Quotulatiousness

May 21, 2019

Four “youths” vandalize model railway show

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

There don’t appear to be any details online about the four “youths” who were arrested then released, so I assume their anonymity is protected by a British equivalent of the “Young Offenders Act”. The Market Deeping Model Railway Club describes the crime on their website:

We were all immensely upset to discover that overnight the school where our show was to be held had been broken into and almost everything totally ruined. This has devastated not only our own members but those of other clubs and the traders who had already set up shop. In the circumstances we felt we had no option other than to cancel the show.

Some of the models destroyed were irreplaceable and while we will of course be seeking to replace and rebuild wherever possible, this will take time and money. We have been overwhelmed by the many messages of support we have received together with offers of financial assistance. Please do help raise funds via our Just Giving page.

Click the image to go to their Just Giving fundraising page.

More on the incident from Deepings Nub News:

Bill Sowerby, Market Deeping Model Railway Club exhibition manager, told Deepings Nub News: “I arrived at 7.30am to be met by one of our members who told me the terrible news.

“Four of the layouts were completely trashed – two of our club’s, one privately owned and one from St Neots club.

“Four demonstrator stands and one for Bourne U3A stall, which would have raised funds for their organisation, was also smashed.

“Fortunately five other layouts in another room were undamaged and we had nine more left to install early this morning.

“It’s really hurtful for us all, not just because of the thousands of pounds we have lost in income – we were expecting between 400 and 500 visitors – and have paid out a lot of money to put on what is the club’s main fundraising event. Demonstrators and trade stands have also lost income.

“But it’s also the time and effort that members put into building the layouts. The St Neots layout took 25 years to construct and our Woodcroft layout took 26 years and involved more than 100 people over those years spending thousands of hours.

“Woodcroft will be repaired, but it’s so sad because a large number of the people who dedicated their time to build it are no longer with us. It has real sentimental importance to the club.

“Although our Knowl End – a children’s layout – was completely destroyed.”

May 17, 2019

QotD: Mark Steyn and the “Human” “Rights” Tribunals

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s statements like these that have landed Steyn on various hit lists, including, most famously, those of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal and the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which are strange quasi-judicial bodies that were stirred to action a decade ago by the Canadian Islamic Congress. Between 2005 and 2007 the weekly news magazine Maclean’s published eighteen articles by Steyn, including an excerpt from America Alone, that were all deemed “Islamophobic” by the human rights tsars. Without going into excruciating detail about the various legal jockeying that took place — who knew one country could have this many commissions and tribunals that could all attack simultaneously? — Steyn and Maclean’s were charged with inciting hatred against Muslims, setting in motion an endless process of discovery and hearings.

“We were trying to lose,” said Steyn. “We wanted them to find us guilty so that we could appeal to a real court, hopefully the Supreme Court, and prove that these hate-speech laws are more absurd than any laws outside North Korea. Before I came along, these human rights tribunals had a 100 per cent conviction rate! The fact that we fought back meant that I became an albatross around their neck. The Thought Police were exposed to massive unrelenting publicity for the first time, and they didn’t expect that. They didn’t expect us to push back. But free speech is on the retreat, and this was not a time for a faint-hearted defence.”

The Canadian Human Rights Commission eventually bowed out of their part in the imbroglio, saying the articles were “polemical, colourful and emphatic” but failed to satisfy the definition of writings “of an extreme nature” as defined by the Supreme Court. But the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal was not so sure, holding a five-day hearing during which the Canadian Islamic Congress presented evidence that twenty articles in Maclean’s presented Islam as a violent religion and Muslims as violent people, with the Islamist lawyer using words like racist, hateful, contemptuous, Islamophobic and irresponsible. Mahmoud Ayoub, a Harvard historian of religion, testified that Steyn didn’t understand the meaning of the word jihad and that, of the 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, less than a million interpreted jihad to justify violence against non-believers. (I don’t know of any other religion in the world that has merely a million devotees willing to kill, but that’s what the man said.)

Mark Steyn, interviewed by John Bloom, “Mark Steyn, Cole Porter and Free Speech”, Quadrant, 2017-05-11.

