Tag: law

Hey, parent, leave the kids offline

Some of you will recall that I have repeatedly urged everyone here to stop posting pictures of your children on social media. I consider it to be a reprehensible violation of their privacy and an abrogation of one’s parental responsibilities in two ways: it robs them of the ability to make their own decisions and it risks exposing them to unwanted attention and potential danger. Worse, it does so for nothing more than to feed the short-term attention-seeking fix of narcissistic parents.

This is not a new subject. Back in 2009, I wrote:

Never, ever, put pictures of children up on the Internet. Not on Facebook, not on invitation-only Live Journals, and certainly not on public blogs. It’s not only reprehensibly stupid, it is completely disrespectful of a child’s right to make his own decisions about his public profile in the future. True, sometimes this is unavoidable, such as when a child happens to be in the news for one reason or another. But barring that, no responsible parent should ever upload a picture of a child to the Internet, no matter how proud one might happen to be.

I repeated that again three years ago:

Don’t put pictures of your kids on Facebook or Instagram.  It’s stupid.  It’s obnoxious.  It’s thoughtless and self-centered.  And it’s their life, not yours, that you’re putting on public display.

And, of course, there is absolutely no excuse for ever putting a picture of another family’s child on social media, for any reason. So, you can’t say you weren’t warned, as it appears the law in some countries is finally beginning to catch up to the obvious privacy violations involved.

French parents are being warned to stop posting pictures of children on social networks in case their offspring later sue them for breaching their right to privacy or jeopardising their security.

Under France’s stringent privacy laws, parents could face penalties as severe as a year in prison and a fine of €45,000 (£35,000) if convicted of publicising intimate details of the private lives of others — including their children – without their consent.

Eric Delcroix, an expert on internet law and ethics, said: “In a few years, children could easily take their parents to court for publishing photos of them when they were younger.”

Grown-ups who sue their parents for breaching their right to privacy as children could obtain substantial compensation awards, according to French legal experts.

I won’t have any sympathy for the parents who find themselves getting hoist by their own narcissistic petard in the future. They will whine and cry about their ungrateful children, who will rightly respond: “why should I harbor any concern for your financial interests when you demonstrably didn’t give a damn about my legal and moral right to not be put on display to the world like a pet or a trophy?”

Interview with Mike Cernovich

Mike Cernovich is one of the most inspiring individuals I have ever had the privilege to meet, and I’ve met everyone from Donald Trump and Henry Kissinger to Dolph Lundgren, Slash, and David Lee Roth. As you might expect, the interview is both interesting and informative:

You took, and passed, the California bar first time out of the box, yet failed to get your ticket punched.  Since you’ve written about it publicly, I need to ask: you were the target of a false rape accusation, back in the days when rape still meant rape. What happened? How did that experience affect you, shape your perspective?  What did you learn about the criminal justice system from having been in its clutches?

I was Patient Zero to the false rape epidemic. “Date rape” was common, the media said, and thus there was pressure to prosecute rape cases where there was no evidence of rape.

My case was bogus. I slept with the girl on the living room floor while her best friend was in the room. (Anyone who wants to fact-check me, ask me for a copy of the case file. It’s somewhere in my Gmail, I’m sure.)

The prosecutors were highly sensitive of the media, as was the judge, who once said to my lawyer, “Think about what the media would say if I dismissed this case!”

I was full of rage, anger, depression, and every other toxic emotion. I had followed all of the rules, and my life was “ruined” by a feminist media and legal system.

The biggest lesson of my rape case is to stay far away from the criminal system. Never talk to the police, even if you’re a witness, because who knows…Maybe they need to close a case, and you were there, after all.

You wrote a book review on Ordinary Injustice, and that was my case. I was a kid with such promise who worked hard, but hey, the media might say something rude about the judge or District Attorney. That’s what really matters.

That mindset, that the players within the system matter more than men charged with serious crimes, is yet another ordinary injustice of our day.

At some point, you “morphed” from the Mike Cernovich at Crime & Federalism, to the Danger & Play guy, your latest venture into blogging, where you have taken up arms promoting masculine health, both physical and mental. What happened? Was this a response to your youth, your having been falsely accused of rape? Your growing fat and realizing you needed to get your shit together?  What turned you into @PlayDangerously?

When you are falsely accused of rape and see the legal system from the inside as a client and the outside as lawyer, your eyes open up. You realize that everything you had been told about the legal system was a lie.

What other lies have we been told, and what are the source of those lies?

