Quotulatiousness

November 24, 2022

Viewing the Public Order Emergency Commission spectacle from abroad

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray on how the Public Order Emergency Commission inquiry in Ottawa has utterly failed to show up on the radar of the US legacy media:

I conducted a dignified survey of a number of politically savvy people this evening, by which I mean I staggered around a bar and slurred questions at friends, and I was surprised to discover that no one has noticed the POEC. At all. Similarly, the US news media appears to have taken a nearly complete pass on covering the thing. The New York Times offered a single story, more than a month ago, describing the fact that it would be happening, and then lapsed into silence. I left some blank space at the bottom of this image so you can see all the nothing down there:

But the spectacle has been extraordinary, and it opens the curtains on the world of high-status malevolence, elite mediocrity, and news media cravenness. For background, remember that the Canadian government led by Prime Minister Derek Zoolander responded to the peaceful truckers’ “Freedom Convoy” in Ottawa and anti-Covid-measure blockades at several border crossing areas this February — the infamous bouncy castle protests — by invoking Canada’s Emergencies Act, for the first time since that law was created in 1988. That declaration of a national emergency allowed the government to exercise extraordinary power, most infamously in the form of an order to Canadian banks to completely freeze the bank accounts of protest participants. Zoolander lost his state of emergency as the Canadian Senate signaled its growing alarm at the decision, after a shameful vote in the House of Commons to affirm the declaration. The state of emergency was declared on February 14, and revoked on February 23.

Now comes the second act. The invocation of the Emergencies Act triggers a legal duty to review that decision after the fact. Here’s the directive calling the Public Order Emergency Commission into being.

So the commission is meeting, with testimony from government officials, and — this is the important part — with cross-examination from lawyers representing the targets of the declaration of emergency. In effect, the truckers are in the room; their representatives can ask questions of the government officials who did things like ordering banks to take their money because they disagreed with the government.

If you read the mainstream Canadian press, which pisses me off every time I try to do it, this means that the moronic lawyers for a bunch of idiotic terrorists are being pointlessly mean to senior government officials. Conspiracy theories! Debunked claims! I mean, truck drivers versus respectable figures, amirite? All the usual deployment of marking language is in effect, telling readers what to think about what’s happening while carefully limiting their description of what’s actually happening.

[…]

And finally, most remarkably, if you followed the Emergencies Act debate in the House of Commons back in February, you’ll recall that Prime Minister Zoolander and his ministers responded to every criticism and question regarding their handling of the convoy by saying that Canadians won’t stand with people who carry Confederate flags, and with “those who fly swastikas”.

That’s how they framed the entire event, full stop: the truckers, the swastika people. The anti-vaccine-mandate Nazis!

The news media picked up that framing and ran with it, non-stop, pounding the message that the truckers were flying Nazi symbols and Confederate flags:

Now: Miller said, before the commission, that he knows the identity of the people who carried those Nazi and Confederate flags in Ottawa — and that they’re employees of a public relations firm that was working on behalf of officials in the Canadian government.

October 26, 2022

When mere accusation functions as a “guilty” verdict

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Sports — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I don’t follow hockey at all, so I hadn’t heard anything about the case of Jake Virtanen and the Vancouver Canucks after Virtanen was accused (but found not guilty) of sexual assault. Janice Fiamengo provides an outline of the case:

NHL forward Jake Virtanen’s once-promising career with the Vancouver Canucks was torpedoed by a rape allegation, and even after he was acquitted in a court of law, detractors have demanded he be shunned as a sexual predator.

In the summer of 2021, Virtanen was first suspended and then bought out by the Canucks after a woman alleged that he had sexually assaulted her in his hotel room in September of 2017. The woman had accompanied Virtanen to his room after a night of partying. She claimed that after she repeatedly refused his sexual overtures, he forced himself on her; Virtanen said the sex had been consensual.

The fact that the complainant stayed the night with her alleged rapist and then waited nearly four years to tell anyone or report to police may have played a role in the jury’s decision, in July of 2022, to find Virtanen not guilty. It was a He said/She said story that simply did not prove guilt.

Feminist advocates, however, couldn’t care less about the verdict, and many hockey commentators seem to feel the same way.

Mary Jane James, CEO of the Sexual Assault Centre of Edmonton, was adamant in interview with Canada’s state broadcaster that the allegation mattered far more than the verdict, and that no team in the NHL should touch Virtanen. Referring to the decision by the Edmonton Oilers to sign Virtanen to a 2-month tryout last month, James accused Oilers’ leadership of “taking the verdict at face value, regardless of what the allegations were”. It didn’t seem to matter to James that our entire justice system relies on the acceptance of verdicts over unproven allegations.

In James’ expressed opinion, any man accused of a “very, very serious” sexual crime (and what sexual crime would she not consider serious?) should be presumed guilty. Hockey teams, she insisted, need to send a message that “We are not going to associate with anyone who has this history” (i.e., of being accused).