May 9, 2019

MV Asterix delivers for the Royal Canadian Navy and breach of trust charge is dropped

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

Amid rumours that the Trudeau government is contemplating dropping the charge against Admiral Mark Norman, Matthew Fisher retweeted a link to his article from last year, praising the ship and suggesting that it should be renamed in honour of the man who did everything he could to get the RCN’s only current replenishment ship to sea:

MV Asterix
Photo via Canadian Defence Review

Aboard MV Asterix and HMCS Charlottetown – The Trudeau government would have fits, but the Royal Canadian Navy should consider renaming the MV Asterix the HMCS Admiral Mark Norman.

The controversial new replenishment ship, which entered service on time and on budget this past January, has been performing brilliantly for the navy during sea trials. That was the unanimous opinion of sailors on HMCS Charlottetown and on MV Asterix after a series of refuelling exercises with the Canadian frigate and American destroyers during a hunt for three U.S. nuclear subs that I witnessed recently in the Caribbean.

The only hiccup during the five-day war game was on the American side. The crew on one of the destroyers was unable to establish a good seal on the fuel probe Asterix sent over as the vessels sailed at 15 knots in a two-metre sea with about 30 metres of water between them. However, it only took about 10 minutes to fix the problem.

Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, who ran the RCN before becoming the military’s second-in-command, strongly supported leasing or buying Asterix. The admiral was suspended early last year and subsequently charged with breach of trust for allegedly violating cabinet confidences. He is accused of passing on information pertaining to doubts that the Trudeau government was believed to have had about leasing the vessel. Although there were strong signals that it wanted out of the deal, the government eventually decided to honour a contract that Davie had with the Harper government to lease Asterix for five years at will be a cost of $677 million,according to the Globe and Mail.

“I think the Asterix is fantastic,” said Chief Petty Officer 2nd Class Mark Parsons, the Charlottetown’s chief bosun’s mate, who oversaw two approximately hour-long, problem-free fuel transfers from the tanker to his warship. “We have missed that capability since (HMCS) Preserver was retired in 2014” because of electrical problems and corrosion.

Parsons’ opposite number on Asterix, CPO2 Steve Turgeon, served on the 48-year old Preserver until 2013. Since January he has been training four deck crews of 11 navy sailors each to handle refuellings. This has allowed Canada to once again be an independent blue-water navy after several years in which it depended on NATO allies and leased Chilean and Spanish navy tankers for fuel at sea. A fresh group of navy sailors has just begun training on the Asterix, which is participating with two Canadian frigates in the vast U.S.-led, 25-nation Rim of the Pacific naval exercise off Hawaii this month.

And on the legal front:

Later in the day, the news was finally made official: the government has dropped the charge and Vice-Admiral Mark Norman wants his job back:

The newly exonerated Vice-Admiral Mark Norman says he was alarmed by the persistent belief among senior government officials that he was guilty, and that their false assumptions took a significant financial and emotional toll on him and on his family.

On Wednesday, prosecutors stayed the single criminal charge of breach of trust laid against Norman, a major victory for the senior naval officer who has always maintained his innocence in the face of allegations he leaked confidential information about a project to procure a supply ship for the Royal Canadian Navy. In announcing the decision, Crown prosecutor Barbara Mercier told the court it was necessary in part due to new evidence the defence produced in March.

“This new information definitely provided greater context to the conduct of Vice-Admiral Norman, and it revealed a number of complexities in the process that we were not aware of,” Mercier said. “Based on the new information, we have come to the conclusion that given the particular situation involving Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, there is no reasonable prospect of conviction in this case.”

She did not provide any details on what exactly that information was.

The announcement ends the two-year legal battle against the officer and heads off what would have been a politically explosive trial for the Liberal government in the middle of a federal election campaign.

A fascinating little detail is also reported:

[Admiral Norman only] learned from a reporter’s question that Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan had announced the government would pay for his legal fees. “Wow,” was all he could muster in response. In 2017, the Department of National Defence had denied Norman’s request for financial assistance, concluding he was likely guilty.

So even though they’re finally making the right gestures, they still manage to be as ungracious as humanly possible while doing so. It’s not the kind of reputation you’d want to encourage.

QotD: Respect for the law

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in “the law” as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.

It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like “They can’t run me in; I haven’t done anything wrong”, or “They can’t do that; it’s against the law”, are part of the atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else. One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney’s Walls Have Mouths or Jim Phelan’s Jail Journey, in the solemn idiocies that take place at the trials of conscientious objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing out that this or that is a “miscarriage of British justice”. Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.

