Social media companies have tricked us all: Welcome to the digital inquisition (+ Podcast)

Lara Prendergast brings us a cover article titled Welcome to the digital inquisition (also called, simply, The Digital Inquisition and, previously, Would You Survive the Digital Inquisition?), coupled with a podcast (see below). The is a must-read accompanying column — Your online history will always come back to haunt you, but only if you are on the right; if you are on the left, it won’t matter at all — while the Spectator cover is drawn by The Times' favorite Norwegian cartoonist, Morten Morland (that's Morten Mørland to you, bud!). Lara Prendergast's article starts with reminiscences:

A friend of mine at university had a rule: he didn’t want anything to appear online that might ruin a future political career. On nights out, when photos were being taken, he’d quietly move out of the picture. While we were all wittering away to each other on social media, he kept schtum. Strange, I remember thinking. Why so paranoid?

I thought of my friend when Toby Young started making headlines. … It’s baffling: why is everyone, seemingly, talking about a journalist having to leave a minor government body that nobody had heard of?

The answer is that Toby has become just the latest — and perhaps the highest-profile — target of a new phenomenon: the digital inquisition. It is something that anyone wanting to enter public life can — and should — expect. As my university friend knew, if you happen to be ambitious in the internet age, you must be very careful about everything you say or do online.

 … Tweets never grow old or die: words published years ago can be reposted, fresh as the day they were typed. Remarks from one context can be republished in another.

 … Social media companies have tricked us all. They have lured us into thinking we can lower our guard online and talk candidly as if to friends. They have coaxed us into blurring personal and private worlds in the name of free speech. We have been led to think our comments are ephemeral when nothing could be further from the truth. Tweets are dashed off, then forgotten about — only to be discovered years later by anyone with a bone to pick. We live in a confessional age and are encouraged to reveal all our inner thoughts. What’s not encouraged, so much, is to reflect over whether we would be prepared to stand by everything we have said in the future.

 … Anthony Scaramucci … said that ‘gotcha’ politics is dead. He soon learnt otherwise.

‘Gotcha’ politics has not died. It has evolved. Unedited thoughts have never been easier to publish — or find. For my age group, most of our lives have been captured online. By the time anyone born in the new millennium starts to enter public life, there will be masses of images of them and words by them on the internet.

It’s no surprise that younger people have started to use technology that offers more privacy as the default. Apps such as Snapchat and Telegram use messaging that self-destructs — or at least pretends to. … This week Kensington Palace announced that Meghan Markle had closed all her social media accounts. It’s highly unlikely though that there won’t be a record of everything she’s said, somewhere.

 … One might have dared hope that, in an era when the capacity to snoop is almost limitless, we would learn to be more forgiving of the failings of others. Instead, the mood is ever more nosey and censorious.

 … The advent of social media therefore sets a new bar for anyone wanting to enter public life: the trail you leave online will now be used to judge your character. Is your profile clean enough? If not, forget it. Indiscretions, youthful or otherwise, are now immortal sins. This will delight the bureaucratic class, who find it far easier to beat away outsiders or rebels who aspire to a career in politics. This new state of play will also deter anyone who doesn’t fancy having their life pored over, their reputation trashed.

The internet dream was that the web would create a more open society. It wouldn’t really matter what you said because everyone would feel more liberated. The opposite has happened: increasingly, people are nervous about what they say online for fear of future rebuke. Far from making everyone feel free to speak their minds, the internet has made many of us terrified of self–expression. …

More Outstanding News from the Continent of Free Health Care: unprecedented cuts to cancer care because of a chronic shortage of specialist nurses at one of Britain's leading hospitals

A chronic shortage of specialist nurses at one of Britain's leading NHS hospitals is forcing bosses to consider making unprecedented cuts to cancer care.

At the Times of London, Health Editor Chris Smyth has more outstanding news (cheers for the link, Maggie) from the continent of free health care:

A leading NHS hospital is delaying chemotherapy for cancer patients and those who are terminally ill face cuts to their treatment because of a chronic shortage of specialist nurses, according to a leaked memo.

Andrew Weaver, head of chemotherapy at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford, which treats thousands of patients from across the region, said in a memo to staff that treatment was being delayed. He also warned that the number of chemotherapy cycles offered to the terminally ill would have to be cut because of a lack of staff trained to deal with medication. The centre has a 40 per cent shortfall in nurses on the unit that administers chemotherapy.

Meanwhile, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Jeremy Hunt, has acknowledged that there is a "short-termist" approach to staff planning…

Related: The Bright Future of European Health Care:
Britons Face Longer Waits Along with Rationing of Treatment

• Almost £1 billion of the NHS budget goes to waste each year,
says Britain's top nurse, because patients fail to turn up for appointments

Obviously, Thousands of Irish Teens Need to Be Hauled to Court for Their Own Good and Put on Sex Offender Lists

More than one in 20 Irish secondary school students has sent a naked picture or video of themselves to a stranger online

reports Aaron Rogan in the Times, meaning that — if laws are to be taken as literally, and as blindly, as in certain American states — for their own good, as well as the good of society, thousands or even tens of thousands of Irish youths (female as well as male) need to be taken to court and have their lives destroyed by being put on sex offender registries.

Remember that for the sake of "protecting children," the authorities would (not without reason) go after people who, among other things, manufacture and disseminate child pornography. In American cases, this has led to a Pandora's Box where teens (young as well as older, i.e., fully formed, teens) are often charged with disseminating child porn by usually sending naked photos of… themselves (!) to a single classmate that they are, or that they want to be, romantically (or at least sexually) involved with. (Cheers for the link, Maggie.)

Here in Ireland (shudder), teens sexted with complete strangers!

Which brings to mind perhaps the best single sentence on the matter ("Charging a teenager for taking a nude selfie means the state is charging the supposed victim [!]—an absurd result that the legislature can't have intended when it passed [the] child pornography statute"), which comes from Glenn Reynolds: "It’s absurd to say that teenagers aren’t mature enough to engage in [sex online], but are mature enough to be treated as felons if they do."

A survey conducted by Marina Everri, a social psychologist from the London School of Economics and head of research at Zeeko, a start-up backed by University College Dublin, revealed that 7 per cent of Irish secondary students had sent a nude or semi-nude image or video of themselves to a person they met online. A sexual selfie had been sent to a stranger online by 10 per cent of boys compared with 4 per cent of girls. The percentage of pupils rose from 3 per cent in their first year to 15 per cent in their sixth year. The study surveyed 3,231 secondary school pupils, made up of 1,408 females and 1,823 males from 30 schools.

Thirteen per cent had sent a nude or semi-nude image or video and 15 per cent had shared or shown a friend an image that was sent to them. Boys were more likely to send sexts, with 17 per cent having sent a nude or semi-nude photo or video compared with 9 per cent of girls. Dr Everri said that the trends were broadly in line with similar countries but highlighted the need for more education for Irish children about the dangers of their behaviour online.

“Teenagers are curious about sexuality and using digital devices. We know the boundaries for being offline and online are continuously blurred for them now so when they explore their sexuality it is happening online as well,” she said. “We need to consider the content so that we know if it is videos, semi-nude pictures or just sexual flirting through text. Before creating a moral panic we need to recognise that sexual behaviours online and offline are different because an image can be shared and stay around pretty much for ever. Children need to be made aware of that.”

