Judged by a wasp — "This tiny individual was judging me."

I'm reading Jordi Casamitjana interview: I’m a vegan thanks to Franco and wasps/An ‘ethical vegan’ fired by a charity has changed the law for his fellow animal lovers. His campaign began with a nest of insects" (London Times):

Something life-changing happened while Jordi Casamitjana was working on his PhD on the social behaviour of wasps. He was observing a nest when one of the insects turned and looked straight at him. “My heart was thumping,” he recalls. “This tiny individual was judging me. And it decided ‘you’re fine’ and didn’t raise the alarm [to the rest of the nest].” He vowed that day to devote his life to helping animals....

[His] devotion to his beliefs led a judge to rule... that ethical veganism is a philosophical belief and therefore a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010... 

Growing up in Catalonia in the 1960s under the rule of General Francisco Franco, he lived “in an oppressive state”. His parents were not allowed to write “Jordi” on his birth certificate; instead they had to use the Spanish spelling “Jorge”.

“Being oppressed was the root of my veganism,” he says. “It gave me empathy with those who are oppressed, and who is more oppressed than the animals? I found the world very hostile and animals seemed much nicer. From a very young age I just wanted to be close to them.”

That's from 2 years ago. I'm reading it this morning because it came up in the sidebar as I was reading something new: "Women who eat little meat and dairy put their health at risk, says scientist." Key message there: If you're vegan, you need to take special care to get enough iron, magnesium, iodine, calcium, and zinc.

Casamitjana's rule for living: “Everything I do is based on two things: minimising the damage I’m doing to others and maximising the help to those who need it the most. That’s it: that’s my entire life.”

Strip away the civilized veneer, and human beings are still capable of anything

I'm obliged to American Partisan for posting a video of the rebellion and civil war in the Congo in 1964, when white mercenaries and Belgian paratroopers had to restore order across thousands of square miles of equatorial forest and bush.  The video is explicit:  you'll see bodies and parts of bodies, all of them real, and most of them casually discarded or even used as decorations by the fighting men.  That's what such absolute disregard for human life does to those who encounter it.  Eventually, it grinds you down.  You become numb, inured to it, no matter how deep your faith or developed your conscience.

I'm not going to embed the video here, because it's very graphic in its depiction of brutality and horror.  Nevertheless, if you want to see what Africa can be like at its worst, I recommend you watch it.  You'll find it at this link.  When you've done so (or if you'd rather not watch it, for which I don't blame you), read on below.

The thing is, nothing's changed in Africa.  Precisely that same brutality is going on right now in the east of the Congo.  The terrorist groups who oppose (and sometimes attack and kill) the medical teams trying to deal with Ebola?  They're the descendants of the same people who slaughtered so many thousands in the sixties.  It's not just the Congo, either.  The Rwanda genocide, the Burundi civil war, the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, the South Sudan civil war, the Sierra Leone conflict, the First and Second Liberian civil wars, the Rhodesian conflict, South Africa under apartheid . . . the list goes on and on.  Nor is it just Africa.  The Killing Fields of Cambodia, the East Timor genocide, the Nicaraguan Revolution, the Salvadoran Civil War . . . need I name more?  For another example of this sort of casual brutality in action, see the documentary "Cry Freetown" about the civil war in Sierra Leone.  You'll find it at this link.  The same warning applies to that video as to the earlier one - it's brutal.

This is the reality of more primitive societies when the thin veneer of civilization is removed from them.  Decades of colonial rule, followed by independence and decades of alleged "education" and "development", have not changed that basic reality.  I know.  I've been in many of those countries, and seen that at first hand for myself.  Nor is it only allegedly "primitive" societies.  Our First World nations are just as vulnerable to such savagery.  Consider the Holocaust, or the lynching of black people during the civil rights struggle in the American South.  It's just that we (usually, but not always) take longer to strip away our slightly thicker veneer of civilization.

Many people in the First World today have become so insulated from this sort of reality that they literally can't conceive of it.  Yet . . . it's not very far from us.  Consider cartel violence in Mexico, or the worst of the crime-ridden inner-city ghettoes in the United States.  Precisely the same savagery is evident there.  It's almost indescribable to a Western audience, because their educated, civilized minds just can't wrap themselves around such things.  Yet . . . it's true.