It is an extraordinarily crude statement of contempt for the cherished principles of western jurisprudence — and would presumably not apply to Mary James herself if she were ever tried and acquitted — but it corresponds fairly closely with the thrust of recent feminist activism: Accused men should be made pariahs, and so should anyone who refuses to participate in their shunning.

October 20, 2022

Canadian firearms law – as deliberately opaque and confusing as the human mind can concoct

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Tim Thurley peels back the covers and provides a glimpse of the inanities, stupidities, and political opportunism that shape Canadian firearms legislation:

A typical arrangement of guns seized by Toronto Police back in 2012. Most of these weapons would be in the “restricted” or “prohibited” categories under the Firearms Act, and pretty much by definition not typically available to the majority of Canadians.

Canadians often assume our government is doing its best. Not the politicians, sure, but there is a broad assumption that at least the bureaucrats tirelessly working behind the scenes to implement political decisions must have a grasp on the facts and exhibit some consistency in decision-making. In few places is there a larger discrepancy between this perception and the grimmer reality than in how the government classifies firearms.

I’ve long had an interest in firearms policy. Those familiar with it will know how onerous the Access to Information process is and wonder why I partake on my own time and dime; I can answer only that a graduate M.Sc. thesis on legislative impacts on firearm homicide and time working in politics and government have made me a glutton for punishment. More seriously, it’s a fascinating field, and I have some insight into political and policy processes. And as any specialist in a hot-button policy area knows, there is nothing more frustrating than seeing bad policy enacted in your field again, and again, and again.

Firearms are classified into three categories under the Firearms Act: non-restricted, restricted, and prohibited. All three require a separate level of licence, obtained with escalating difficulty after multiple courses and checks. (Prohibited licences are no longer issued to the regular public, but some Canadians hold them as part of a grandfathering in of prior licence holders.) Each category is primarily determined by firearm design. A simple overview: restricted firearms are some rifles and most pistols, prohibited firearms are shorter-barrelled pistols or fully automatic (or converted to another mechanism therefrom), and non-restricted firearms are anything else meeting the legal definition of a firearm, typically meaning typical hunting rifles and shotguns.

That’s a simplified version, but that’s the system.

In theory.

In practice, as my requested documents confirmed, firearm classification in Canada is an opaque and byzantine nightmare. A messy plethora of firearms which meet the functional criteria for being non-restricted, subject to the least stringent oversight and controls, are prescribed by regulation as either restricted or prohibited, and therefore subject to more controls or outright banned. Since functional differences are accounted for by law and did not apply in these cases, the deviations must have another explanation.

In short, politics.

Take the 2020 Nova Scotia attacks. Despite the unlicensed murderer smuggling his firearms from the United States, the Liberals took the opportunity to issue an executive Order-in-Council that banned a bunch of legally owned Canadian guns mostly because it was an easy wedge for the next election. The facts of the case were irrelevant, as was the fact that the banned firearms were responsible for a minuscule fraction of Canadian homicides. The government did not even bother writing the ban by how the firearms functioned, which while unhelpful from a homicide-reduction perspective, would have at least been a coherent position. The order, among other things, simply identified a few well-known guns by name and banned those.

This is where the concept of “variants” matters. When a firearm is designated by regulation as restricted or prohibited, the designation includes all variants of the firearm, which then receive the same classification. This makes sense. Ridiculous as classifying firearms by name over function already is, it would be yet more ridiculous if a mere renaming by a manufacturer, for instance, was sufficient to evade a legal classification.

Most ridiculous of all is that the public does not and cannot know what constitutes a “variant”. The Firearms Act does not define it. The Canadian government does not define it. Nor do its agencies, even the one responsible for determining variants: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The Mossberg Blaze 47 saga is illustrative of this problem. It is uncontroversial to assume that a precise mechanical copy of an original Russian AK-47 with a different name and slight design changes is still an AK-47. But when Mossberg, the manufacturer, slapped a plastic frame bearing some resemblance to Kalashnikov’s famous design on its Blaze rifle — a cheap, non-restricted, rimfire rifle suitable for, at worst, a particularly aggressive colony of rabbits — that new gun, dubbed the Blaze 47, somehow transformed from an unthreatening small-game rifle to a dangerous AK-47 variant prohibited under Former Prohibited Weapons Order No. 13.

The amazing transformation of a simple .22LR plinker into a facsimile of a dangerous “black fully semi-automatic murder machine”.

These head-scratching decisions have confused firearm owners and manufacturers, who wasted decades trying to understand how the government decides to classify their guns. It all seemed very random.

Surprise! It is!

October 12, 2022

Medically assisted suicide in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Common Sense, Rupa Subramanya discusses how quickly MAID (Medical Assistance in Death) became a commonality in Canada:

Toronto General Hospital in 2005.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

When we think of assisted suicide or euthanasia, we imagine a limited number of elderly people with late-stage cancer or advanced ALS in severe pain. The argument for helping them die is clear: Death is imminent. Why should they be forced to suffer?

In 2015, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that assisted suicide was constitutional. In June 2016, Parliament passed Bill C-14, otherwise known as the Medical Assistance in Dying Act. MAiD was now the law of the land. Anyone who could show that their death was “reasonably foreseeable” was eligible. In this respect, Canada was hardly alone: The Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Australia, and New Zealand, among others, allow assisted suicide. So do ten states in the U.S.