Dr Everri said that the increase in sexting should not be considered alarming because it was a new form of teenagers fulfilling development tasks and needs that were previously carried out offline. “Texting, sharing videos and photos, encounters with strangers and looking for strangers online to meet offline respond to adolescents’ need to expand their social network outside of their families,” she said. “However, there is a need for education programmes that teach adolescents how to critically assess the content and potential risks.”

The research showed that secondary school students were aware of the risks about sexting, with 76 per cent saying that being careful about the photos and videos they put online was a serious or very serious consideration.

The research also looked at bullying and aggressive behaviour online. It found that 20 per cent of students claimed to be victims of cyberbullying, which has remained stable in recent years. The survey also found that 49 per cent of secondary school students had spoken to strangers online and 16 per cent had met someone they first spoke to online.

The government has set the age of 13 as the minimum for children to be allowed to open social media accounts.

Which U.S. president was the one who “never listened to anyone, always thought he was smarter than every expert in the room, and treated every meeting as an opportunity to lecture everyone else”?

By the looks of his New York Post article, Charles Gasparino doesn't seem to be too convinced (thanks to Stephen Green) that Donald Trump's mental state is something to be unduly concerned about:

One thing we don’t have to worry about is the economic sanity of President Trump.

In fact, it’s safe to say that the current president, for all his temperamental flaws and petty insecurities, makes his tightly wound predecessor, Barack Obama, look like a raving madman when it comes to showing sense on economic growth. Armchair psychiatrists are having a field day diagnosing the president’s mental state from afar, especially after his increasingly bizarre tweeting, but the market says otherwise.

Consider: The United States had one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world — so high that companies (and jobs) were fleeing to places like Ireland. That’s why it was perfectly sane to lower the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent as Trump just did, and presto: Corporations are announcing plans to hire more workers, and the economy, which was expected to slow after seven years of weak growth, is heating up. The markets are predicting that growth with their surge.

Likewise, regulations have been strangling businesses for years while making it difficult for banks to lend to consumers and small business. Trump went out and hired perfectly sane regulators who basically pulled the federal government’s boot off the neck of the business community.

It was described to me as a de facto tax cut by one business owner that gives him leeway to hire more people. A major win for the working class.

And since so many of my fellow journalists are at it, let me do a little psychoanalysis of what an economically insane person might do as president.

An insane president would threaten a significant tax increase immediately upon taking office following a financial crisis, and then eventually impose one on individuals and small businesses still in recovery.

He’d impose job-crushing regulations on these same businesses as unemployment rose. He’d put a cumbersome mandate on businesses that upends the entire health care system just as the economy was finally turning a corner.

A really insane president would blow nearly $1 trillion on a stimulus plan with little planning and direction, wasting much of the money on boondoggles (see: Solyndra) and then laugh at the lack of “shovel ready” jobs created. He’d then try to spread his delusion to the masses, telling them to ignore historically low wage growth, anemic economic growth and the massive amount of people who dropped out of the work force because the stock market rallied, thanks in large part to the Fed printing money instead of his own fiscal policies.

Is Barack Obama crazy? No, but his post-2008 economic policies were. …

Speaking of which, Donald Trump is regularly called a self-absorbed bully, while Barack Obama is unfailingly depicted as a modest gentleman. What, then, to make of a U.S. president called “one of the most narcissistic, self-absorbed people [a British Prime Minister had] ever dealt with”?
 
What, then, to make of a leader who “never listened to anyone, always thought he was smarter than every expert in the room, and treated every meeting as an opportunity to lecture everyone else”?

David Cameron’s former director of strategy has said Cameron thought Barack Obama was one of the “most narcissistic, self-absorbed people” he had ever encountered, despite the pair’s once notorious “bromance”.

Thus writes Nadia Khomami in the Guardian (cheers to Instapundit).

Steve Hilton, one of Cameron’s closest advisers before the pair fell out over immigration and Brexit last year, made the comments during the latest instalment of his show, The Next Revolution, on Fox News.

Discussing Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury, Hilton said any claims by elitists and the establishment that Donald Trump was mentally unfit for the presidency came second to Trump’s promotion of a pro-worker, populist agenda on immigration, infrastructure, trade and the fight against China.

He went on to emphasise the shortcomings of Trump’s predecessors, adding:

“My old boss, former British prime minister David Cameron, thought Obama was one of the most narcissistic, self-absorbed people he’d ever dealt with.
 
“Obama never listened to anyone, always thought he was smarter than every expert in the room, and treated every meeting as an opportunity to lecture everyone else. This led to real-world disasters, like Syria and the rise of Isis.”

But the real world did not matter to the elites, Hilton said.

“For them, it’s all about style and tone, not substance and results. Donald Trump offends the elites aesthetically, like a piece of art that’s not to their taste.

“They can afford to do that because they live in a world of booming neighbourhoods, delightful hipster eateries and everyone they know employed in the virtual world of the knowledge economy. They don’t see what’s going on in the actual economy. Whatever his mental state, [Trump] has achieved more for working Americans in one year than his predecessors did in eight, or 16, frankly.”

Hilton’s comments contradict reports of Cameron and Obama’s “transatlantic bromance” in office. The two leaders were often pictured together playing ping-pong or golf, eating or watching a basketball game. …

Feminism has gotten progressively crazier over the years to the point that that most rational people—even most women—now find it grotesque and want nothing to do with it

Merriam-Webster’s 2017 word of the year was “feminism”

writes Benny Huang, and it ain't

difficult to see why. The year began with anti-Trump Women’s Marches, picked up speed with the installation of the Fearless Girl statue on Wall Street, chugged along with the release of the Wonder Woman film, and finished off with #MeToo.

 … Given feminism’s innocuous dictionary definition it’s a wonder that it doesn’t have more adherents. According to a 2013 YouGov poll, large majorities of both sexes reject the feminist label. Only 23% of women and 16% of men described themselves as feminists.

An interesting wrinkle: The poll also asked if respondents believed in political, social and economic equality between the sexes (Merriam-Webster’s first definition) without using the word “feminism” and found 82% in favor. The obvious inference to be drawn here is that a majority of Americans believe in feminism—or at least in Merriam-Webster’s definition of the word—but don’t want to be called feminists.

Clearly, feminism has an image problem.

But why? One possible explanation is that feminism is a movement and, like most movements, it has a cadre of opinion leaders who interpret it for the rest of us. They decide what equality means and if you don’t agree with them they will revoke your feminist card.

Case in point—during last January’s Women’s Marches, organizers excluded a group of Texas-based feminists because of their pro-life stance. The organizers had to enforce orthodoxy, you see, and their orthodoxy is so narrow that it would exclude the famous suffragette Susan B. Anthony if she were alive today. I can only conclude that the continued legality of killing children in the womb is a nonnegotiable precept of feminism. Get with it or get out.

The cadre’s interpretations have gotten progressively crazier over the years to the point that that most rational people—even most women—now find feminism grotesque and want nothing to do with it.

Here are two examples from just the past two weeks that illustrate some of what ails feminism.