We may degenerate more slowly than others, revert to savagery more gradually than others:  but in all of us, civilization is only so deep.  Pushed far enough, some - too many - of us really are capable of reverting to the most primitive savagery.  I hate to acknowledge that, and I don't want to believe it, but I've seen too much to doubt it.

Peter

Isn't this fraudulent misrepresentation?

I was baffled to read about a sales tactic by food delivery companies such as DoorDash and others.

In March 2019 a good friend who owns a few pizza restaurants messaged me ... For over a decade, he resisted adding delivery as an option for his restaurants ... But he had suddenly started getting customers calling in with complaints about their deliveries.

. . .

He realized that a delivery option had mysteriously appeared on their company's Google Listing. The delivery option was created by Doordash.

To confirm, he had never spoken with anyone from Doordash and after years of resisting the siren song of delivery revenue, certainly did not want to be listed. But the words "Order Delivery" were right there, prominently on the Google snippet.

. . .

Tricking businesses onto your platform and creating additional headaches for small business owners in the pursuit of Softbankian growth is a bad as it gets. Many restauranteurs were complaining about their Google listings being "hijacked" by Doordash, sometimes even usurping their own preferred delivery.

These underhanded tricks aren't unique to Doordash though. In recent weeks there has been some great work coming out around a Yelp - Grubhub phone scam. This one is just priceless (seriously, read this Buzzfeed piece). Grubhub for their own sites generates a phone number for each restaurant that goes to a centralized, Grubhub owned call center. If someone calls in and orders via this number, the restaurant gets charged a fee. Apparently, some enterprising BD folks came up with the idea that Yelp could put the Grubhub phone numbers in place of the real restaurant phone number on the Yelp listing. Customers who think they’re “helping” their local restaurants by calling in the order are still creating a fee for Grubhub.

There's more at the link.

I'd say that tactic is at least underhanded, if not downright dishonest.  How is it legal to publicly pass off a phone number for your company as the phone number to order from another company?  How is it legal to misrepresent your phone number as theirs, on other business Web sites?  How is it legal to have Google add your delivery service to the Web listing of another company, without that company's permission and authorization?  Isn't that almost the definition of the crime of fraudulent misrepresentation?  Why have no criminal charges or civil lawsuits been filed?  I'd appreciate comment from the legal eagles among my readers.

In this case, I'm glad to say that the misrepresentation backfired on Doordash when the owner of the pizza business found a way to make them pay him a lot of money at no extra cost to himself.  It's an amusing tale that I'll leave you to read for yourselves.

There's also the issue of delivery services charging fees to restaurants for referrals, even if customer calls didn't result in orders.  GrubHub is in all sorts of trouble in New York over that practice.  It looks like Yelp got in on the scam as well.  I don't understand why charges haven't been filed against both companies.  Surely that's illegal?

All I can say is, if I found another company misrepresenting itself as my business, I'd be furious.  Those sorts of shenanigans are why so many small restaurant owners I know are very angry with food delivery services.  They claim they're costing them customer goodwill by delivering food late and cold, causing customers to blame the restaurant, and post negative reviews about it on social media.  In other words, they're blaming the restaurant for the delivery service's shortcomings.  In the restaurant's shoes, I'd try getting together with others to launch a class action lawsuit against the delivery companies concerned.

That's why I won't use most food delivery services.  I'd rather call in my order direct to the restaurant, making sure it's their number, not a third party's.  I'll use a delivery service with whom they've contracted, knowingly and honestly, or collect my order if necessary.  I don't want to reward dishonest misrepresentation with my customer dollars.

Peter

Choosing political expediency over ethics and morality

There's a remarkable admission in an article in the New York Times yesterday, titled "I Believe Tara Reade. I’m Voting for Joe Biden Anyway."

Let’s be clear: I believe Tara Reade ... Discounting Ms. Reade’s accusation and, one after another, denigrating her corroborating witnesses, calling for endless new evidence, avowing that you “hear” her, is nonsense. We are now up to four corroborating witnesses ... So stop playing gotcha with the female supporters of Mr. Biden or the #MeToo movement, making them lie to the camera — or perhaps to themselves — about doubting her to justify their votes.