George Orwell, “England Your England”, 1941-02-19.

May 8, 2019

Your electronic devices and the Canadian Border Services Agency

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

A few years ago, many civil libertarians were upset that the US government allowed warrantless searches of electronic devices at the border, but it was less well known that the Canadian Border Services Agency does the same at the Canadian border:

According to the CBSA, it has the right to search electronic devices at the border for evidence of customs-related offences — without a warrant — just as it does with luggage.

If travellers refuse to provide their passwords, officers can seize their devices.

The CBSA said that between November 2017 and March 2019, 19,515 travellers had their digital devices examined, which represents 0.015 per cent of all cross-border travellers during that period.

During 38 per cent of those searches, officers uncovered evidence of a customs-related offence — which can include possessing prohibited material or undeclared goods, and money laundering, said the agency.

While the laws governing CBSA searches have existed for decades, applying them to digital devices has sparked concern in an era where many travellers carry smartphones full of personal and sometimes very sensitive data.

A growing number of lawyers across Canada argue that warrantless digital device searches at the border are unconstitutional, and the practice should be stopped or at least limited.

“The policy of the CBSA of searching devices isn’t something that is justifiable in a free and democratic society,” said Wright who ran as a Green Party candidate in the 2015 federal election.

“It’s appalling, it’s shocking, and I hope that government, government agencies and the courts, and individual citizens will inform themselves and take action.”

QotD: Those “my-kid-was-almost-sex-trafficked” hoaxes

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

Perhaps you’re wondering why someone would make up such a preposterous story. I have an idea.

For the last few years, there has been a string of moms going on Facebook, breathlessly claiming that they were out at the mall (or Ikea, or Target), when suddenly they realized that they were being stalked by a kidnapper clearly planning to snatch their kids and sex-traffic them.

The evidence is usually something like, “I saw a guy staring at my baby.” Or, “I saw the couple in one aisle and then I went down a different aisle and there they were again,” or, “I looked outside and there was a van with its door open!”

Inevitably, the mom congratulates herself on having had the wherewithal to figure out what was going on just in time, and bravely thwart the heinous crime by, uh, staring the guys down. Then the mom usually says something like, “if it happened to me it could happen to you,” without reminding readers that in fact, nothing happened. No one grabbed a kid. No one was sex-trafficked. (The head of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, David Finkelhor, says he knows of zero cases of a child kidnapped from a parent in public and sex trafficked.) It’s all in the moms’ heads.

Yet they get thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of approving shares and comments on social media.

Here’s one story. Here’s another, and another, and another. Here’s one that went mega-viral a few years back. You get the idea. It’s a panic, with a twist: adulation.

The mom ends up the hero of the non-event, basking in comments like thank you for sharing this, and so glad you are safe and, you are such a strong, conscientious mama.

If only this hoax story could go as viral as the my-kid-was-almost-sex-trafficked posts.

Lenore Skenazy, “Mom Charged With Falsely Accusing a Man of Trying to Kidnap Her 5-Year-Old at the Mall”, Reason, 2019-07-04.

May 5, 2019

Theresa May’s awful “Withdrawal” Agreement

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

Hector Drummond relays a Spectator article that lists 40 problems with Prime Minister May’s agreement with the EU:

Just in case readers don’t have the time to go through the lengthly document themselves, Steerpike has compiled a list of the top 40 horrors lurking in the small print of Theresa May’s Brexit deal.

[…]

In summary: The supposed “transition period” could last indefinitely or, more specifically, to an undefined date sometime this century (“up to 31 December 20XX”, Art. 132). So while this Agreement covers what the government is calling Brexit, what we in fact get is: “transition” + extension indefinitely (by however many years we are willing to pay for) + all of those extra years from the “plus 8 years” articles.

Should it end within two years, as May hopes, the UK will still be signed up to clauses keeping us under certain rules (like VAT and ECJ supervision) for a further eight years. Some clauses have, quite literally, a “lifetime” duration (Art.39). If the UK defaults on transition, we go in to the backstop with the Customs Union and, realistically, the single market. We can only leave the transition positively with a deal. But we sign away the money. So the EU has no need to give us a deal, and certainly no incentive to make the one they offered “better” than the backstop. The European Court of Justice remains sovereign, as repeatedly stipulated. Perhaps most damagingly of all, we agree to sign away the rights we would have, under international law, to unilaterally walk away. Again, what follows relates (in most part) for the “transition” period. But the language is consistent with the E.U. imagining that this will be the final deal.