• A topless feminist by the name Alisa Vinogradova bum-rushed the Vatican’s nativity scene on Christmas Day in an attempt to steal the baby Jesus. Thankfully, she was stopped by guards. Vinogradova reportedly screamed “God is a woman!” and had the same slogan painted on her back. She belongs to FEMEN, a feminist group whose stated goal is “complete victory over the patriarchy.” Her attempted theft was a protest against the Catholic Church’s teachings on contraception and abortion.
• Huffpost editor and self-described feminist Emily McCombs tweeted that her two New Year’s resolutions were “cultivating female friendships” and “banding together to kill all men.” She has since deleted the tweet in a lame attempt at a coverup. She will nonetheless keep her job because bloodthirsty misandrist rhetoric is fashionable among feminists.

Both of these examples illustrate the oppositional posture that has come to define feminism. Feminists are recognized more often by what they’re against than by what they’re for.

In the first example, Alisa Vinogradova was raging against feminism’s eternal bugaboo—religion. But most women don’t perceive religion as an oppressive force. …

The second example indicates that today’s feminism is at least as anti-male as it is pro-female. If it weren’t, Emily McCombs would be drummed out of respectable feminist circles. The fact that she hasn’t been tells me that feminist opinion leaders think comments like hers are cute and funny.

Killing men! Ha! Ha!  

Miserable wretches like Vinogradova and McCombs are the reason feminists can’t get even one quarter of American women to call themselves members of their movement. Feminists are perceived as a small group of discontented women revolting against one thing—family life, with “family” defined in the traditional sense.

Feminists hate religion because it is the guardian of the family. They hate men because they are women’s partners in the family enterprise. And above all, they hate children and wish to maintain the legality of killing them in the womb because children complete families. Feminism, at least in its modern incarnation, is grounded in hate and violence.

While their hatred of family life may be regrettable it is not inexplicable. There has always been a tension between women’s career aspirations and their roles as wives and mothers. Women who wish for careers must often put families on hold while they accumulate the proper education, a process that, depending on the field, can last into a woman’s thirties. …

In short, some women harbor resentment against the family because its obligations fall disproportionately to them. Feminist doctrine blames “the patriarchy” for this state of affairs though nature is the more likely culprit. Women have always played a more active role in perpetuating the human race and they always will. It’s not fair it’s just reality.

Feminists cannot accept this reality so they rail against the big-S “System” that they believe was created by men to keep women down. The feminist ideal is to liberate women from the traditional family model so that they can be themselves. Think of Gloria Steinem’s adage “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” That’s feminism—women doing it on their own without the strictures placed on them by the family unit. If they need a support network they should rely on other women.

It aggravates feminists that so many women still like to wear the nuclear family’s straightjacket. What woman in her right mind would want to be tied down to home and children?

Plenty, actually. Among women with minor children, 56% wish to stay at home. Even among women who don’t have minor children, 39% prefer the homemaker role.

Clearly, many women find value in the traditional family which has many benefits not the least of which is the harmony it brings to the sexes. When men and women are united in marriage and later in the raising of children they are yoked together in a mutually beneficial partnership. The two roughly equal halves of the human race rely upon each other for their daily needs and to provide for the children, the weakest and most vulnerable of our society. Neither side can afford a battle of the sexes and for the children it can be traumatic. A truce is therefore declared, not just in the home but in society at large.

This truce cannot survive feminism because feminism encourages the female component to forgo obligations in favor of selfish desires. It foments acrimony between men and women and between woman and their children. It spurs both men and women to withdraw to their own separate bunkers while children are left to fend for themselves.

Even as we wrap up the most feminist year on record the movement still struggles to gain credibility among the population at large and even among the demographic it professes to help. Feminism has an image problem and it is entirely feminists’ fault.

Almost £1 billion of the NHS budget goes to waste each year, says Britain's top nurse, because patients fail to turn up for appointments

Patients have rejected accusations that they are wasting £1 billion of public money by missing hospital appointments

writes Chris Smyth, Health Editor at the Times,

arguing that the NHS needs to stop sending them inconvenient times by post.

Doctors also said that drunks and people with minor problems contribute little to overcrowding in A&E, which they said was caused mainly by sick patients needing beds.

It came after Jane Cummings, the chief nursing officer for England, said the NHS was “under pressure as never before” as she called for the public to be more responsible about wasting time and resources as the service heads into what is likely to be the busiest week of the winter.

Conservatives in Hollywood: Celebrities who lean right

A Washington Times Photo Galleries presents Conservatives in Hollywood: Celebrities who lean right, from Jerry Bruckheimer and Tom Selleck to Bruce Willis and Jessica Simpson.

What We Would Like to Hear When a Flight Is Overbooked

The New Yorker's Colin Stokes presents "A Travel Slide Show" called Cartoons for the Road. Related: What Lies Behind the Ever-Worsening Treatment Passengers Get at the Hands of Airlines?

What Lies Behind the Ever-Worsening Treatment Passengers Get at the Hands of Airlines?

This Fox News report is one of the most ludicrous things I have read in recent times. Four hours into its flight across the Pacific Ocean, an L.A.-to-Tokyo plane is "forced" (sic) to turn around and fly back to California. Why? What warranted this? Technical failure? A drunk passenger getting loud and threatening? A group of terrorists?

No. Mid-flight, personnel found a… stowaway aboard. An unexpected person who does not seem to have been displaying any kind of particularly peculiar or unwelcome behavior beyond the fact that he or she wasn't supposed to be on board, no more, no less.

Why on earth not continue the flight and, upon landing (wait for this astoundingly bright solution to the problem), turn the person over to local (to Japanese) authorities?! Have him (or her) detained, perhaps, while making sure to have the stowaway fly back to the point of origin on the very next available flight?! (Alternatively, the stowaway might pay the airline for a ticket and, insofar as the person's papers are in order, be allowed into the Land of the Rising Sun…)

It seems to me that that — that that simple, straight-forward solution — would be the first reaction of any pilot with a brain, any flight attendant with a brain, any air company CEO with a brain, any airport director (whether at the point of departure or arrival) with a brain. Does no one in the flight industry have common sense anymore?

Supermodel Chrissy Teigen live-tweeted her disastrous experience aboard a Japan-bound jet that made a U-turn about four hours into the flight due to an unauthorized person on board. 

Teigen, 32, who was on the flight with her husband, crooner John Legend, reported her Tokyo-bound All Nippon Airways jet turned around halfway into the flight because “we have a passenger who isn’t supposed to be on this plane.”

"A flying first for me: 4 hours into an 11-hour flight and we are turning around because we have a passenger who isn't supposed to be on this plane. Why...why do we all gotta go back, I do not know," Teigen said in a tweet.  

Certainly, this is far worse than my own recent experience — trying to board an airliner with two pets — but doesn't it show the general direction (away from the friendly skies) that the airplane service industry is going?

The following complaint is very long, filling two fully typed pages, and if you ask me why you should care, I agree — there is not much of a reason why you should (and, who knows, you might even come down in favor of the airport authorities) — but at the midpoint of the letter (see where I inserted a bullet point), I head away from my experience into a more general discussion of what seems to have been screwing up airlines in the past decade or two.

As you read this (or part of it, if you want to skip to the bullet point), recall the words of Lao-Tzu from 2,600 years ago

“The more laws and restrictions there are, The poorer people become. ...
The more rules and regulations you create,
The more thieves and robbers [the more criminals] you create as well.”