I’ll take one for the team. I believe Ms. Reade, and I’ll vote for Mr. Biden this fall.

. . .

Suck it up and make the utilitarian bargain.

All major Democratic Party figures have indicated they’re not budging on the presumptive nominee, and the transaction costs of replacing him would be suicidal. Barring some miracle, it’s going to be Mr. Biden.

So what is the greatest good or the greatest harm? Mr. Biden, and the Democrats he may carry with him into government, are likely to do more good for women and the nation than his competition, the worst president in the history of the Republic. Compared with the good Mr. Biden can do, the cost of dismissing Tara Reade — and, worse, weakening the voices of future survivors — is worth it.

. . .

Utilitarian morality requires that I turn my face away from the people I propose to sell out: Monica Lewinsky, Tara Reade. This is agonizingly hard for me to do. Pretending not to believe the complainants — which is what is taking place with Ms. Reade — or that they’re loose nobodies, which is what much of the media did to Ms. Lewinsky, is just an escape from the hard work of moral analysis ... Better to just own up to what you are doing: sacrificing Ms. Reade for the good of the many.

There's more at the link.

Here you have the classic difference between liberal and conservative;  between socialist and capitalist;  between those who believe the state can (and should) do everything, and those who believe in individual freedom.  It's simply stated:

The individual is less
important than the group.

That's it, in a nutshell.  In this case, it's more important for the "group" to triumph (however you care to define the group:  liberal/progressive/left-wing political supporters, or women, or feminists, or anti-Trumpers, or whatever) than for the allegations of a self-described sexual assault victim to be investigated and, if proved, prosecuted as criminal charges.  It's more important that ethical, moral and criminal evil be allowed to triumph (in the crime of sexual assault) rather than allowing partisanly perceived political evil to triumph (in President Trump winning re-election).

That attitude, of course, is the diametric opposite of our constitution, which assigns individual rights to "the people" and to each individual member of "the people".  That's why we speak of "equality before the law" and the importance of "due process" (both of which the author of the above article would deny to Ms. Reade).  One can take that further.  In the mid-eighteenth century, William Blackstone published his "Commentaries on the Laws of England".  In it, he stated the seminal proposition that "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" (a concept that came to be known as Blackstone's Ratio).  As Wikipedia points out:

The phrase was absorbed by the British legal system, becoming a maxim by the early 19th century. It was also absorbed into American common law, cited repeatedly by that country's Founding Fathers, later becoming a standard drilled into law students all the way into the 21st century.

Other commentators have echoed the principle. Benjamin Franklin stated it as: "it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer".

The attitude expressed by the NYT op-ed writer appears to turn on its head the principle expressed in Blackstone's Ratio.  In so many words, she's arguing that it's better for political reasons that the victim of crime (Tara Reade) should suffer than that the guilty party (Joe Biden) should be held accountable.  What's more, she has no qualms, and no shame, about stating that openly, in print.

One doesn't have to wonder what Blackstone would have said to that . . . or what the Founding Fathers would have said.  One suspects their reaction would have been to call loudly for tar, feathers and a rail.  It's certainly mine.  As for deliberately voting on the basis of expediency - openly advocating the triumph of evil over good in the ethical and moral sense, in order that one set of partisan political principles may triumph over another - all I can say is that such a person has no place in my world, or I in hers.  If her view triumphs, it effectively means civil war between those who have principles, and those who have none:  between those who support our constitution, and those who reject it.  On so amoral a foundation no society can stand, and no nation can endure.




Peter

The corruption of the "news" media into the "propaganda" media

Two recent articles have underlined the collapse in objectivity, factual reporting and trustworthiness of the news media.

Victor Davis Hanson asks, "Do the media even exist?"

The problem is not that reporters are human and therefore sometimes err. The rub is not even that they are poorly educated or rarely write well ... The crisis instead is that they are now almost always wrong, and predictably wrong because they are lazy and biased—and they deny it to the point of self-delusion. The result is that, for all practical purposes, journalists no longer exist for the general public as sources of news.