In 2017, the first full year in which MAiD, which is administered by provincial governments, was in operation, 2,838 people opted for assisted suicide, according to a government report. By 2021, that figure had jumped to 10,064 — accounting for more than 3 percent of all deaths in Canada that year.

There have been a total of 31,664 MAiD deaths and the large majority of those people were 65 to 80 when they died. In 2017, only 34 MAiD deaths were in the 18- to 45-year-old category. In 2018, that figure rose to at least 49. In 2019, it was 103; in 2020, 118; and in 2021, 139.

Today, thousands of people who could live for many years are applying — successfully — to kill themselves.

Indeed, in some Canadian provinces nearly 5 percent of deaths are MAiD deaths. In 2021, the province of Quebec reported that 4.7 percent of deaths in the province were due to MAiD; in British Columbia, the number was 4.8 percent. Progressive Vancouver Island is unofficially known as the “assisted-death capital of the world”, doctors told me.

Why the dramatic increase? Over the past few years, doctors have taken an increasingly liberal view when it comes to defining “reasonably foreseeable” death. Then, last year, the government amended the original legislation, stating that one could apply for MAiD even if one’s death were not reasonably foreseeable. This second track of applicants simply had to show that they had a condition that was “intolerable to them” and could not “be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable”. This included applicants like Margaret Marsilla’s son, Kiano.

In 2023, those numbers are almost certain to rise.

Next March, the government is scheduled to expand the pool of eligible suicide-seekers to include the mentally ill and “mature minors”. According to Canada’s Department of Justice, parents are generally “entitled to make treatment decisions on their children’s behalf. The mature minor doctrine, however, allows children deemed sufficiently mature to make their own treatment decisions.” (The federal government does not define “mature”, nor does it specify who determines whether one is mature. On top of that, the doctrine varies from one province to another.)

Dr. Dawn Davies, a palliative care physician who supported MAiD when it was first conceived, said she had “tons of worries” about where this might lead. She could imagine kids with personality disorders or other mental health issues saying they wanted to die. “Some of them will mean it, some of them won’t,” she said. “And we won’t necessarily be able to discern who is who.”

Hugh Scher, an attorney advising Margaret Marsilla, told me: “While other countries have explored extending assisted suicide to minors, those governments have insisted on substantial safeguards, including parental notification and consent. Canada is poised to become the most permissive euthanasia regime in the world, including for minors and people with only psychiatric illness, having already removed the foreseeability of death or terminal illness as an essential condition to access euthanasia or assisted suicide.”

October 8, 2022

Faint glimmers of hope for Canadians’ “right to repair”?

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist on the state of play in modifying Canada’s digital lock rules to allow consumers a tiny bit more flexibility in how they can get their electronic devices repaired:

“The Self-Repair Manifesto from ifixit.com ‘If you can’t fix it, you don’t own it’. Hear, hear!” by dullhunk is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Canadian anti-circumvention laws (also known as digital lock rules) are among the strictest in the world, creating unnecessary barriers to innovation and consumer rights. The rules are required under the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Internet Treaties, but those treaties leave considerable flexibility in how they should be implemented. This is reflected in the countless examples around the world of countries adopting flexible anti-circumvention rules that seek to maintain the copyright balance. Canada was pressured into following the restrictive U.S. approach in 2012, establishing a framework is not only more restrictive than required under the WIPO treaties, but even more restrictive than the U.S. system.

One of the biggest differences between Canada and the U.S. is that the U.S. conducts a review every three years to determine whether new exceptions to a general prohibition on circumventing a digital locks are needed. This has led to the adoption of several exceptions to TPMs for innovative activities such as automotive security research, repairs and maintenance, archiving and preserving video games, and for remixing from DVDs and Blu-Ray sources. Canada has no such system as the government instead provided assurances that it could address new exceptions through a regulation-making power. In the decade since the law has been in effect, successive Canadian governments have never done so. This is particularly problematic where the rules restrict basic property rights by limiting the ability to repair products or ensure full interoperability between systems.

The best policy would be to clarify that the anti-circumvention rules do not apply to non-infringing uses. This would enable the anti-circumvention rules to work alongside the user rights in the Copyright Act (also known as limitations and exceptions) without restricting their lawful exercise. This approach was endorsed by the 2019 Canadian copyright review, which unanimously concluded:

    it agrees that the circumvention of TPMs should be allowed for non-infringing purposes, especially given the fact that the Nintendo case provided such a broad interpretation of TPMs. In other words, while anti-circumvention rules should support the use of TPMs to enable the remuneration of rights-holders and prevent copyright infringement, they should generally not prevent someone from committing an act otherwise authorized under the Act.