Here, with no further ado, is the (slightly redacted) complaint in question:

Air France

December 18, 2017

Dear Sirs,

    I wish to issue a complaint about the treatment I received at Air France's Aviator desk in Copenhagen on December 1, when I was denied access to flight AF1051 due to the presence of two cats traveling with me.

    On the other hand — needless to say — I am grateful to Air France that I was allowed to board the same flight 24 hours later (along with both felines and this time one hard box), even more so due to the non-refundable status of the first ticket being changed with no charge.

    Still, when I arrived with the cats on December 1, I was carrying a bag for each cat.  They were two soft bags, authorized specifically by Air France, as can be confirmed by your recordings of my conversations with Air France staff not only on Monday November 27 but also on Thursday November 30.  During the latter, the representative was so insistent on getting her facts right that she asked me to hang up from our (long) conversation while she went to check with her supervisor before calling back …/… with "good news" (her words).  I asked her to make sure to put the authorization of the two soft bags in "writing" in a note on the [computer] reservation.

    On December 1, therefore, I duly went through all the steps of getting registered at Kastrup airport, getting as far as having my boarding pass issued (seat 21A).  Then it was over to a special desk to get my cat tickets paid for (a hefty price of 1150 Danish Crowns).

    Here we started bumping into obstacles — mainly, a(n incomprehensible) rule that allows no more than one cat per passenger in the cabin, while other cats must go into the hold.  It seems like it's a rule which theoretically would allow 100 pets on board a given plane, barking, meowing, whimpering in the hypothetical situation where each passenger showed up with one pet.  That was not the case on December 1 (nor on December 2).

    For 30 minutes to an hour, Aviator staff called back and forth, ringing one supervisor after another to give them permission to either 1) allow two cats in the cabin — as the Air France note specifically directed staff to do! — or 2) put one of the two cats in the cabin and the other in the hold in a hard box instead of a soft bag (admittedly, I was far from keen with regards to the second alternative).

    Time was running out, which could have been used to fetch a hard box in the airport's basement (your airport personnel were the ones who mentioned this possibility!), to lend me or to sell to me (I am not sure which).

    All the while, I was treated to one catastrophic scare scenario after another explaining the rules (what if a passenger brought five kittens?! what if an animal was crushed in the hold?! what if you brought a lawsuit against us?!) — some of which admittedly made a modicum a sense — with no one capable of making a simple decision to slightly bend the rules.

    Have they watched Monty Python and The Holy Grail too many times, and do they think that kitty cats are like the movie's cute white bunny that can turn into the vicious killer rabbit of Caerbannog, leaping from neck to neck to bite off one knight's head after another?

    Finally, some supervisor said that because two cats would not be allowed in the cabin and because one cat would not be allowed in the hold in a soft bag, I would not be allowed to board at all — in spite of Air France's specific directions.  This anonymous pencil pusher refused to talk to me or even give me his name.

    I had no choice but to leave the airport, not knowing when and if I could get another flight and wondering whether my non-refundable ticket would be changed free of charge (thankfully, it was, and that for the following evening) while spending Saturday hunting for a hard box for the hold cat (no easy task, as it turned out — most boxes being for dogs of a larger size).

   • On a more general note:

    Aren't all the scandals of the past couple of years — the Kentucky doctor dragged off a plane in Chicago (David Dao), the young mother whose stroller was violently grabbed by a flight attendant (Olivia Morgan) — due to airline employees' inordinate focus on following rules — and on treating passengers like children who should remain quiet and obey — instead of being the smiling face of a service agency?

    Indeed:  isn't the very presence of a plethora of more rules — many of which did not exist in the "laissez-faire" era of only 10 to 20 years ago (which in itself would seem to prove that [contrary to common-sense bans about bringing handguns aboard, for example] the new edicts are relatively non-essential and unimportant, almost gratuitous) — a thing that causes, consciously or otherwise, employees to be more focused on the rules than on the passengers and on providing service?

    A number of these new directives are close to unfathomable:  regarding pets, besides the one-only-in-the-cabin, you have — all airlines have? — if I understand correctly, recently decided to ban every type of hard box for sale except for that of one single vendor; and apparently there is a decree that unless you declare a traveling pet 24 hours prior to boarding — i.e., if you show up with the pet unannounced at the airport counter — it will be denied admittance.

    Where do these rules come from, anyway?  Are lawyers with nothing to do dreaming them up, like Woody Allen in Bananas, to justify their salary?

    Then there are bans like the one on changing places to an empty seat with more legroom — unless you pull out your credit card — which make travelers think that we are to be treated more like a flock of sheep or, rather, a herd of milch-cows.

    In any case, the heads of your Copenhagen crew seem to be they have to act as policemen and/or as judge, and follow the rules religiously.

    However, in real life, aren't real police officers and real judges flexible at times?  In what country does a citizen not hear, at one time or another, "This time, I'm letting you off with a warning" or "Okay, we'll let it go this time — but don't do it again"?  In other words, the very sworn representatives of the state (!) and its rule of law (!) do not act like robots, and use (and are allowed to use) their discretion as well as their common sense, rendering a service to a citizen when and if the situation warrants it.

    In legal terms, today's citizens seem to suffer from an incapacity and a mental refusal to see the difference between malum in se (conduct inherently wrong by nature like theft and murder) and malum prohibitum (non-damaging statute-based rules), as well as to determine mens rea in one's fellow human being (to what degree was a fellow's misdeed intentional, if at all?).

    To return to the Air France/Aviator supervisor in Denmark, who is definitely part of the service industry, but who seems incapable of taking the initiative to overlook rules when and if the situation warrants it — a passenger stranded with two cats in the airport as an airliner readies to take off — in spite of specific directions by Air France on said passenger's computer reservation to do so.

    The Scandinavian peoples' love affair with rule-following allowed for no decision, no initiative, no capacity to improvise, no motivation to say, "Let's see if we can't find a solution and make this customer (and his furry friends) happy."

    As I said, there were several solutions available — including going around the rules and, in a cabin of some 100 people, allowing two cats (there may have been one or two more) for one passenger.

    Indeed, this was exactly which happened earlier this year, on my evening flight of January 9 when I traveled in the opposite direction.  Then, the ground crew at Charles de Gaulle airport brought the Air France captain out from his cockpit and the plane to the terminal (this does sound a bit extreme, you realize), where he told duly me he would accept two cats on his aircraft if I could find a passenger agreeing to take the second feline.  (Needless to say, chances are close to 100% that in a group of about 100, you will find a high number of people willing to take responsibility for a cute kitty-cat for less than two hours.)

    Now, a final word of praise:  while one cat went into the hold on December 2, the Aviator personnel who made my reservation was so kind to put me and the other animal in a row all by ourselves.  This is the kind of service and thoughtfulness that I fully appreciate.

    Joyeux Noël et bonne année

Related: This Is What We Would Like to Hear When a Flight Is Overbooked

Update: Airlines are running out of ways to charge customers more by Alessandra Malito:

The [airline] industry ranked seventh-to-last out of 43 industries in the American Customer Satisfaction Index in 2016. All aspects of air travel have been criticized, such as airfare, booking flights, getting onto the plane and even the flight itself.

Did Donald Trump Read Lao Tzu Early in His Life?