The top 40 horrors:

  1. From the offset, we should note that this is an EU text, not a UK or international text. This has one source. The Brexit agreement is written in Brussels.
  2. May says her deal means the UK leaves the EU next March. The Withdrawal Agreement makes a mockery of this. “All references to Member States and competent authorities of Member States…shall be read as including the United Kingdom.” (Art 6). Not quite what most people understand by Brexit. It goes on to spell out that the UK will be in the EU but without any MEPs, a commissioner or ECJ judges. We are effectively a Member State, but we are excused – or, more accurately, excluded – from attending summits. (Article 7)
  3. The European Court of Justice is decreed to be our highest court, governing the entire Agreement – Art. 4. stipulates that both citizens and resident companies can use it. Art 4.2 orders our courts to recognise this. “If the European Commission considers that the United Kingdom has failed to fulfil an obligation under the Treaties or under Part Four of this Agreement before the end of the transition period, the European Commission may, within 4 years after the end of the transition period, bring the matter before the Court of Justice of the European Union”. (Art. 87)
  4. The jurisdiction of the ECJ will last until eight years after the end of the transition period. (Article 158).
  5. The UK will still be bound by any future changes to EU law in which it will have no say, not to mention having to comply with current law. (Article 6(2))

And on for another 35 awful items.

May 4, 2019

Canadian privacy laws

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

Michael Geist asks whether it matters that Canadian privacy laws provide more privacy protection if they can’t actually be enforced:

It has long been an article of faith among privacy watchers that Canada features better privacy protection than the United States. While the U.S. relies on binding enforcement of privacy policies alongside limited sector-specific rules for children and video rentals, Canada’s private sector privacy law (PIPEDA or the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act), which applies broadly to all commercial activities, has received the European Union’s stamp of approval, and has a privacy commissioner charged with investigating complaints.

Despite its strength on paper, my Globe and Mail op-ed notes the Canadian approach emphasizes rules over enforcement, which runs the risk of leaving the public woefully unprotected. PIPEDA establishes requirements to obtain consent for the collection, use and disclosure of personal information, but leaves the Privacy Commissioner of Canada with limited tools to actually enforce the law. In fact, the not-so-secret shortcoming of Canadian law is that the federal commissioner cannot order anyone to do much of anything. Instead, the office is limited to issuing non-binding findings and racing to the federal court if an organization refuses to comply with its recommendations.

The weakness of Canadian law became evident last week when the federal and British Columbia privacy commissioners released the results of their investigation into Facebook arising from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The report details serious privacy violations and includes several recommendations for reform, including new measures to ensure “valid and meaningful consent”, greater transparency for users, and oversight by a third-party monitor for five years.

Facebook’s response? No thanks. The social media giant started by disputing whether the privacy commissioner even had jurisdiction over the matter. After a brief negotiation, the company simply refused to adopt the commissioners’ recommendations. As their report notes “Facebook disagreed with our findings and proposed alternative commitments, which reflected material amendments to our recommendations, in certain instances, altering the very nature of the recommendations themselves, undermining the objectives of our proposed remedies, or outright rejecting the proposed remedy.”

May 3, 2019

The rarely used US Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA)

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

Ron Paul wonders why Russian national Maria Butina got a harsher sentence under the Foreign Agent Registration Act than an actual foreign agent who was paid millions of dollars by the Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein:

Russian gun rights activist and graduate exchange student Maria Butina was sentenced to 18 months in prison last week for “conspiracy to act as a foreign agent without registering.” Her “crime” was to work to make connections among American gun rights activists in hopes of building up her organization, the Right to Bear Arms, when she returned to Russia.

She was not employed by the Russian government nor was she a lobbyist on Putin’s behalf. In fact the Putin Administration is hostile to Russian gun rights groups. Nevertheless the US mainstream media and Trump’s Justice Department are treating her as public enemy number one in a case that will no doubt set the dangerous precedent of criminalizing person-to-person diplomacy in the United States.

The Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) was passed in 1938 under pressure from the FDR Administration partly to silence opposition to the US entry into World War II. While a handful of cases were prosecuted during the war, between 1966 and 2015 the Justice Department only brought seven FARA cases for prosecution.

Though very few cases have been brought on FARA violations, one of them was against Samir Vincent, who was paid millions of dollars by Saddam Hussein to lobby for sanctions relief without registering. He got off with a fine and “community service.”

Millions of dollars in unregistered payments from Saddam Hussein gets no jail time, while Butina gets 18 months in prison for privately promoting a cause most Americans support! How is this justice?

The US Justice Department is not even as tough on illegals who commit capital crimes in the US!

Unfortunately Maria Butina was in the wrong place at the wrong time. With the rise of the “Russiagate” hysteria, Butina’s case was seen as a useful tool by Democrats to push the idea that President Trump was put into office by the Russians. Plus, many of them are also hostile to our Second Amendment and to the National Rifle Association. So it was a perfect storm for Butina.

The power of the patriarchy

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

As we are often told, men have distinct advantages in modern society that women are still struggling to achieve for themselves. Daphne Patai doesn’t seem to have got the memo, however:

In contemporary America, women and men still act out ancient roles. From the point of view of the men, the society is a matriarchy: Women have physically less demanding jobs — with the sole exception of childbirth, by now a rare event in the average woman’s life. Women sustain far fewer injuries on the job, are not required to go to war, take better care of their health, and for these reasons and many others enjoy a lifespan significantly longer than that of men.

In this society, men use their physical strength, when necessary, on women’s behalf. Women claim to be equal partners when that suits them and claim to be entitled to special consideration when that suits them. They insist on autonomy in maintaining or aborting pregnancies, but at the same time, they determine the fathers’ duties-and rights, if any. Women claim child support. They can either demand or impede fathers’ continuing involvement with their offspring, as the women see fit. The result is that women have advantages over men in child custody suits, just as they have learned to use charges of child sexual abuse and domestic violence.

Though dozens of studies show that women, by their own account, initiate violence against their domestic partners as often as (if not more often than) men, and cause as much injury when weapons are involved, somehow the social mythologies of this country keep that fact from gaining broad public attention, let alone credence.

But worst of all, in terms of the interactions of daily life, are women’s emotional demands on men. At home, men routinely sit through harangues that demonstrate women’s greater verbal skills and emotional agility. Men, inarticulate, try to figure out what is required of them in a given situation. Not by accident, verbal therapies in this society archetypically began with men listening and women speaking. Even as little boys, males learn to be in awe of girls’ verbal fluency. The feeling of ineptness, of being no match for females at the verbal and emotional level, is the common inheritance of all but a few exceptional males.

The matriarchy here described, structured to protect women’s interests as against men’s (and, ironically, having conned men into defending such a set up) puts a premium on women’s special social and emotional skills. Everywhere, women engage men and one another in personal conversation, offering and receiving disclosures, demanding commiseration, giving advice, spreading censure. Men, trained to keep to their workhorse style, are uncomfortably cornered by women, in the workplace, and at home, demanding that they speak from the heart. When asked “How are you?” women give a detailed and precise accounting. In offices, they spend valuable time discussing personal matters.

Musgrave 9mm: A Gun for the Black Market

Filed under: Africa, History, Law, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 27 Mar 2019

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…

In the brief couple of years between the election of a new black-majority government in South Africa in 1994 and the dissolution of the Musgrave company, it attempted to produce a new 9mm pistol to sell to the burgeoning market of black South African citizens buying handguns. Ownership of pistols by black citizens had been legal under apartheid, but was (not surprisingly) quite uncommon – this began to change in 1994. The most popular pistol at the time was the Norinco 213 Tokarev in 9x19mm, which was available in large numbers and at very low cost.

To compete against this, Musgrave designed a simple blowback, polymer framed pistol chambered for 9x19mm using Beretta 92 magazines (which Musgrave had a large supply of, being the licensed Beretta distributor in the country). The gun was extremely simple, held together with a handful of screws and using a single-action-only hammer-fired mechanism. It was a commercial flop, however — unable to match the quality and price combination of the Tokarev and only about 500 were made in 1995 and 1996.

Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754

April 29, 2019

Cannabis stores struggling against cheaper black market weed outlets

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

In a rational world, a license to sell legal cannabis from a storefront where you have almost a legal monopoly would be a license to print money — the market demand is very clearly real and widespread. Yet Toronto’s legal cannabis stores are still suffering:

How much would it suck to go through all the trouble of opening a legal weed store, only to have dozens of people do the exact same thing without paying for permits, inspections or meeting any sort of government regulations?

How much would it suck to then watch these people not only get away with their illegal operations, but do so while luring your customers away with cheaper prices?

Probably as much as it would suck to sink years of your life into building a retail cannabis business and then learning that only 25 of such stores could exist in all of Ontario — and that the owners of those stores would be chosen at random.

It’s been nearly one month since Doug Ford’s PC government allowed the first wave of brick and mortar retail cannabis stores to open across Ontario. Three have launched so far in Toronto, where five licenses were issued in total, but many consumers aren’t pleased with consistently long lines and higher (than pre-legalization) prices.

So, like the rest of Canada, Toronto continues to buy black market weed.

Roughly 20 unlicensed dispensary storefronts are still up and running across the city as of April 25, in addition to more than 100 illegal marijuana delivery services.

You can find them all on WeedMaps, a popular online cannabis community that’s been listing these types of businesses for adult consumers in North America since 2008.

It’s not that police and bylaw enforcement officers can’t find these illicit dispensaries — I mean, operators are advertising their locations and menus online for all to see.

The problem is that no level of government can (or will) shut them down for very long.

“Why not?” you ask? Well, it’s complicated.

QotD: Prostitution

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

I had a few patients who were prostitutes. I remember one well-dressed lady in her 40s, whose profession I asked in the course of my history-taking.

“Dominatrix,” she said.

She was obviously very good at it because she had an international clientele, including, for example, a judge in Alabama. She told me that she never went anywhere in her car without her kit, for she might receive an emergency call at any time from Hong Kong or South Africa. You might have thought that being whipped by one woman in black fishnet stockings was as good as being whipped by another, but apparently this was (and I presume still is) not so: It’s the words and gestures that go with the whipping that count as well.

This activity of hers gave her a very good living (her car was far better than mine); she was sending her daughter to private school. I admired her enterprise and thought of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Was she or the judge in Alabama to blame? Was either of them to blame at all?

Of course, she wasn’t typical of the profession, and hard cases, as they say, make bad law. But I am not at all sure that I saw the poor prostitutes in my street as merely victims, as the new French law would have them. Not everyone with their life history becomes a crack-taking prostitute. This does not mean that I did not pity them for what they had become. If we can truly sympathize only with those who have done nothing to contribute to their own fate, we shall have very restricted sympathies indeed.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Turning Tricks Into Sympathy”, Taki’s Magazine, 2016-04-09.

April 24, 2019

Opponents claim Doug Ford is using booze liberalization as a distraction … if so, it’s working well

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

Chris Selley documents just how Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s opponents are unable to ignore the (personally teetotal) Ford’s alcohol-related proposals:

A peculiar affliction has broken out among Ontarians who think their relatively new government is devoting far too much time and attention to liberalizing alcohol laws: They can’t stop talking about it.

I don’t mean people with entirely fair public health concerns (though I think those concerns are pretty marginal, given the modest changes). And I don’t mean the pearl-clutching hordes who think allowing alcohol consumption in parks will lead to mayhem, no matter how civilized the results might demonstrably be elsewhere. (That peculiarly Ontarian crew has certainly made itself heard, though, and it seems to include a surprising number of progressive millennials.)

I mean people who didn’t have particularly strong views one way or the other about 9 a.m. mimosas, tailgate parties, drinking in parks or buying beer at the corner store, or might even have supported some legislative relaxation, but who now can’t stop railing against them even as they deplore the government’s actions on objectively more serious files.

[…]

On letters and op-ed pages, you’ll find the topic of booze popping up in all sorts of places it objectively doesn’t belong — not if one doesn’t want to be distracted, anyway. It seems to lead people down all sorts of strange blind alleys. One Toronto Star columnist noted that neither Premier Doug Ford nor Finance Minister Vic Fedeli will “touch a drop themselves,” but that “they are making it easier for you to access just in time for breakfast, happy hour, or a nightcap.” So what? Why would anyone want the premier’s or finance minister’s personal tastes and preferences influencing public policy?