The government has not acted on this recommendation, but two private members bills are working their way through the House of Commons that provide some hope of change. First, Bill S-244 on the right of repair. Introduced by Liberal MP Wilson Miao in February, the bill this week passed second reading unanimously and has been referred to the Industry committee for further study. The lack of a right of repair exception in Canadian digital lock rules has hindered both consumers and Canadian innovation significantly, leaving consumers unable to repair their electronic devices and farmers often locked out of their farm equipment. After farmers protested against similar copyright restrictions, the U.S. established specific exceptions permitting digital locks to be circumvented to allow repair of software-enabled devices.

Given the impact on consumers, the agricultural sector, and the environment, a provision that explicitly permits circumvention for purposes of the right of repair in Canada is long overdue. Indeed, such an approach is consistent with the 2019 copyright review recommendation:

    Recommendation 19

    That the Government of Canada examine measures to modernize copyright policy with digital technologies affecting Canadians and Canadian institutions, including the relevance of technological protection measures within copyright law, notably to facilitate the maintenance, repair or adaptation of a lawfully-acquired device for non-infringing purposes.

October 1, 2022

QotD: The Left does not handle political reverses gracefully

Filed under: Law, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

While this [recent progressive losses on religious school funding, gun control, voter ID, the repeal of Roe v. Wade] all may seem like fun and games to us, keep in mind that for the Left, this is the most serious business they’ve had to face since the 1960s. Being reversed in the courts — repeatedly, openly — represents a massive monkey wrench in their “march of progress”. And as I discussed last week, the Left has been accelerating the imposition of its agenda over the past two decades to the point that it cannot slow down or back off without the risk of losing everything. It’s truly all or nothing for these folks now. And they realise this.

The Left is absolutely right to fear all of this because these things represent the furtherance of a growing trend towards decentralisation that I’ve been talking about recently. This is bad for them because the Left’s whole program — and I’m talking about going back for at least two centuries — has been based on the centralisation of power into its own hands. Everything the Left does is predicated upon the “principle” of coalescing power into its hands in government, NGOs, woke corporations, and a constellation of other institutions that all coordinate together to advance the progressive agenda. Due to our place in our current demographic-structural secular cycle, this decentralisation is nigh inevitable, but that doesn’t mean the Left won’t (literally) burn through a lot of social capital fruitlessly trying to stop it.

These recent Supreme Court rulings represent real loses for their program at the most sovereign level in our government. This, in turn, signals openly their loss of control over that institution. This is why we’re seeing increasingly desperate ideas being floated for ploys to take back the SCOTUS, from packing the Court to (somehow) convincing 2/3 of the states to gut it completely. They know they’ve lost control over it as an institution, so they’re perfectly willing to dynamite it (hopefully not meaning that literally), like an ex-girlfriend who takes a baseball bat to a guy’s X-Box rather than just giving it back to him like a sane person would do. In the space of a few short years, the SCOTUS has gone from hero to zero in the Left’s eyes, since for them everything is situational in nature. Once something, anything, outlives its usefulness to them, it goes up against the wall.

The thing to understand from this is that these losses the Court has handed to the Left are real things. They’re not just some kind of plot to “mobilise their voters” to win the midterms in November. While lefties may often be cunning, they are also arrogant and in many ways kind of dumb. These people are really not out here playing some grandmaster game of four-dimensional chess. They’re desperate, which is why they’re willing to engage in such blatant attempts at gaming the system through naked procedural manipulation. They’re the ones who are suddenly finding themselves in the place of having to operate outside of “our sacred norms” by refuting the legitimacy of institutions that go against them.

Bear in mind that the Left’s entire view of legitimacy is predicated on this “ever-forward march of progress”. To “move backwards” is to show weakness, to reveal a chink in the armour of the dialectic of inexorable progress. This sense of legitimacy, in turn, was based upon their capture of the various power-generating and power-wielding institutions, including the Supreme Court, since the “right” people now had possession of the means to remake society. What a lot of people forget is that the whole “march of progress” since the mid-1960s occurred because of this institutional takeover. Their judicially imposed agenda has never really “won the argument” on any issue. They just used social and political force to achieve their goals, followed up by media-driven social pressure and anarchotyranny to “encourage” conformity among the general population. So yeah, especially with something like the repeal of Roe v. Wade, their whole program is in jeopardy. The post-Roe stance on abortion adopted in 1973 was the truly radical stance on this issue, but they don’t want you to realise this.

Theophilus Chilton, “The Left Is in a Precarious Place”, The Neo-Ciceronian Times, 2022-06-29.

September 19, 2022

QotD: Representative government

Filed under: Government, Law, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If it’s to work at all, representative government has to be representative. That is, it must be consented to by the governed. But not only did we not consent to be ruled this way, we couldn’t. Just to take the most obvious problem: We have no idea who our rulers actually are.

Hawaiian judges are our kakistocracy‘s public face, but all the decisions that matter are made long before the hacks in black get involved. As we know, we Americans commit, on average, three felonies a day. If, when, and how these come to the State’s attention are almost completely random. This is true for any law, actually, and because it is, it’s not really an exaggeration to say that your livelihood, and often your actual freedom, depends on what side of the bed the cop got up on this morning.