Lao Tzu does not seem to have been a leftist, a Democrat, or a communist…

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu - chapter 57

Rule a nation with justice.
Wage war with surprise moves.
Become master of the universe without striving.
How do I know that this is so?
Because of this!

The more laws and restrictions there are,
The poorer people become.
The sharper men's weapons,
The more trouble in the land.
The more ingenious and clever men are,
The more strange things happen.
The more rules and regulations,
The more thieves and robbers.

Therefore the sage says:

     I take no action and people are reformed.
     I enjoy peace and people become honest.
     I do nothing and people become rich.
     I have no desires and people return to the good and simple life.

(translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English)

Star Wars VIII: A Disturbance in la Force

When, at minute 1:10 of the Jimmy Kimmel Live special on the eighth Star Wars film, the host asks Rian Johnson, "Is Jedi in the title of this film singular or plural?", the writer-director of the The Last Jedi replies that it is singular.

Fair enough, but in France, the message does not seem to have gone through — or else, it's due to the ever-lasting love-hate relationship between les Français et les Anglo-Saxons — as the title there is Les Derniers Jedi.

Rian settles the debate over whether or not Jedi is plural in this movie's title

Le Figaro's Jean Talabot has an entire article on the issue, saying that a translation error might be involved.

Il se peut également que ce titre français soit du à une erreur de traduction, ce qui ne serait pas la première fois comme l'a soulevé le Huffington Post .

Police Corruption in the UK: Manchester force ‘took bribes from organised crime gang’

No good news for the police and the authorities of the United Kingdom days after the breaking of the scandal of an innocent student almost jailed for up to 10 years for rapes he did not commit, based on the lying testimony of his petulant former lover, an ignominy that is but the tip of the iceberg.

Now it turns out, writes Crime Editor Fiona Hamilton, that a Times exposé of corruption in the Greater Manchester Police has found allegations that Britain’s fourth-biggest force ‘took bribes from organised crime gang’, effectively causing its £3.5m investigation to collapse.

A £3.5 million inquiry into one of Britain’s most notorious crime gangs collapsed after multiple claims of police corruption, an investigation by The Times has revealed.

Officers from Greater Manchester police were accused of taking bribes from associates of Paul Massey, the underworld “Mr Big” who was murdered in Salford two years ago. The allegations emerged during Operation Holly, a five-year inquiry into money laundering, fraud and tax offences, which centred on a security company for which Massey, 55, was a consultant. Detectives believed that he was a “shadow director” for 21st Security Ltd and that it was used to launder funds and disguise the gang’s gains. …

Confirmation bias in this alarmed age says that because some teachers have been abusers, some men have raped, and many victims weren’t believed, it follows that assuming guilt is the safe bet

The ordeal of Liam Allan must not have been in vain

writes Libby Purves in the Times (see Teach British Women Not to Lie About Rape and The case of an innocent student put on trial for a rape hoax is just the “tip of the iceberg”).

The torrent of public and legal outrage following the student’s two years on bail and instant acquittal must not die away. Police and CPS failures must be analysed, punished and made unthinkable. This was a young man facing a 12-year sentence and lifelong stigma for multiple rapes, and it took the prosecuting barrister to save him.

Jerry Hayes was left spitting rivets of indignation at being put in a position of nearly wrecking a life simply because bad training and lazy procedure meant the police ignored, or never looked at, clear evidence that the accuser lied. She was, as Allan pleaded, out for revenge and had long pestered him for sex after he ended the liaison. Hayes, new to the case but an old warrior in the law, demanded her phone record (previously denied to the defence as “very personal” and not relevant). The defence sat up reading the woman’s texts, and in court the next day Hayes announced that there was no case.

Every detail is dismaying. The accused had asked for the woman’s phone to be checked because he had lost his own; police archived it or ignored what was staring them in the face. A report this year by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and the Crown Prosecution Service indicates that the “scheduling” of evidence is

“routinely poor, while revelation by the police to the prosecutor of material that may undermine the prosecution case or assist the defence case is rare”.

Liam Allan, vindicated and angry, suspects that in sex-offence cases convictions have become “like sales targets”. We know about the psychology of confirmation bias, in which the mind selects evidence that reinforces its prejudices. But to find it in the criminal justice system is horrifying. The director of public prosecutions, Alison Saunders, driven by missionary zeal over real unpunished sexual abuses, has caused unease by referring to complainants — once even after the acquittal — as “victims”. The message from police, in a backlash against decades of disgraceful nonchalance, is a soupy “You will be believed”, which has led in some cases to believing fantasists and liars.

It is hard not to see confirmation-bias culture in this case. …

Confirmation bias in this alarmed age says that because some teachers have been abusers, some men have raped, and many victims weren’t believed, it follows that assuming guilt is the safe bet. Yet just because it has long been a dangerous world for women, that is no reason to make it so dangerous for men. It’s happening, though. And the risk is that proper rage at the system’s abuse of Liam Allan will be smothered by fashionable truisms about sexual assault: “OK, he is innocent but lots of men do get away with it.” Exposure of real sexual misconducts lately has aggravated this feverish anxiety, and a dismaying willingness to punish and smear without investigation. Aled Jones, of all people, is now off the BBC while it pokes suspiciously at a decade-old allegation reported as “inappropriate contact and messages”. This he has strongly denied. The new wisdom says that we women are perpetual victims: abused, coerced or freezing in dumb terror.

Take The New Yorker’s short story Cat Person currently overexciting the western world, in which a flirtatious woman enjoying her power suddenly cools off, but proceeds with coupling through a mixture of politeness and vanity (“Look at this beautiful girl, she imagined him thinking. She’s so perfect, her body is perfect . . . The more she imagined his arousal, the more turned-on she got”). Some seize on even that soft-porn fiction as evidence that we are always victims of male domination because, after brushing the poor mutt off with an abrupt text, the heroine gets in return one which irritably ends in the word “whore!”.

Well, that’s rude of him. Very rude. On the other hand, it is not nearly as bad a response to rejection as crying rape and trying to get your former intimate jailed for a decade, reckoning that officialdom will believe you and not him.

It should be emphasised that false accusations of sexual assault are very rare. Home Office figures suggest 4 per cent. But they do happen, and the present atmosphere of suspicion, and neurotic magnification of minor male clumsinesses may encourage more. Women are not all angels, and a sense of our historical powerlessness may make this particular weapon horribly tempting.

It mustn’t be. There have to be consequences, because sexual crime is too serious, lying about it too wicked, to be used as a weapon of the petulant. In the Allan case we know nothing of the vulnerabilities or mental problems of the woman who lied, but it will be dismaying if she is not promptly charged with perverting the course of justice. Or, at least, wasting police time. Certainly she should lose anonymity. That privilege of real victims is far too precious to be brought into disrepute.

Update: Police Corruption in the UK — Manchester force ‘took bribes from organised crime gang’

Betrayed by the UK System of Justice: The case of an innocent student put on trial for rape because police withheld evidence is just the “tip of the iceberg”

At the Times of London, Ben Gurr has more on the UK man — nay, the UK men — who are betrayed by the UK system of justice:

This must be brought to a stop. There is only one way to do that, and that involves two common-sense steps.

