave did mention the idea that this would be good for a quiz show, however, and I think he is right. It would be interesting to see how well people do at judging their competency.

By Legal Eagle | Posted in Academia, Education, Law | Comments (3)

Right to annoy

July 16, 2008 – 7:41 pm
By Legal Eagle

Two protesters have successfully challenged a New South Wales law that prevents people from “annoying” World Youth Day participants. What a farcical law! But it does really exist. Clause 7 of the World Youth Day Regulations 2008 (NSW) provides that:

(1) An authorised person may direct a person within a World Youth Day declared area to cease engaging in conduct that: 

(a) is a risk to the safety of the person or others, or 

(b) causes annoyance or inconvenience to participants in a World Youth Day event, or 

(c) obstructs a World Youth Day event.

(2) A person must not, without reasonable excuse, fail to comply with a direction given to the person under subclause (1). 

Maximum penalty: 50 penalty units. [emphasis added]

The protesters, Amber Pike and Rachel Evans, had formed a NoToPope group which proposed to hand out condoms and protest against the Catholic Church’s attitude to abortion, contraception and homosexuality. Naturally, such conduct risked contravening Clause 7(1)(b) of the Regulations above. 

In Evans v State of New South Wales [2008] FCAFC 130, the Federal Court declared that Clause 7(1)(b) was invalid to the extent to which it applied to conduct which may cause annoyance to participants in World Youth Day events. The Court found that it should not construe legislation in a way which interfered with fundamental common law rights, including the right to freedom of speech. The Court said that annoyance was a subjective concept, and very much depended on the individual concerned. It concluded at [83]:

In our opinion the conduct regulated by cl 7(1)(b) so far as it relates to “annoyance” may extend to expressions of opinion which neither disrupt nor interfere with the freedoms of others, nor are objectively offensive in the sense traditionally used in State criminal statutes. Breach of this provision as drafted affects freedom of speech in a way that, in our opinion, is not supported by the statutory power conferred by s 58 properly construed. Moreover there is no intelligible boundary within which the “causes annoyance” limb of s 7 can be read down to save it as a valid expression of the regulating power.

However, “inconvenience” was capable of an objective definition, and that remained in the statute as a legitimate limitation on freedom of speech.

Sounds like an eminently sensible decision by the Federal Court to me. Charterblog has a great analysis of how the likely outcome of a similar case would differ in Victoria (where we have a Charter of Human Rights). Charterblog decides that perhaps the Charter would only rule out moderate to mildly annoying conduct, but that the presence of the Charter might prevent such stupid legislation being enacted in the first place.

For other blawg analyses, see Armagnac’d and WSJ Law Blog (yup, this issue made it to the US).

Update

Hmm, is this annoying or just funny?

(Via Armagnac’d)

By Legal Eagle | Posted in Fark!, Free Speech, Human/Civil rights, Law, Personal liberty, Religion | Comments (23)

This guy is amazing

July 16, 2008 – 10:33 am
By skepticlawyer

In the competition for world’s freakiest voice, Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu has it covered. Unsurprisingly a member of the large (and vastly talented) Yunupingu family, he has developed his own distinctive style (if you’re wondering about the upside-down guitar, he’s both blind and left handed - presumably just turning the thing on its ear was easier than re-stringing).

UPDATE (via Amanda in comments): His latest album is available here. At the moment he’s with an independent label, but somehow I suspect that won’t last long. What a talent!

By skepticlawyer | Posted in Music | Comments (6)

Thomas the Tank Engine and Hayek

July 15, 2008 – 7:40 pm
By Legal Eagle

Thomas

Now, you never thought to see those two in the same sentence, did you? Believe it or not, a law professor has analysed Thomas the Tank Engine as “a pro-market show, but a genuine, Hayekian coordination-of-information free-market type of capitalism…”

The poor fellow is recovering from an operation and his two-year-old daughter has commandeered the TV remote (a phenomenon with which I am very familiar). Which means that he has had to watch lots of Thomas. His theory is that the inefficiency of the trains in Thomas the Tank Engine serve as a negative example, which then throws into relief the benefits of a proper free market.