If The Authorities notice you when they’re in a good mood, you skate. If The Authorities are in a bad mood, though — tired, hung over, had a fight with the spouse, whatever — you’re screwed. What actually happens to you depends on the lawyers, a.k.a the most incestuous little fraternity on the planet. Whether they choose to prosecute or not, and for what, and what deals they make over a drink or seven determine what happens to you once you get in front of hizzoner … who, of course, is also butt-buddies with all the lawyers who appear in his chambers, since he was one of them not too long ago and they remain his entire social circle.

Who in his right mind could possibly agree to this? No, forget “right mind” — it’s simply not possible for anyone, not even someone as far out on reality’s fringes as the SJWs, to consent to this. Those “people” (in the strict biological sense) think houseplants have human rights, but not even they would agree to have their life’s course determined by two dimbulbs with great hair and ugly neckties cutting deals with each other in a dive bar.

But so long as we fetishize the form of “representative government,” it can’t be otherwise. As folks in Our Thing never tire of pointing out, had The People ever been consulted about our preferences, at any time after 1963, we’d still be living in a White Christian nation with a solid manufacturing base and a minuscule military footprint. If it were possible to throw the bums out, we would’ve thrown out every bum on every ballot since at least Calvin Coolidge. But we can’t throw the bums out, because the process is rigged.

Severian, “Form > Process > Outcome”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-09-06.

September 17, 2022

A royal assault on free speech | The spiked podcast

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

spiked
Published 16 Sep 2022

Tom, Fraser and Ella discuss the clampdown on republican protesters. Plus: the Ukrainian counteroffensive and the madness of Mermaids.
(more…)

September 1, 2022

Rotherham Borough Council proudly announces they will be the first “Children’s Capital of Culture”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Honest to God, you can’t parody the real world harder than it parodies itself:

The news that the South Yorkshire market town of Rotherham would be the world’s first “Children’s Capital of Culture” in 2025 has been greeted by many as some kind of sick joke.

Rotherham is at the heart of England’s group-based child sexual exploitation crisis. In 2012, The Times revealed that a confidential 2010 police report had warned that vast numbers of underaged girls were being sexually exploited in South Yorkshire each year by organised networks of men “largely of Pakistani heritage”. South Yorkshire Police and local child-protection agencies were shown to have knowledge of widespread, organised child sexual abuse — but failed to act on this on-the-ground intelligence.

Rotherham borough council, South Yorkshire Police and other public agencies responded by setting up a team of specialists to investigate the reports. In 2013, an independent inquiry spearheaded by Professor Alexis Jay was launched. Her subsequent report into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, published in 2014, made for awfully grim reading. It found that at least 1,400 children had been subjected to appalling forms of group-based sexual exploitation between 1997 and 2013. The report detailed how girls as young as eleven years of age — either in Year 6 or Year 7 of school — had been intimidated, trafficked, abducted, beaten and raped by men predominantly of Pakistani heritage.

Jay was also deeply critical of the institutional failures that had allowed organised child sexual abuse to flourish in Rotherham. The report concluded that there had been “blatant” collective failures on the part, firstly, of the local council, which consistently downplayed the scale of the problem; and secondly, on the part of South Yorkshire Police, which failed to prioritise investigating the abuse allegations. Indeed, the Jay Report found that the police had “regarded many child victims with contempt”. The inquiry discovered cases involving “children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone”. One young person told the inquiry that gang rape was a normal part of growing up in Rotherham. Just let that sink in — groups of adult-male rapists preying on vulnerable girls was normalised in an English minster town.

The Jay Report also took the local authorities to task for elevating concerns about racial sensitivities over the protection of the children in their care — an all-too-familiar element of the nationwide grooming-gangs scandal in England. As the Jay Report put it: “Several [council] staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so”.

The safety and protection of the most vulnerable girls in society was sacrificed on the altar of state-backed multiculturalism and diversity politics. A recent report published after a series of investigations carried out by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) under “Operation Linden”, found there were “systemic problems” within South Yorkshire Police that meant “like other agencies in Rotherham … it was simply not equipped to deal with the abuse and organised grooming of young girls on the scale we encountered”. South Yorkshire Police recently landed itself in further hot water after it was revealed by The Times that the police force was failing to routinely record the ethnic background of suspected child sexual abusers. For Rotherham, suspect ethnicity was missing for two in three cases.

August 29, 2022

“What did you do in the Covid War, Daddy?”

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Health, Law, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Janice Fiamengo hopes that the future isn’t female, for the sake of all of us:

If Covid was a war, as it was frequently depicted as being, it was one in which none of the typical masculine virtues required by war were in evidence. Gone was the valorization of stoicism, courage, forgetfulness of self, rational risk assessment, and the curtailment of emotionalism. In their place came generalized anxiety, self-righteous vindictiveness, and the longing for (an unattainable) safety at all costs.

In his book United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis, American psychiatrist Mark McDonald noted the disappearance of men from the Covid state as a key factor in our descent into social psychosis. Of course men remained in existence, but their roles were reduced to enthusiastic compliance with even the most trivial of health rules.