There must be divulgation of the identity (yes, that's right, shaming) of, lawsuits against, and trials and punishment (including jail time) for the drama queens involved in the crime of falsely accusing others of a specific crime (in these cases, rape). Don't the potential future lovers or boyfriends of these crybullies deserve to know the identities of those with whom there is danger of hanging around with?!

There must be divulgation of the identity of, lawsuits against, and trials and punishment (including jail time) for the police officers and government lawyers involved in assisting (even unintentionally) people (men as well as women) in the crime of falsely accusing others of a crime (whether rape or any other offense).

Needless to say, the above is as much, if not more, about setting precedents by dissuading others (other vixens, other police officers and prosecutors) from the temptation of engaging in similar "mental torture" stories in the future as it is about punishing the guilty in this particular case. Pour encourager les autres.

Many will notice, no doubt with the greatest of astonishments, that this "extreme" solution used to be… the rule before the left swept through society with all their fairy tale takeovers of history, of the culture, and of the law.

I will be pleased if a reform movement will include criminology student Liam Allan.

Update: Confirmation bias in this alarmed age says that because some teachers have been abusers, some men have raped, and many victims weren’t believed, it follows that assuming guilt is the safe bet

 … There have to be consequences, because sexual crime is too serious, lying about it too wicked, to be used as a weapon of the petulant. In the Allan case we know nothing of the vulnerabilities or mental problems of the woman who lied, but it will be dismaying if she is not promptly charged with perverting the course of justice. Or, at least, wasting police time. Certainly she should lose anonymity. …

But back to Ben Gurr of the Times of London:

The case of an innocent student put on trial for rape because police withheld evidence is just the “tip of the iceberg”, senior barristers said last night.

Dozens of cases have collapsed in the past three years because of serious police failings over the way they handle evidence, according to an inspection report obtained by The Times.

In one case, a man accused of robbery spent six months in jail before a prosecutor found evidence confirming that he had been robbed by the “victim”, who was a violent drug dealer.

Yesterday The Times revealed that Liam Allan, 22, spent almost two years on bail and was on trial for a series of alleged rapes before police handed over text messages that exonerated him.

Angela Rafferty, QC, chairwoman of the Criminal Bar Association, said yesterday that without the intervention of the barristers in court Mr Allan “would have suffered an appalling miscarriage of justice” because of the failure of police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

She warned that the failure was “not an isolated incident” and said that police and the CPS may be “unconsciously bias[ed]” towards people who report sex offences.

Mr Allan’s acquittal comes as concern grows over a series of rape cases involving young men that have fallen apart because of fears about the quality of the evidence.

A report in July by HM Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate, seen by this newspaper, found that police and CPS staff blamed “limited resources and lack of time” for the poor disclosure of evidence.
 
The inspectors found that the failure to deal with issues early meant that unauthorised disclosure between lawyers, unnecessary adjournments and discontinued cases “are common occurrences”. The report said that at least 56 cases had been scrapped because of failure to disclose evidence between 2013 and last year.

 …/… Critics said Mr Allan’s case showed that lessons had not been learnt. Ms Rafferty said: “The case should never have been brought. Public funds were wasted, he spent two years on bail, and no good has come of it. The authorities do not appear to have learnt lessons from the joint report by HM Inspectors of the CPS and Constabulary in July 2017, which highlighted systemic failures and offered remedies.”

Dapinder Singh, QC, who specialises in complex frauds and serious crime, said the failure to disclose evidence in Mr Allan’s case may be “just the tip of the iceberg”. He added: “Disclosure is the backbone of the criminal justice system and a defence team must be able to trust the prosecution to properly discharge their disclosure duties.”

Among cases to have fallen apart recently are those of George Owen, a 21-year-old trainee accountant, who was cleared in September by a jury that took two hours to find that he had not forced himself on a 19-year-old student as they left a bar in Manchester.

The previous week, two young men were cleared of raping girls after nights out. Bartolomeo Joly de Lotbiniere, 22, a student at York University, was reported to police when he appeared on University Challenge — 14 months after having sex with his accuser. Joshua Lines, 23, was accused by a fellow student who had invited him into her bed. Both said that the sex was consensual and were found not guilty, prompting questions about why they had ended up in court.

The woman who accused Mr Allan faces investigation for attempting to pervert the course of justice. The detective involved will be questioned about the failure to hand over the vital evidence. The accuser told police that she hated sex but wrote hundreds of text messages to friends saying she was devastated when Mr Allan said that they could not meet again and discussing in detail her enjoyment of sex.

The CPS and Scotland Yard are reviewing why 40,000 text and WhatsApp messages from her phone were not handed over until after the trial had begun at Croydon crown court. Alison Saunders, the director of public prosecutions, has apologised in a letter to The Times today for the failure to hand over the evidence earlier.

In Mr Allan’s case, the phone records were handed over only when a new prosecutor agreed to a request from the defence barrister to see any material from the woman’s phone. Judge Peter Gower said on Thursday it was clear that Mr Allan would not have been charged if the messages had been seen, and demanded an inquiry into the failure to produce them.

Mr Allan, who is in the final year of a criminology degree at the University of Greenwich, had been warned that he faced at least ten years in jail and would be on the sex offenders register for life.

A Crown Prosecution Service spokeswoman said: “We know how important it is to get disclosure right and in the light of the recent HM Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate report we are reviewing our disclosure policies and practices with police colleagues as a matter of urgency.”

The ‘victim’s’ messages

The woman who accused Liam Allan of rape told police that she hated sex, but hundreds of messages sent to friends during the preceding months detailed her obsession with the student and her love of sex.

The messages were downloaded by police from the woman’s telephone shortly after she was interviewed in January 2015. Police then stated there were no messages of interest to either the prosecution or Mr Allan’s lawyers.
 
Edited examples of some of her messages were read out in court. In a message to a friend after Mr Allan told her he was going to university she described how she had called him in a panic and begged him to see her, writing:

“Honestly I was just a mess and I was like I’m asking for one last chance to show you how much you mean to me.”

Writing to a friend about having sex with another man:

“After the initial pain of the train getting into the tunnel it’s not that bad, after a while it’s alright and it’s fun . . . everyone knows I enjoy it but it still hurts me to this day but no pain no gain. It’s worth it.

“It’s always nice to be sexually assaulted without breaking the law. You clearly don’t love me because you keep revoking my sexual advances, have I got to drug you.”

In the comments section, Richard Strickland writes that

You can't trust the police, they're more interested in their social engineering and politically correct duties than solving crime.

More interested in chasing people for saying mean things on twitter and facebook than protecting white girls from the muslim rape gangs.

More interested in arresting someone for leaving a rasher of bacon outside a mosque than dealing with FGM.

They should be stripped of their pension rights en-masse and be investigated on a personal level, and made to pay damages on a personal basis to those that they have failed.

Related: Teach British Women Not to Lie About Rape — Accused man who went through “mental torture”: "I feel betrayed by the system which I had believed would do the right thing"

Update 2: Police Corruption in the UK — Manchester force ‘took bribes from organised crime gang’

Teach British Women Not to Lie About Rape — Accused man who went through “mental torture”: "I feel betrayed by the system which I had believed would do the right thing"

A judge has called for an inquiry after the trial of a student accused of rape collapsed because police had failed to reveal evidence proving his innocence.