I must say that I had never really thought about the Isle of Sodor as a transport monopoly before, or of Sir Topham Hatt as an example of the deleterious effect of the link between the aristocracy and capital. Generally, I just zone out into some kind of meditatory state when forced to watch such TV shows (with the exception of the excellent Playschool). I suspect I’ll never be able to watch Thomas in the same way again!

(Via PrawfsBlawg)

By Legal Eagle | Posted in Children, Economics, Fark!, Popular culture | Comments (7)

Personalised number plates

July 14, 2008 – 12:58 pm
By Legal Eagle

I was driving home the other day in the middle lane when three cars came zooming past in the outside lane, well over the speed limit, jockeying for pole position. All three cars had really stupid personalised number plates.

I’ve noticed that there seems to be a general correlation between stupidity of personalised number plate and recklessness of driver.  The more ridiculous the personalised number plate, generally, the more reckless the driver. So people who just have their initials on their number plates are usually pretty much like any other drivers, but someone who has a red number plate with SPRMAN* on it is pretty much guaranteed to be a hoon. I’ve noticed a number of trends in personalised number plates:

  • Young girls with pink number plates saying MISS21 (obviously a 21st birthday present) or BARBIE or something like that;
  • Cars with cartoon character name plates - for example, a yellow car with a number plate saying TWEETY;
  • Guys with some macho number plate, like ZOOMER, or FREEEK, or HANSUM (the cars tend to have spoilers, those little lights underneath and the low profile alloy wheels as well);
  • People of all sorts with incomprehensible personalised number plates, for example GFRICK (what the hell does that mean? why get a number plate that no one will understand?);
  • Business vans - for example, a van for a cleaning company with a number plate like CLEENA (this one I can understand, and have more sympathy for).

I wonder if anyone has done a statistical analysis of personalised number plate drivers and traffic violations? Do personalised number plate drivers have a greater amount of speeding tickets than the rest of us, or is it just my imagination that there is a correlation between personalised number plates and stupid driving habits? My husband was theorising that personalised number plates stick in the memory more, and thus, it’s easier to remember hoons with personalised number plates than those without. But even taking into account that effect, I still think there is some kind of correlation.

If there is a correlation between personalised number plates and reckless driving, why would this be so? Perhaps it’s something to do with pride in one’s car and in one’s driving skills - a person with a personalised number plate is more likely to put extra care into his or her car, and perhaps to think that they have driving skills and capabilities beyond that of the average bear.

What do other people think? Is this something about which others have speculated, or is it all in my imagination?

* NB: Any number plates cited in this post are ones I have invented, not real ones I have seen, and any likeness to a real personalised number plate is purely accidental.

Update

A commenter has pointed out that a psychological study has actually concluded that people who personalise their car (with personal number plates, stickers and the like) are more likely to be aggressive on the road. So I’m not delusional.

Drivers who individualize their cars using bumper stickers, window decals and personalized license plates, the researchers hypothesized, see their cars in the same way as they see their homes and bedrooms — as deeply personal space, or primary territory.

Unlike any environment our evolutionary ancestors might have confronted, driving a car simultaneously places people in both private territory — their cars — and public territory — the road. Drivers who personalize their cars with bumper stickers and other markers of private territory, the researchers argue, forget when they are on the road that they are in public territory because the immediate cues surrounding them tell them that they are in a deeply private space.

“If you are in a vehicle that you identify as a primary territory, you would defend that against other people whom you perceive as being disrespectful of your space,” Bell [one of the researchers] added. “What you ignore is that you are on a public roadway — you lose sight of the fact you are in a public area and you don’t own the road.”

Update 2

Now I can’t help wondering what other generalisations can be drawn about car decoration! What about people who have religious symbols on their cars (eg, “fish” drivers)? If a person is sufficiently devout to put a symbol of her belief on her car, perhaps she believes that God will look after her, no matter how she drives?

What about people who have nodding dogs and collections of stuffed toys on the rear car windowsill? (I tend to think that’s a sign of insanity, but maybe I’m just mean).

By Legal Eagle | Posted in General | Comments (22)