As a psychiatrist with extensive clinical experience, McDonald was uniquely positioned to diagnose some of the underlying causes of Covid panic. He notes in the book that women, evolved to be hyper-attentive to the needs of infants and simultaneously aware of their own vulnerability as maternal caregivers, tend to be far more susceptible to anxiety disorders than men. Women evolved over millennia to look to men for protection of themselves and their children (p. 30-31), and men evolved to provide it.

Yet as Covid experts encouraged us all to worry about the safety of our families, with daily case counts and endless updates on (de-contextualized) death numbers, “men failed […] dismally in their duty to provide a sense of safety and security for the women in their lives” (p. 41). When some women insisted fearfully on rules to protect themselves and their loved ones — even irrational rules such as outdoor masking and limitations on how children played together — men, whose traditional role has been to “calm and ground women’s fears” (p. 39), either did nothing or went along. Some men, of course, led the charge.

The emasculation of men had been prepared for a long time, and under Covid it came to fruition. Men could not reassure the women in their lives or stand up to the infantilizing Mother State. They could not speak out to put the Covid threat in perspective. Most of them couldn’t even decide independently whether to go to work in the morning. McDonald is well aware of the social forces that have contributed to the feminization of men — he notes especially how “healthy expressions of masculinity […] have all been redefined as universally unhealthy” (p. 52) — but even he does not fully understand the depth of the anti-male attack that prepared the ground for Covid-enforced male passivity.

For decades now, with the advent of no-fault divorce, mother-favoring custody laws, the determination to stamp out (subjectively defined) alleged sexual harassment, and the mandate to “Believe Women”, it has been made clear to men that their lives and careers remain intact entirely at the pleasure of feminist ideologues or potentially vengeful ex-wives. One wrong move, an inappropriate comment, a gaze that is too intense, a tone-deaf request for a date, a sexual encounter where the woman is left unhappy, or merely having married the wrong woman, can lead — and too often does lead — to the ruination of a man’s reputation, a forced psychiatric evaluation, the garnisheeing of his wages, imprisonment on false charges, and the judicial kidnapping of his children. Scholar Stephen Baskerville has extensively documented the injustices in his devastatingly compendious Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family and his more recent The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Governmental Power. For a heartbreaking and fully researched personal account, see Greg Ellis’s The Respondent: Exposing the Cartel of Family Law.

For well over 20 years, it has been made more and more difficult for men to respond as men once did, firmly and unplacatingly, because many men now know that everything they have built in their lives — and their ability to continue to build, to contribute their gifts, to live a normal life, to be a father to their children — now hinges on their avoiding the fury of a state-supported complaining woman. It is this bedrock vulnerability, the reality that even guiltless men can be imprisoned on a woman’s word and can lose their life savings and children, that more than anything else has silenced and paralyzed many decent and brave men.

August 26, 2022

It’s now apparently illegal to tell a Californian elected official that they’re “not God”

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray discusses the recently signed California law intended to prevent proles from “bullying” elected officials from now on:

The Romper Roomification of the American political class continues apace.

I’ve written several times about SB 1100, a tedious bill written by tedious people to stop the “bullying” of tedious elected officials at the tedious public meetings of tedious local legislative bodies. Hold on a moment while I see if I can work the word tedious into that sentence one more ti— nope, we’re good.

This week, California’s tedious governor signed the tedious thing, so everybody has to be nice from now on and not hurt anybody’s tedious widdle feewings. The tedious California legislature spews out so many tedious bills that Newsom doesn’t usually offer signing statements on the things, group-signing them in box lots and paying about as much attention to them as anybody else does. So.

For a look at what the state has supposedly just prohibited, do yourself the very mild favor of reading this piece of tedious pearl-clutching from some television news idiots in San Francisco:

Here’s the example of “bullying”, using the tedious example of the tedious Los Gatos politician Marico “Tedious” Sayoc as the tedious designated martyr:

    Last year, anti-vaccine and anti-LGBTQ groups targeted Los Gatos Mayor Marico Sayoc during town council meetings.

    One Los Gatos resident spoke at the podium during an October meeting to say, “Madam Sayoc, you are not God! How dare you force your ideologies on our children! We the people of Los Gatos do not consent to the forced mutilation of our bodies, mind, and sovereignty.”

They targeted her! For example, they spoke during the public comment section of a public meeting and told an elected official — loudly and angrily, but still — that they disagreed with her. The public spoke at … public comment.

Taking the story at face value, telling a member of a suburban city council that she isn’t God is bullying, and state law now prohibits the bullying of the members of city councils, so you can no longer tell the members of California city councils that they aren’t God, because that’s being mean. If I’m reading the theological implications correctly, I believe this means that the members of California city councils have now been legislatively elevated to the status of actual gods, and will therefore no longer know death or suffering, and so we’ll have to sacrifice livestock to propitiate them or they’ll destroy our crops. But we may have to wait for the courts to weigh in on all of that.

In practical terms, the bill means literally nothing at all. After amendments that removed some even dumber stuff, the version passed by the legislature and signed by Newsom just says — I am not making this up — that city councils may remove individuals who are disruptive, which the law defines as people who engage in disruption. Free tautology lessons in the senate chamber, stop by anytime.