Thus reports David Brown in the Times of London. As Instapundit says, this should lead to jail time, but not just for the woman, also for the members of the bar in charge of the prosecution. Shouldn't at the very least the reparations that the young man is due come directly from their pockets? And why on earth can't she be named and identified?! Maybe there ought to be jail time for the (fake news?) journalists (or, rather, their editors) refusing to fully inform the public (not least, the future potential lovers of hers)…
[Update: thanks for the Instalanche, Glenn Reynolds; Instapundit readers, as the full story turns out to be even worse, do not fail to check out the update to this post, Betrayed by the UK System of Justice: The case of Liam Allan is just the “tip of the iceberg” (!!)]

Liam Allan, 22, spent almost two years on bail and three days in the dock at Croydon crown court before his trial was halted yesterday.

The judge demanded a review of disclosure of evidence by the Metropolitan Police, Britain’s biggest force, and called for an inquiry at the “very highest level” of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). He warned of the risks of “serious miscarriages of justice” after hearing that, to save costs, material was not always handed to defence lawyers.

Mr Allan, a criminology undergraduate at Greenwich University, had been warned that he would be jailed for at least ten years if found guilty after being charged with six rapes and six sexual assaults against a woman who told police that she does not enjoy sex. Mr Allan said the sex was consensual and that the woman was acting maliciously because he would not see her again after he started university.

His lawyers had repeatedly been refused access to records from the woman’s telephone because police insisted that there was nothing of interest for the prosecution or defence, the court was told.

When a new prosecution barrister took over the case the day before the start of the trial, he ordered police to hand over any telephone records. It was revealed that they had a computer disk containing copies of 40,000 messages.

They showed that she continued to pester Mr Allan for “casual sex”, told friends how much she enjoyed it with him and discussed her fantasies of being raped and having violent sex.

Jerry Hayes, the prosecuting barrister, told the court yesterday that he would offer no evidence. “I would like to apologise to Liam Allan. There was a terrible failure in disclosure which was inexcusable,” he said.

Mr Hayes, a former Tory MP and criminal barrister for 40 years, added:

“There could have been a very serious miscarriage of justice, which could have led to a very significant period of imprisonment and life on the sex offenders register. It appears the [police] officer in the case has not reviewed the disk, which is quite appalling.”

Speaking outside court, Mr Allan told The Times: “I can’t explain the mental torture of the past two years. I feel betrayed by the system which I had believed would do the right thing — the system I want to work in.” His mother, Lorraine Allan, 46, a bank worker, hugged her son as he was surrounded by friends who had been lined up to give character evidence if the trial continued.

“In the current climate, in these sorts of cases, you are guilty until you can prove you are innocent,” she said. “The assumption is there is no smoke without fire.”

Radhia Karaa, a district crown prosecutor, wrote to the court admitting that the handling of the telephone downloads “has fallen below the standard that we expect”. Judge Peter Gower found Mr Allan not guilty on all charges. “There is something that has gone wrong and it is a matter that the CPS, in my judgment, should be considering at the very highest level,” he said. “Otherwise there is a risk not only of this happening again but that the trial process will not detect what has gone wrong and there will be a very serious miscarriage of justice. He [Mr Allan] leaves the courtroom an innocent man without a stain on his character.”

The judge said that police must tell prosecutors about all material collected during their investigations. “It seems to me to be a recipe for disaster if material is not viewed by a lawyer,” he said. “Something has gone very, very wrong in the way this case was investigated and brought to court.”

Julia Smart, for the defence, said she received the details of the woman’s text messages on the evening before she was due to cross-examine her, so stayed up reading them. When she told the court what she had found, the trial was halted. She said she believed that evidence from phones was being withheld from defence lawyers to save money.

Alison Saunders, the director of public prosecutions, has pushed to increase the prosecution and conviction of sexual offences. Rapes recorded by police have risen from 12,295 in 2002-03 to 45,100 last year but the number of rapes referred to the CPS for a decision on charging has stayed broadly static. Of the 35,000 adult and child rapes recorded by police in 2015-16, just over 6,800 were referred to police, a fall of about 690 on the previous year, according to Rape Monitoring Group figures.

A Met spokeswoman said: “We are aware of this case being dismissed and are carrying out an urgent assessment to establish the circumstances.”

Down Under, meanwhile, Victoria Craw has more quotes from Liam Allan:

A STUDENT has described going through “mental torture” after a rape case against him was thrown out in court because police had failed to hand over more than 40,000 messages from his accuser. 

Liam Allan, 22, faced up to ten years in jail charged with six counts of rape and six counts of sexual assault against a young woman over a 14-month period that began when he was 19.

 … Now, the judge has called for an inquiry at the “very highest level” to understand why police failed to hand over critical evidence including 40,000 messages from the accuser to Mr Allan and friends.

The messages showed how she had continually messaged Mr Allan for “casual sex”, said how much she enjoyed it and discussed fantasies of violent sex and rape, The Times reports.

 … Outside the court, Mr Allan said he went through “mental torture” over the two year period and relied on the system to uncover evidence that would exonerate him.

When first accused, he turned to a local lawyer he had done work experience with and said he was terrified at the idea of going to prison with sex offenders and worried about what would happen to his mum and flatmates when he was away.

“You are all on your own. I could not talk to my mother about the details of the case because she might have been called as a witness. I couldn’t talk with my friends because they might have been called. I felt completely isolated at every stage of the process,” he said.

“I can’t explain the mental torture of the past two years. ... I feel betrayed by the system which I had believed would do the right thing, the system I want to work in.”

 … The Crown Prosecution Service said they will not conduct a “management review” with the Metropolitian Police to “examine the way in which the case was handled.”

Mr Hayes, who is a former Conservative MP wrote in The Times the case marked the most “appalling failure of disclosure I have ever encountered.”

Update: Betrayed by the System of Justice: The case of Liam Allan is just the “tip of the iceberg”

Update 2: Confirmation bias in this alarmed age says that because some teachers have been abusers, some men have raped, and many victims weren’t believed, it follows that assuming guilt is the safe bet

… There have to be consequences, because sexual crime is too serious, lying about it too wicked, to be used as a weapon of the petulant. In the Allan case we know nothing of the vulnerabilities or mental problems of the woman who lied, but it will be dismaying if she is not promptly charged with perverting the course of justice. Or, at least, wasting police time. Certainly she should lose anonymity. …

Update 3: Police Corruption in the UK — Manchester force ‘took bribes from organised crime gang’

Is it really true? Are these “sexual orientation” nondiscrimination laws really aimed at no one in particular?

Over at the Constituion website and in spite of Neil Gorsuch, Benny Huang is not optimistic.

The American people probably won’t learn the Supreme Court’s decision in the groundbreaking case of Masterpiece Cake Shop v. Colorado until the court deigns to deliver its “wisdom” sometime before June.

We’ll all be holding our breath until then, waiting to know if Justice Anthony Kennedy feels like allowing us to have a few scraps of freedom.

My prediction: probably not. The First Amendment is dead.

Interestingly, the plaintiff in this case, a Christian baker named Jack Phillips, has made his appeal primarily on free speech grounds, arguing that his rights have been violated because he’s being forced to use his artistic talent to communicate a message that he does not support. Though he is also making a free exercise claim, it is secondary in nature.

