Tag: law

Retreat is pointless

Christian organizations might as well learn to start standing firmly on their principles, because you either use them or you lose them:

One of the largest evangelical organizations on college campuses nationwide has told its 1,300 staff members they will be fired if they personally support gay marriage or otherwise disagree with its newly detailed positions on sexuality starting on Nov. 11.


InterVarsity Christian Fellowship USA says that it will start a process for “involuntary terminations” for any staffer who comes forward to disagree with its positions on human sexuality, which holds that any sexual activity outside of a husband and wife is immoral.

One of Rod Dreher’s commenters adds an observation.


Federal law makes it pretty much impossible to take a stance along the lines of, “This is what we believe, but out of compassion and pragmatism we’re willing to be flexible for a certain amount of time, with certain people, and/or in certain situations.” Either you have a blanket policy that applies to all people in all instances, or federal courts will rule that you don’t “really” have a principled position and invalidate the broader policy because of the exceptions.

So, do the right thing. Don’t make exceptions. Tolerance is not a Christian virtue, it is the first step along the path to destruction.

Immigration trumps law

How is it possible to argue that immigration is beneficial to a society when the mere presence of immigrants involves rendering that society’s laws moot?

Child brides as young as 14 are being reunited with their older, migrant husbands in Denmark after authorities decided that upholding Danish law breached their “human rights”. The legal minimum age for marriage is 18 in the Nordic nation, yet the exemptions are being made for migrants because separating the couples is said to violate the right to family life guaranteed in the European convention on human rights.

There are 27 migrants under 18 who were known to be married Denmark, and among the influx arriving in the past year were two 14-year-old girls, wed to 24 and 28-year-old men. One 14-year-old was expecting a baby. The age of consent in Denmark is 15 for the rest of the population, and those found guilty of sexual acts with minors are liable for 8 years in jail.

One simply cannot take ANY of the Left’s claims seriously anymore. The leftists strain at gnats and swallow mammoths. They are not fit for Western civilization.

Why I no longer link to Steve Sailer

Or quote him, or quote the Saker, or link to any other writer on the Unz Review. I received this notice from Blogger yesterday:


We have received a DMCA complaint for your blog, Vox Popoli. An e-mail with the details of the complaint was sent to you on Sep 30, 2016, and we reset the post status to “Draft”; you can edit it here. You may republish the post with the offending content and/or link(s) removed. If you believe you have the rights to post this content, you can file a counter-claim with us. For more on our DMCA policy, please click here. Thank you for your prompt attention.

The complaint was related to a post entitled Cold War II, in which I extensively quoted The Saker and provided a link to The Saker’s article on the Unz Review from which I quoted. There are three problems here.

  1. It is obnoxious to file a DMCA complaint instead of directly contacting the writer with a request to take down or modify his post. My words get quoted, repeated, copied, and even plagiarized every day, and I have never filed a DMCA complaint about anyone. This is only the second DMCA complaint I have received; the first was from SFWA when they wanted to hide their embarrassing report about me from the public.
  2. I have an email from the Saker giving me permission to utilize all of his work; we’re even planning to release a collection of his excellent work on the Russian invasion of Syria in an ebook one day.
  3. The Saker told me that the rights to his work have been released to the public under one form of GPL or another; I’ll have to look it up to determine precisely which license it is.

So, until I a) hear from someone at the Unz Review, b) the DMCA complaint is either withdrawn at their own request or Blogger is informed that it is illegitimate and was filed by someone without the rights to do so, and c) I am assured that no DMCA complaints will be made against VP or AG in the future by anyone in their organization, I will neither cite nor link to anything on the Unz Review.

Caveat: if I go to the trouble of successfully counter-claiming and proving that I have the rights to quote the Saker as I see fit, I will continue to read and quote and link to him.

Lest anyone doubt that I am serious about this, I should mention that there was a strategy-related service that used to send me emails, unrequested, every day. One day, after I posted a quote from one of their emails and linked to their site as I had previously done from time to time, they sent me an email demanding that I stop posting quotes from their emails. So, I promptly unsubscribed, and after a few months went by and they realized they had lost an amount of regular traffic, they asked me to resubscribe and start linking to their posts again. I declined to do so, having found superior alternatives in the meantime, and spamfiled them. That was years ago. I haven’t visited their site or read a single email from them since. I don’t even know if they’re still around.

If any site doesn’t want a writer with monthly traffic of ~3 million pageviews providing them with links and traffic, that’s fine. I am too busy to waste time working with fools, the obnoxious, or the obtuse, and I have a surfeit of prospective sources from which to draw. I already feel that I don’t read half the material or address one-quarter the subjects I should. Regardless, as you can see, I have removed Steve Sailer from the list of Day Trips on the sidebar so as not to risk any future violations.