More than half the country now assumes that the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, the networks, and the cable news outlets are culpable not of merely failing to tell the truth but of being incapable of telling the truth. Even if they wished to, or had the skills to report empirically and dispassionately, they simply cannot, given their investments in the progressive agenda, and its investments in them. In other words, they are owned—creatures of that agenda.

. . .

To understand the media coverage of the greatest economic self-inflicted wound in American history is simple: as long the virus remains active, Trump is cast as culpable for the spread of the epidemic by not locking down the country earlier and longer; once the virus disappears, Trump caused the ensuing depression by locking down the country too early and far too long.

Every story until Election Day will serve those two master media themes. After Journolist, the John Podesta email archive, the serial CNN fables, the daily White House correspondents circus, and Trump Derangement Syndrome, no one can believe the news anymore—to the extent Americans still read and watch it.

There's more at the link, including many examples of journalistic malfeasance.

Supporting Mr. Hanson's contention, Daniel Greenfield points out that many journalists being sponsored to work in local news media are, in fact, political activists first, and journalists second.

While Report for America claims that it’s funding local journalism, what it’s actually doing is embedding social justice activists in local papers who are often targeted at pursuing a narrow political agenda.

Leah Willingham was placed at the Associated Press to focus on the "Mississippi state legislature" and its "actions affecting the poor", Kyeland Jackson was planted in Twin Cities Public Television to cover the "causes, effects and solutions to racial disparities in Minnesota", Shivani Patel was dispatched to the Ventura County Star to write about “equity in education in the county”, and Devna Bose was shoved into The Charlotte Observer to report on "poor and minority communities in prosperous Charlotte".

The agenda is often built into the very description of what Report for America’s activists are doing. Or at least it is to Report for America’s donors who are told what the activists they fund are doing. But ordinary readers of local publications and stations are often not told that what they’re reading isn’t real local reporting: it’s the work of activists funded by a national organization and its wealthy backers.

The lack of transparency is dishonest, unethical, and a new low even in the era of fake news.

The left-wing foundations and donors aren’t funding journalism, they’re buying coverage that fits their agenda. And local newspapers are renting out their newsrooms to wealthy left-wing organizations. Beyond the usual radical foundations like the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Knight Foundation, the Facebook Journalism Project has poured millions of dollars into RFA.

. . .

Facebook has often been accused of spreading fake news. Here it, along with the Google News Initiative, which kicked in $400,000, is literally financing a fake news project which pays half the salaries of the reporters it embeds in local newsrooms, while its own funding comes from wealthy left-wing groups.

Most newspapers are happy with the arrangement: it’s the readers who are cheated.

Facebook has claimed that its Journalism Project will fight fake news, instead it’s funding it. If the social media monopoly giant wanted to support journalism, it could do so in any number of ways. By financing Report for America’s activism, it’s helping fund papers on the condition that they run propaganda.

This isn’t philanthropy, it’s politics.

Again, more at the link.

Both articles underline the fact that we can no longer depend on or trust any news report at face value.  We now have to verify it, sift through evidence for or against the claims made in the report, and make an informed judgment about what's believable - and what isn't.  Sadly, the average voter can't or won't take the time or trouble to do that . . . which is perilous indeed for the survival of our democracy - and is, of course, the reason behind the manipulation of our news media in the first place.

Peter

Does marriage have value anymore, monetary or otherwise?

Aaron Clarey, a.k.a. Captain Capitalism, offers an intriguing look at whether dowries are something that may become part of the modern "marriage market" in the Western world, just as they were in the not too distant past (and still are in some other parts of the world).  I don't necessarily agree with his arguments, but I have to admit that he poses questions that require an answer.

If you don't know (or never knew) what a dowry was, it was a payment the father usually made to his would-be son in law to take his daughter off his hands and care for her into the future.  This was based on the premise that women did not work, would likely bear children, would stay home to rear said children, and would in a purely accounting sense be a financial liability to the family, earning no income.  And so, the would-be husband would be entitled, if not required, to some kind of financial recompense to take the financial liability of a woman off the hands of her father.

Fast forward 300 years later and I ask a very simple question;

How is it any different today?