August 21, 2022

QotD: The “social responsibility” of the corporate executive

Filed under: Business, Law, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to their basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom. Of course, in some cases his employers may have a different objective. A group of persons might establish a corporation for an eleemosynary purpose — for example, a hospital or a school. The manager of such a corporation will not have money profit as his objectives but the rendering of certain services.

In either case, the key point is that, in his capacity as a corporate executive, the manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation or establish the eleemosynary institution, and his primary responsibility is to them.

Needless to say, this does not mean that it is easy to judge how well he is performing his task. But at least the criterion of performance is straight-forward, and the persons among whom a voluntary contractual arrangement exists are clearly defined.

Of course, the corporate executive is also a person in his own right. As a person, he may have many other responsibilities that he recognizes or assumes voluntarily — to his family, his conscience, his feelings of charity, his church, his clubs, his city, his country. He may feel impelled by these responsibilities to devote part of his income to causes he regards as worthy, to refuse to work for particular corporations, even to leave his job, for example, to join his country’s armed forces. If we wish, we may refer to some of these responsibilities as “social responsibilities.” But in these respects he is acting as a principal, not an agent; he is spending his own money or time or energy, not the money of his employers or the time or energy he has contracted to devote to their purposes. If these are “social responsibilities,” they are the social responsibilities of individuals, not business. What does it mean to say that the corporate executive has a “social responsibility” in his capacity as businessman? If this statement is not pure rhetoric, it must mean that he is to act in some way that is not in the interest of his employers. For example, that he is to refrain from increasing the price of the product in order to contribute to the social objective of preventing inflation, even though a price increase would be in the best interests of the corporation. Or that he is to make expenditures on reducing pollution beyond the amount that is in the best interests of the corporation or that is required by law in order to contribute to the social objective of improving the environment. Or that, at the expense of corporate profits, he is to hire “hardcore” unemployed instead of better qualified available workmen to contribute to the social objective of reducing poverty.

In each of these cases, the corporate executive would be spending someone else’s money for a general social interest. Insofar as his actions in accord with his “social responsibility” reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending the customers’ money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money.

Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”, New York Times, 1970-09-13.

August 18, 2022

MAID in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Critic, Ben Woodfinden discusses the maple-flavoured slippery slope we’re gaining speed on: what’s known as “Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID)”:

Toronto General Hospital in 2005.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Canada is widely seen as one of the world’s most progressive nations in the world, “leading the way” (depending on where you stand) on a variety of social issues. But in recent months, Canada has been garnering some less than savoury international attention because of the dark side of one of its recent progressive accomplishments, namely the assisted suicide regime that has been created since the Supreme Court struck down prohibitions on assisted suicide in 2015. The tragic situation that has developed in Canada offers a warning to Britain and other countries considering going down a similar path, both to be cautious about opening the assisted suicide floodgates and about empowering judges to decide whether such things should be allowed.

When Canada’s enlightened judicial philsopher kings and queens overturned criminal prohibitions on assisted suicide in Carter v. Canada, they overturned their own precedent. In 1993 a majority of the Supreme Court found that the criminal code provisions that prohibited assisted suicide did not ultimately violate the Canadian Charter. In 2015 the Court changed its mind. The law didn’t change, of course, but the court decided that “the matrix of legislative and social facts” surrounding the case had changed. Thus the interpretation of constitutional rights must change with them.

Plenty of the same people who were outraged that the United States Supreme Court would overturn precedent on seminal abortion decisions, seemingly had no problem with the overturning of precedent in this Canadian case. This is because implicit in the view of rights and judicial review that many progressives hold, is that it is perfectly acceptable to overturn precedent in the name of expanding or establishing some newly discovered right — but once this is done, the debate is settled and there can be no reasonable dissent or change of heart. History, it seems, only marches in one direction.

An important part of the Carter decision, where the court determined that relevant social facts had changed, was essentially a blithe dismissal of exactly what has come to pass in Canada less than a decade after the decision. The court rejected the concern that once assisted suicide was allowed in some rare cases, there would be a “slippery slope” from helping terminally ill people end their lives, to a system in which vulnerable people like the disabled were caught in a euthanising net.

Evidence presented in the case by a medical expert from Belgium that this might be possible, was dismissed by the court because “the permissive regime in Belgium is the product of a very different medico-legal culture”. Unlike those barbaric Belgians, enlightened Canada could avoid sliding down this slippery slope in which safeguards are easily gotten around. They would avoid the creeping expansion of eligibility by setting up a “carefully regulated scheme” that would keep its application narrow and exceptional.

Spoiler: No. No, we didn’t.

August 16, 2022

“Penguin Random House is a vampire corporation”

Filed under: Books, Business, Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Belatedly, as I was away for the weekend, here’s something from the latest SHuSH newsletter on the Random Penguin court case:

At the beginning of the millennium, Random House (pre-Penguin) had revenues of $2.3 billion (all US figures) and a profit margin of 9 per cent. At the end of the aughts, it had revenues of 2.3 billion and a profit margin of 9 per cent. It was the biggest publishing company on the planet but it had ceased to grow.