And just to be clear, I’m not blaming Ron Unz, Steve Sailer, or The Saker for this. I tend to doubt any of them even knew about it.

UPDATE: This appears to be an SJW attack on the Unz Review. He said the following in the comments:

Someone mentioned this situation to me. As might be guessed, this was the first I’d heard of it, and I assume it’s some sort of hoax intended as petty harassment by some random activist on the Internet. Anyway, I’m not too familiar with either these DMCA complaints or how Blogger works, but if you’ll drop me a note explaining whom I should email to explain that it’s fraudulent, I’ll be glad to do so.

Regards,
Ron Unz, Publisher

I have, of course, restored the link to Steve Sailer at the Unz Review and I will be contacting Blogger accordingly.

UPDATE: I have filed a counter-complaint with Blogger, citing Mr. Unz’s statement as proof that the complainant did not have the right to the content. That should suffice to resolve the issue.

“Marital rape” does not, and cannot, exist

Judgy Bitch considers my debate with Louise Mensch on the matter, thinks everything through and concludes that my position is the correct one:

I think we have to clearly distinguish between having a right and exercising that right. Under the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, every American has the right to keep and bear arms. Lots of Americans choose not to exercise that right. They still have the right, whether they use it or not. The question under consideration in this particular debate is whether marriage confers consent to sex that cannot be withdrawn except by the dissolution of the marriage.

If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I would have sided with Mensch. If I say no to my husband, I expect him to respect that, although if I’m being honest, I would be very insulted and sulky if he rejected my advances. In the 18 years we’ve been together, I do not recall him ever rejecting me, and I can count the number of times I’ve absolutely refused to have sex with him on one hand.  Pondering the idea more carefully, I have now come to the conclusion that Day is correct – rape cannot exist within a marriage. If marital rape is a thing, then 100% of the sex I have ever had with my husband has been rape.

I have never obtained his consent and he has never obtained mine.

Consent is assumed as a basic function of marriage. Consent to sex is part of what marriage is. Mensch acknowledges the general obligation spouses have to one another to have sex, but refuses blanket consent. I think the most interesting part of the discussion surrounds the use of force and violence. Marriage confers the right to have sex with your spouse, but it does not confer any right to assault your spouse. By what means could a spouse force sex that was not wanted without the use of force?

It’s not an accident that the same ideology that has expressly stated “all sex is rape” is the same one behind the push to create the oxymoronic legal concept of “marital rape”.

If they could, feminists would outlaw both marriage and normal sex. Marital rape is an effective way for them to attack both.

The first thing we do

Is shoot all the lawyers. Glenn Reynolds draws our attention to an absurd parody of justice and recompense:

In 2013, Yahoo announced that it would begin scanning its users’ e-mail for targeted advertising purposes—just as Google does. As is par for the course, class-action lawsuits were filed. The Silicon Valley media giant, according to one of the lawsuits, was violating the “personal liberties” of non-Yahoo Mail users. That’s because non-Yahoo Mail users, who have sent mail to Yahoo mail users, were having their e-mail scanned without their permission.
…
The suit, which was one of six that were co-mingled as a single class action, demanded that a judge halt the scanning and award each victim “$5,000 or three times actual damages” in addition to “reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs.”


Fast forward three years. The case is now closed. Days ago, a Silicon Valley federal judge signed off (PDF) on a settlement (PDF). The lawyers won, they were awarded $4 million (£3 million), and the public got nothing. What’s more, the settlement allows Yahoo to continue to scan e-mails without non-Yahoo users’ consent.

It’s almost as though class-action suits have become nothing more than shakedown operations for lawyers.

We will, of course, spare Dr. Reynolds as the proverbial exception to the rule and award him his pick of his former colleague’s estates.

It would be in the definite interest of the American people to pass a law that forbids lawyers to collect more than 10 percent of any settlement or court-dictated award. Unfortunately, the lawyers in Congress are very unlikely to ever permit the passage of anything that would restrain the rapacious predation of their colleagues.

The media is not above the law

I’ve been hard on Jonah Goldberg of late, and correctly so, which is why it is important to give the author of Liberal Fascism his due when he gets it right, as he does here with regards to the death of Gawker.

The real issue seems to be that journalistic corporations are just different than every other kind of corporation. No one would bat an eye if, say, George Soros, bankrolled an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit by the ACLU against a “normal” corporation like Microsoft or Bank of America. But when a media outlet is in the dock, the rules are different.