If there was a time young women were not a financial liability, but an asset, it was the boomers and Gen X'ers.  These women were workers, they were employed, and they did take care of themselves.  But today's generation of young women (who are also at the age of marriage) do not present young male suitors a similar financial proposition or condition.  Matter of fact, most young women today are horrifically bad financial liabilities, and any young man who commits to them risks tanking his own finances.

This isn't primarily due to young women not working.  They most certainly do, and at labor force participation rates higher than any generation of women past.  But the financial liability nature of most young women today is due to student loans and the education scam that destroys their finances.  Young women ... are lured too easily to go $120,000 in debt for worthless liberal arts degrees that offer them no employability.  Worse, the indoctrination they receive in college weaponizes them against men, instead of making them partners and lovers in life to help one another.  And with the repeated indoctrination that women should NEVER rely on a man, the end result is not only often a girl who is a financial risk, but is a girl no man wants.  Indebted, talentless, unemployable, and ideologically programmed to be against men, marriage, family, and love. Even women trained in STEM, who are eminently employable, are often times indoctrinated to be antagonistic towards men, increasing the risk of divorce, adding a huge legal risk to a financial one as well.

Traditionally, logically, and "accountingly," such a proposition would require some kind of financial compensation for the legal and financial risks of committing to a modern day western woman.  And today, young men (or any man) is well within his rights to demand such a modern-day dowry.  But since most boomer and Gen X fathers have no money (and are likely financially compromised through matrimony as well), demanding a dowry today is moot.

. . .

Most men simply cannot afford to take on that risk, and even with a dowry the non-financial risks are just as costly and daunting as the financial ones.  Yes at the same time, men are biologically programmed, nay, compelled to want to get married and have kids. And so what is likely going to happen is what's been happening for quite some time now - men are balking.  They're going to punt.

The increase in cohabitation and the abandonment of marriage is a sign of men waking up and eschewing the legal and financial risks marriage presents to them ... And such marriage-avoidant behavior will continue as the internet educates men about the unacceptable legal and financial risks marriage presents to them (or, frankly, they just saw their dad get butchered in divorce court).

And so what we've seen this past 20 years, certainly the past 10 will continue. With no "theoretical dowries" and marriage being such a bad deal, more and more men will simply leave the marriage market because they can't afford it.

There's more at the link.

Modern marriage is weighted heavily against a man in our legal system.  I'm aware of one situation going down right now, where a divorced father, with legal custody of his children, has seen his former wife simply take them and refuse to return them.  She's gone so far as to interfere with his bank accounts, file false charges against him, and try to wreck his life, out of spite and vindictiveness.  I repeat - she has no legal right to custody of the children, but because she doesn't want him to have them, she's more than prepared to use them as a weapon against him (including lying to them that he doesn't want them any more), and destroy his reputation in the process.  What's more, law enforcement authorities appear powerless.  They've told him to get yet another court order for them to enforce, ignoring those he already has.  I don't understand that.

When men see that sort of thing happening, and realize that our legal system is predisposed to believe the mother rather than the father, is it any wonder that many men are afraid to commit themselves to a relationship that may have those consequences?

There's also the very real problem that a hyper-sexualized society, where a "hookup culture" has taken root, is anything but the ideal climate in which to foster traditional marriage.  When both partners in a marriage come into that relationship with a past history of dozens, if not scores of lovers, and probably having lived with several of those partners, how can they pretend that there's anything unique about their relationship?  There isn't.  They're just going through the motions they've been through many times before.  There's nothing "special" to bind them together, because they've done it all before.  When it comes to arguments, they can put each other down with comments like, "Oh, so-and-so was much better at that than you are!"  There's no foundation of "special" intimacy on which to build, because intimacy is no longer special.  It's been trivialized.

Perhaps, if a dowry was required prior to marriage, both sides of the equation would realize that it signifies the value of their relationship in monetary terms.  Perhaps they might then attach more intrinsic value to marriage, instead of seeing it as an arrangement that may, or may not, endure, depending on one or the other party's whims.  To me, of course, there's also a deeply spiritual element to marriage;  but that's not shared by many people, so I won't emphasize it here.  I'll simply note that I think it's essential.

Aaron Clarey poses some very good questions, that force us to confront unpleasant realities, and which deserve answers.

Peter