Growth matters, especially to Random House’s parent company, Bertelsmann SE, a public company. People buy shares in publicly listed companies because they believe the entity will grow and produce larger profits in the future, making the share price rise and the investor happy. That is the whole game for public companies.

When an asset at a public company does not contribute to growth it is dead weight. It needs to be fixed or jettisoned.

Bertelsmann decided to fix Random House. In 2012, it struck the richest deal in book publishing history, acquiring 53 per cent of Penguin Books, which it then merged with Random House to make the biggest publisher even bigger.

It was said at the time that the two publishers, with combined revenues of $3.9 billion, would be able to share costs, attract better talent, take more risks, offer new products, develop new markets, and otherwise innovate. Together they would have the scale to stand up to bookselling chains like Barnes & Noble and the massive digital players, Amazon and Apple.

It was a lot of hype, of course. Random House had its pick of talent, all the size it needed to negotiate with Barnes & Noble, and it would never be in the same league as Amazon. Markus Dohle, CEO of Penguin Random House, is lucky to get a mid-level account manager on the phone at Amazon.

But the deal went ahead and expectations for the new Penguin Random House were sky high. They had to be. Bertelsmann’s purchase price valued Penguin at $3.5 billion, or more than twenty times its annual profits of $171 million. Penguin Random House would have to be far more than the sum of its parts to justify that price.

Over the next several years, Bertelsmann doubled down on its bet, scooping up the remaining 47 per cent of Penguin in two separate transactions to eventually own it outright.

Did any of the anticipated magic happen?

The first full year of a combined Penguin Random House was 2014. Revenues were about $4 billion, and that’s where they’ve been ever since (leaving aside a nice bump in 2019, the year of Michelle Obama). Profits are up, which might be considered a good sign. But they didn’t grow as a result of the combined firm’s increased scale, new competitive muscle, better talent, new markets, new products, or innovations. As far as I can tell, the improved profitability was achieved the old-fashioned way: the payroll shrunk from a high of 12,800 to 10,800. Also, e-books and audiobooks improved the profitability of all publishers. And the Obamas each knocked one out of the park.

The point is that seven years down the road, Penguin Random House remained exactly the sum of its parts, minus 2000 workers. The acquisition was a big-time bust. Most of the $3.5 billion purchase price was wasted.

July 6, 2022

“The Great Charter of the Liberties” was signed on June 15, 1215 at Runnymede

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West on the connections between England’s Magna Carta and the American system (at least before the “Imperial Presidency” and the modern administrative state overwhelmed the Republic’s traditional division of powers):

King John signs Magna Carta on June 15, 1215 at Runnymede; coloured wood engraving, 19th century.
Original artist unknown, held by the Granger Collection, New York. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

England does not really go in for national monuments, and when it does they are often eccentric. There is no great shrine to Alfred the Great, for example, the great founder of our nation, but we do have, right in the middle of London, a large marble memorial to the animals that gave their lives in the fight against fascism. And Runnymede, which you could say is the birthplace of English liberty, would be a deserted lay-by were it not for the Americans.

Beside the Thames, some 10 miles outside London’s western suburbs, this place “between Windsor and Staines”, as it is called in the original document, is a rather subdued spot, with the sound of constant traffic close by. Once there you might not know it was such a momentous place were it not for an enclosure with a small Romanesque circus, paid for by the American Association of Lawyers in 1957.

American lawyers are possibly not the most beloved group on earth, but it would be an awful world without them, and for that we must thank the men who on June 15, 1215 forced the king of England to agree to a document, “The Great Charter of the Liberties”.

Although John went back on the agreement almost immediately, and the country fell into civil war, by the end of the century Magna Carta had been written into English law; today, 800 years later, it is considered the most important legal document in history. As the great 18th-century statesman William Pitt the Elder put it, Magna Carta is “the Bible of the English Constitution”.

It was also, perhaps more importantly to the world, a huge influence on the United States. That is why today the doors to America’s Supreme Court feature eight panels showing great moments in legal history, one with an angry-looking King John facing a baron in 1215.

Magna Carta failed as a peace treaty, but after John’s death in 1216 the charter was reissued the following year, an act of desperation by the guardians of the new boy king Henry III. In 1300 his son Edward I reconfirmed the Charter when there was further discontent among the aristocracy; the monarch may have been lying to everyone in doing so, but he at least helped establish the precedent that kings were supposed to pretend to be bound by rules.

From then on Parliament often reaffirmed Magna Carta to the monarch, with 40 such announcements by 1400. Clause 39 heavily influenced the so-called “six statutes” of Edward III, which declared, among other things, that “no man, of whatever estate or condition he may be … could be dispossessed, imprisoned, or executed without due process of law”, the first time that phrase was used.

Magna Carta was last issued in 1423 and then barely referenced in the later 15th or 16th centuries, with the country going through periods of dynastic fighting followed by Tudor despotism and religious conflict. By Elizabeth I’s time, Magna Carta was so little cared about that Shakespeare’s play King John didn’t even mention it.

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