Gilles Wullus of the group Reporters Without Borders told the BBC that the Gawker case poses a dire threat to press freedom. “Journalism ethics should be taken care of by journalists themselves,” he said. “In case they do not, we think that nobody else can do it in their place, neither states nor governments; especially not wealthy individuals.”

A free press is an important institution in a democracy, but journalists don’t have any rights the rest of us don’t. What nonsense.

Yes, a free press is an important institution in a democracy (and even more important in non-democracies), but journalists don’t have any rights the rest of us don’t. A reporter has the right to free speech, and so does a plumber. Indeed, in the era of smartphones, it has never been more true: We all have the right and ability to commit journalism. That right manifests itself in people, not corporations. The New York Times, to the extent that it is a “corporate person,” should have no more (and no fewer) rights than Exxon Mobil.

Imagine the outrage if I said, “Petroleum-industry ethics should be taken care of by petroleum industry executives themselves.” It’s certainly fair to argue against the merits of the verdict. But no one is above the law. Not even journalists, never mind corporations in the journalism business.

There is no “Fourth Estate”. There is nothing special about the media and they have no rights that anyone else doesn’t have. And when they break the law, be it criminal or civil, they are liable for the consequences.

On the other hand, Jonah’s NRO colleague, Mario Loyola, fails to understand that the conservative media is, in part, culpable for the declining regard in which America’s institutions are held in a piece that is unmitigated cuckservative blather.

Democracy depends vitally on reverence for “the majesty of the democratic system.” That means reverence for its basic institutions, if not for the men and women who run them as individuals. It’s one thing to criticize politicians as crooked and mendacious, but quite another to say that our democratic institutions are themselves corrupt. If that is true in any major respect, it is vital to solve the problem fast. Democracy begins to die when democratic institutions lose the people’s trust.

Alas, such talk finds a willing audience today, across the political spectrum. During Obama’s entire presidency, trust in government has bounced along rock bottom at less than 20 percent — unprecedented in the history of polling.

While in power, Democrats have done enormous damage. During Obama’s first two years, when they controlled Congress, and since then in the form of unilateral executive actions, the Democrats have verbally assailed the legitimacy of vital democratic institutions, including the Constitution, the police, corporations, and, of course, elections….

President Bush’s last words were “I believe I have upheld the honor of the presidency.” We could do worse than to ask God to bless the next president with a similar sense of humility and dignity, and a similar awe for the majesty of the democratic system, but it will be for naught if the American people aren’t thankful for it.

Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
One reason the people don’t trust the institutions anymore is because commentators like you are constantly lying to them.

Mario Loyola @Mario_A_Loyola
Tell me Dark Lord, do you sit around at home all day defeating the enemy with these flaccid little one-liners? Wow

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
You can lie to people all you want, but no one is buying it anymore. The nation is dying and you’re still virtue-signaling.

Milo corners Twitter

Either Twitter is desperate or they have some seriously incompetent lawyers handling @nero’s data request.:

Twitter attempted to dodge Milo Yiannopoulos’ data request by falsely claiming that he lives in the United States of America and is therefore ineligible to receive the information.

“Twitter International Company provides the Twitter Services to individuals who live outside the United States of America. We understand that you live in the United States,” said Twitter in their reply today, despite the fact that Yiannopoulos has permanent residence in the United Kingdom and remains a citizen there.

“As a result, we are not a data controller in respect of your personal data. Consequently, we will return your postal order, in the sum of €6.35, to you.”

Yiannopoulos replied shortly after, stating:


TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN


I do not live in the United States. I am a permanent UK resident at the address listed on my letter, and a citizen of the United Kingdom.


You are clearly prevaricating by waiting until now to make this statement as opposed to making simple inquiries as to my country of residence.


Twitter has the choice of waiving the EUR 6.35 or paying the shipping and handling costs of sending a new money order, which will be EUR 7.


As a matter of interest, given that you have my UK address, where did you send the money order back to? To dispatch it to a UK address seems quite at odds with your proposition that I am a resident of the United States.


You have 21 days from the date of the original Subject Access Request to reply in full. This situation has not changed. I look forward to receiving the information requested within the time frame permitted by law.


Yours


Milo Yiannopoulos”

Seriously, who advised them to try to play that sort of ridiculous game? I’ve noticed that American companies often fail to take foreign courts very seriously, as if they assume they are merely some sort of state-level court that can be beaten at the federal level. No wonder so many of them end up paying massive fines.

I know for a fact that Milo’s been in London recently anyhow. It’s just a bizarre, time-wasting response by Twitter.