Another Star columnist spent seven paragraphs sneering at the idea of tailgating in Ontario before declaring herself perfectly fine with the idea. “But,” she asked, “is tailgating what Ontario needs?” Is that the standard, then? Government shall only allow the masses such entertainments as they “need”?

Using booze as a “distraction” is not a new tactic. It became a running joke during Kathleen Wynne’s tenure that whenever things were going (especially) badly for her government, she would pop up to announce another batch of supermarkets authorized to sell beer and cider (and sometimes, though much more rarely, wine!).

April 7, 2019

Rubin “Hurricane” Carter and the murders at the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey

Filed under: History, Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I was too young to know anything about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter except what I “learned” from listening to Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” long after the events. In Quillette, Lona Manning recounts the story, which doesn’t agree with Dylan’s interpretation (but Dylan was far from the only journalist or celebrity to be fooled):

How many people who followed the BBC Radio 4 podcast series about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter were startled — or even outraged — when Carter was not triumphantly vindicated in the final episode?

In the small hours of June 17, 1966, two black men walked into a late-night Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey and opened fire on the occupants. They left bartender James Oliver and patron Fred Nauyoks dead at the scene and mortally wounded a woman named Hazel Tanis, who would succumb to her injuries a month later. Another customer named Willie Marins lost an eye in the shooting but survived. Neighbors Patty Valentine and Ronald Ruggiero told police that they had seen two black males flee the scene in a white vehicle. This testimony was corroborated by petty thief Alfred Bello who walked past the dead and the dying to empty the cash register after the shooters had fled.

Half an hour later, Paterson police stopped middleweight boxer Rubin Carter and his companion John Artis in a car bearing out-of-state plates that matched the eyewitnesses’ description. A search of the car yielded a .32 and a 12 gauge shotgun, the weapons police later determined had been used in the shooting. Carter and Artis were eventually indicted by a grand jury and convicted of the Lafayette murders in 1967. Carter vehemently protested his innocence and his case became a cause célèbre after his 1975 autobiography found its way into the hands of Bob Dylan. Carter was retried in 1976, after the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the first conviction had been unsafe. Despite support from Dylan, Muhammad Ali and the New York Times, the two were convicted again. John Artis was paroled in 1981, and Carter was finally released in 1985 after the second conviction was overturned and prosecutors declined to try him a third time.

Sports reporters Joel Hammer and Steve Crossman spent 18 months researching and reinvestigating the case and promised listeners of the BBC’s podcast that they would provide the “full” and “true” story. Their in-depth look at the crime provides far more detail about the murders than can be gleaned from Bob Dylan’s 1975 protest song or the hagiographic 1999 Norman Jewison film starring Denzel Washington. Dylan accused the prosecution team of framing Carter for the slayings and called them “criminals in their coats and their ties” who were “free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise.” Crossman and Hammer are likewise very critical of the prosecution; for example, they think that Alfred Bello should never have been allowed to testify. How could the life of such a man, be in the palm of some fool’s hand? And they argue that the prosecution ignored — or perhaps even suppressed — an investigation into a very plausible suspect, Eddie Rawls (who is now deceased). But they stop short of calling it a frame-up and an attempt at judicial murder.

On the other hand, Crossman and Hammer think the “racial revenge motive” was a reasonable one. The very first newspaper accounts of the slaughter at the Lafayette Grill included the speculation that the murders were committed in revenge for the slaying, earlier that night, of black bartender Roy Holloway and this would also be the prosecution’s contention. That Crossman and Hammer now accept the plausibility of this theory is a significant concession to the prosecution’s version of events, not least because it was Judge Lee Sarokin’s rejection of this motive which led him to overturn the second conviction—the prosecution’s case, he ruled, had been based on “racism rather than reason.”

Coincidentally, on the front page of the East Bergen Record, under the murder story, there was a wire service article about Stokely Carmichael proclaiming “Black Power” at a rally in Mississippi, an event which marked the transition from the peaceful civil rights tactics of Dr. Martin Luther King to the radical activism of the Black Panthers. These two articles encapsulated all the elements of the Lafayette Grill case that continue to be debated over 50 years later. Why did someone walk into a working-class bar and slaughter the occupants? Was the black community in Paterson in a ferment that night because a white man blew off Holloway’s head with a shotgun? And what, if anything, did this have to do with the state of race relations in America at the time?

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