That’s because Phillips would almost certainly lose if he hung his hat on the Constitution’s free exercise clause. I don’t mean to imply that I wouldn’t find a free exercise argument compelling, only that the court probably wouldn’t. If SCOTUS were to uphold his free exercise right not to be forced to be an unwilling participant in someone else’s wedding, it would mean overturning precedent, something the court is loath to do.

For credibility’s sake, the supremes have traditionally stood by previous decisions, even bad decisions like Employment Division v. Smith, a free exercise case that the court decided in 1990. The case was brought by Alfred Smith, a member of Oregon’s Klamath tribe, who lost his job as a drug and alcohol counselor for using the psychedelic drug peyote, a controlled substance, and was subsequently denied unemployment benefits. Smith argued that his free exercise rights had been violated because he only used peyote in the context of religious rituals sponsored by the Native American Church, of which he was a member. He took his case all the way to the Supreme Court…and lost. 

There are a number of thorny issues surrounding the Smith case that would require a lengthy tangent to explain here. Suffice it to say that the case set a bad precedent and greatly diminished religious freedom in this country. SCOTUS came to two conclusions that we’ve been forced to live with ever since. They are:

1. Laws that happen to impinge on free exercise rights are not unconstitutional on their face. If they are “laws of general applicability” that happen to bump up against someone’s religion, “the First Amendment has not been offended.” Only laws that intend to curb free exercise are automatically unconstitutional.
2. Legislatures may create special religious accommodations but they don’t have to.

The first of these conclusions is problematic because it speaks to motive. A law can be either constitutional or unconstitutional depending upon what the legislators’ were thinking at the time. Trying to divine legislators’ true motives seems like a fool’s errand—especially if they aren’t honest about their intentions—so my instinct is to discard motive as a guiding principle in favor of effect. Yet on the other hand I can see that some laws really do find themselves in conflict with people’s religious beliefs and practices quite by accident. An example of this can be found in a 2003 case from Florida in which a Muslim woman, Sultaana Freeman, sued the state for not allowing her to have her driver’s license photo taken while wearing a niqab, a garment that covers all of the face except the eyes.

I can see an argument for creating a special accommodation for religious garb. After all, if she’s pulled over while driving she will be wearing her niqab so her face will match her license photo. On the other hand, a photo ID is basically worthless if its bearer can obscure her face in the picture.

Though I can see the pros and cons of granting this woman an accommodation, it’s actually irrelevant. The question is not whether Florida should make special accommodations for Muslim women but whether it must. 

The answer is no. Sultaana Freeman lost her case because the infringement upon her free exercise rights was incidental. The law wasn’t written to make her feel like a lesser citizen. It was written because people often need to prove their identities and because identities must be matched to faces.

The reason that free exercise claims have failed to protect private business owners from intrusive nondiscrimination laws is because supporters of such laws have countered that any infringement upon free exercise rights is entirely unintentional. Just as Sultaana Freeman was forced to yield to a law of general applicability, so too must Christian bakers, florists, and wedding photographers.

But is it really true? Are these “sexual orientation” nondiscrimination laws really aimed at no one in particular?

How anyone can make this argument with a straight face is beyond me. Just listening to the way supporters of these laws talk tells me that they harbor a deep animus against people of faith—hence all the talk of flying spaghetti monsters and creeping theocracy, the constant comparisons of Christian conservatives to ISIS and the insane claims that religious zealotry is to blame for the Holocaust.

Supporters of these laws are the same people who maintain that restricting marriage to the union of a man and woman violates the Constitution’s establishment clause because only religion could be the impetus. Then, when a Christian baker asks not to be forced to design a custom wedding cake for a same-sex wedding they act as if religion has nothing to do with it.

A good example of someone who can’t stop betraying the true motives of such laws can be found in homofascism’s premiere sugar daddy, Tim Gill, a billionaire homosexual who uses his fortune to bankroll “gay” “rights” initiatives. Basically, he promotes nondiscrimination laws and opposes religious freedom laws.

Said Gill to a Rolling Stone reporter:

“We’re going into the hardest states in the country. We’re going to punish the wicked.”

Punish the wicked? And who might that be, Mr. Gill?

Gill offers a clue that such laws aren’t actually comparable to the Florida law that so vexed Sultaana Freeman. The purpose of the Florida law is to establish a reliable form of identification, something the state has an actual interest in. It’s not intended to “punish the wicked” and if it were we could logically infer that “the wicked” must be religious Muslim women.

Naturally, Gill denied that “the wicked” means Christians. Rolling Stone’s Andy Kroll defended Gill in a follow-up article: “Not once in my profile does Gill talk about ‘targeting’ Christians. Not once does Gill so much as hint at singling out Christians or adherents of any other religion. Not once does the word ‘Christian’ appear.”

It’s worth noting that none of the various state religious freedom initiatives Gill opposes say anything about homosexuals or wedding services. Tim Gill simply infers that that’s what is meant.

But it’s true that Tim Gill didn’t explicitly mention Christians. He only said that he would go into the “toughest states” (the Bible Belt was clearly implied) and use his huge checkbook to crush religious freedom laws. In other words, “punish[ing] the wicked” was a dog whistle that all of his supporters heard loud and clear.

For a wonderful rebuttal to Gill’s nonsense, I’ll refer to The Federalist’s Bre Payton.

“Ah, so ‘the wicked’ whom Gill says need to be ‘punished’ are indeed Christians, as well as everyone who agrees with them. Anyone who stands up for a Christian’s right to live in accordance with his or her religious beliefs will also be targeted for harassment in public and the legal system. Further, he clearly defines ‘wickedness’ as adhering to centuries-old Christian (and Jewish and Muslim) beliefs on human identity and sexuality. To Gill, orthodox Christian beliefs comprise ‘wickedness.’ Thanks for clearing that up.”

The distilled version of Gill’s argument is that nondiscrimination laws apply to everyone so shut up. This is not nearly the air tight argument he thinks it is.

In days gone by, some states required poll taxes to vote. They applied to everyone but they were often aimed at blacks even if the legislators who passed them wouldn’t admit it. They claimed it was about funding elections.

Prior to 2011, the US military prohibited homosexual conduct in the ranks, a policy which I supported then as now. This was a law of general applicability yet some people—people like Tim Gill for example—believed that it targeted “gays.”

In short: Just because a law applies to everyone doesn’t mean that it isn’t aimed at someone in particular. The outrageous laws that Tim Gill pushes are aimed at people of faith and they therefore run afoul of the Constitution, even as interpreted in light of the Smith ruling. The First Amendment was written to protect us from exactly this kind of governmental overreach. If it doesn’t protect us from this it’s not worth the paper it’s written on.

Johnny Hallyday: Good-Bye, Friend

The beloved French mega rock star who passed away at 74 Wednesday, Johnny Hallyday (see Adam Gopnik's New Yorker profile), is to have his coffin driven down the Champs-Élysées on Saturday before being flown to his favorite island, Saint Bart's, for burial on Monday.

A lover of America, he was nicknamed the French Elvis Presley, and many, if not most, of his songs feature a distinctive American rock sound.

More on Johnny Hallyday, including from Steven Erlanger:

 … his Wikipedia entry in French is longer than Jesus Christ’s.

Johnny Hallyday is as French as the baguette, and he has been singing for more than 50 years, bringing Elvis rhythms, energy and glitter to a culture steeped in ballads.