Heat Street debate: marital rape

My latest debate with Louise Mensch of Heat Street is on the subject of marital rape, concerning which my view that it is an oxymoron has been declared controversial in certain circles:

Louise Mensch: Do you agree that there’s no such thing as rape within marriage?

Vox Day: Yeah, I think it’s quite obvious that it’s not even possible for there to be anything that we describe as rape within marriage. I find it remarkable that someone would try and claim that it is beyond debate when this new concept of marital rape is not only very, very new but is in fact not even applicable to most of the human race. It’s very clear, for example, in India it’s part of the written law that it’s not possible, for even if force is involved, there cannot be rape between a man and a woman. In China the law is the same.

LM: Mm-hmm (affirmative) but there’s a difference between saying what the law is and saying what is morally right. You would agree that just because somebody says something is a law doesn’t make it so. Let’s just start with that basic principle.

Vox: There’s huge difference between morality and legality. I’d be the first to agree with that. The fact of the matter is that the concept of marital rape hangs on consent and because marriage is and has always granted consent, the act of marriage is a granting of consent, therefore it’s not possible for the consent to be withdrawn and then for rape to happen. In fact, the concept of marital rape is created by the cultural Marxists in an attempt to destroy the family and to destroy the institution of marriage.

LM: I’m going to say that that’s patent nonsense. If you consent to something once it doesn’t mean that you’ve given a blanket consent to it forever. We agree on the definition of rape – that rape is when one party forces sex on the other without their consent?

Vox: Yes.

LM: Good. We go that far. Your argument then hinges on the statement that to get married is to give an all-time consent forever to sex with your spouse?

Vox: Exactly. It’s no different than when you join the army. You only have to join the army once. You don’t get the choice to consent to obey orders every single time an order is given. In certain arrangements, and marriage is one of them, the agreement is a lasting one, and that’s why it’s something that should not be entered into lightly.

I find it both amusing and mildly disconcerting that a view which is consistent with the entire legal and philosophical history of the human race is suddenly supposed to be unimaginable. I mean, precisely how ignorant, precisely how brainwashed, does one have to be in order to be completely unable to imagine that which is not only recent history, but is still the law for most of the human race?

Vaccine lawsuit in Japan

This anti-Gardisil lawsuit could prove interesting, as Big Pharma’s political influence is considerably less in Japan:

Sixty-three young women are seeking a combined 945 million yen ($9 million) in compensation in the first mass lawsuit concerning side effects from cervical cancer vaccines.

The women are suing the central government and pharmaceutical companies GlaxoSmithKline Plc and MSD KK.

The lawsuits were filed July 27 in the district courts at Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya and Fukuoka. The plaintiffs are aged between 15 and 22.

The women argue they have suffered health problems, such as pain in various parts of their bodies, difficulty in walking and also impaired eyesight, as a result of taking the vaccines that were meant to prevent cervical cancer.

They were mostly in junior or senior high school when they took the vaccines between July 2010 and July 2013.

The vaccines under question are GSK’s Cervarix, which was approved for domestic use in 2009, and MSD’s Gardasil, which was approved in 2011.

The plaintiffs argue that reports had been filed overseas where the two vaccines were in use before Japan about various side effects, including cases of death and serious illness.

On the downside, it looks as if the Japanese government is one of the defendants, which may be a tactical blunder by the plantiffs’ lawyers. But perhaps not; I know very little about the Japanese legal system. However, Japan is very big on taking full responsibility even when the individual is known not to be directly to blame, so I expect the pharmaceutical companies’ customary utilitarian defenses will not go over particularly well.

Trolls are federal criminals now

This Court of Appeals decision should making policing the blog considerably easier for the moderators:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has handed down a very important decision on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Facebook v. Vachani, which I flagged just last week. For those of us worried about broad readings of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the decision is quite troubling. Its reasoning appears to be very broad. If I’m reading it correctly, it says that if you tell people not to visit your website, and they do it anyway knowing you disapprove, they’re committing a federal crime of accessing your computer without authorization….

As I read the court’s opinion, the main issue is state of mind. Did you know that the computer owner didn’t want you to visit the website? At first, Power didn’t know Facebook’s view. But after the cease-and-desist letter, Power knew Facebook’s position. As a result, it was a federal crime to use Facebook after having received Facebook’s letter telling it to stay away. If I’m reading the opinion correctly, it appears that every contact with the computer that its owner doesn’t want is “without authorization.” The main question becomes mens rea: The visit becomes a federal crime when the visitor knows that the computer owner doesn’t want it.

Got that, everyone? If I tell you to go away, and you continue to visit or comment here, you are committing a federal crime. I’m sure the FBI doesn’t have anything better to do than investigate violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, so I trust you will comply.