We’ve been lied to about rape culture. If you took the arguments about college rape culture seriously, you’d never send your daughter to college. That’d be like sending her to the Congo. Yet, people claim 1 in 4 women are raped while simultaneously sending girls off to college, and those girls even go walking in public and attend parties. It’s almost as if those rape statistics are made-up.

We have been lied to about gender, especially about a man’s role in society. As a man, you’re supposed to live for everyone except yourself. Make a woman happy, even if she nags. Please everyone, expect nothing for yourself because that’s selfish.

When a man buys a cool car, it’s because he’s having a mid-life crisis. A man can’t have fun or do anything he likes without being attacked.

A man who divorces a harpy is evil. A woman who divorces a man because she “just doesn’t feel it anymore” is a hero. Even a woman who cheats on her husband will be celebrated under the Eat, Pray, Love attitude towards women.

Those were lies resulting from what Nietzsche, who I read in college but never understood until I became a man, would call the “slave mindset.”

I began examining those lies one-by-one, and as I did, more lies were revealed.

What Mike saw in the legal system, I saw in the political and business worlds. And later, in the legal system. We both decided we would not play along to get along. After all what profits a man to gain the world if it costs him his soul?

Obama makes a list

He’s getting ready for the Supreme Court appointment battle in the Senate:

Moving quickly to begin the process of filling the unexpected vacancy on the Supreme Court bench, President Obama spent much of the weekend compiling a shortlist of gay, transsexual abortion doctors to replace the late Antonin Scalia, White House sources confirmed Monday. “These are all exemplary candidates with strong homosexual values and proven records of performing partial-birth abortions, but am I missing anyone?” Obama reportedly asked himself while reviewing his list of queer, gender-nonconforming, feminist Planned Parenthood employees, all of whom were also said to be black immigrants. “I definitely have enough post-op transsexuals on the list, but it is a little light on pre-op candidates. And I should probably add a cop killer or two on here just to round out my options.”

Sources later confirmed that Obama was attempting to rapidly narrow the list down to the single best nominee to submit to the Senate in hopes of wrapping up confirmation hearings before his choice had to leave to attend the Hajj pilgrimage.

In related news, Majority Leader “Vichy” Mitch McConnell refused to reveal his plans for the upcoming Republican surrender in the Senate. “We haven’t decided exactly how, or how fast, we’re going to collapse,” the U.S. Senator from Kentucky said. “Perhaps just a few of us will bravely cross the aisle and join the Democrats in supporting whatever illiterate, homeless person of color is put up for the Court by the President, or maybe we’ll go all in and stab the grass roots in the back en masse. We’re still working out the strategy.”

When asked if he, personally, had held the pillowcase over the late Justice Scalia’s face, Sen. McConnell shook his head before replying, “No comment.”

The last defender of the Constitution

RIP Antonin Scalia:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died at the age of 79, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said in a statement on Saturday. The statement did not indicate the cause of death, but several news
outlets reported that he died of natural causes while in Texas this
weekend.

Scalia was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to the Supreme Court in 1986.

It’s sobering to think that he may be the last genuine Constitutionalist to sit on the Supreme Court. One can only expect that he’ll be replaced by a black female Marxist.

Ross Douthat summed up the man well: “We should all die full of years, with 28 grandchildren, in our sleep after quail hunting.”

That is the sign of a life well-lived.

National Review risks non-profit status

Justin Raimondo observes that Rich Lowry appears to have committed a serious legal blunder, as well as the obvious political one, with the “Stop Trump” issue:

The publication of a special “Stop Trump” issue of National Review was heralded in a blaze of publicity. Editor Rich Lowry appeared on Fox News and was interviewed by Trump nemesis Megyn Kelly, where he proceeded to denounce The Donald as a threat to the intellectual integrity of the conservative movement….

All well and good: there are plenty of reasons for principled conservatives (and libertarians) to oppose Trump. However, there’s one big problem with this well-publicized blast at The Donald.

In March of last year, Politico reported that National Review was becoming a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, which would enable it to solicit tax-deductible donations: “Since its launch, the magazine has operated as a not-for-profit business, even as it came to rely on more and more donations in recent years. Starting next month, it will become a nonprofit organization, which will make it exempt from federal taxes. National Review also plans to merge with the nonprofit National Review Institute, its sister organization, according to a source with knowledge of the plans.”

Rich Lowry averred that the shift would be good for the magazine, which was fighting a costly lawsuit and had never been profitable anyway. “We’re a mission and a cause, not a profit-making business,” he told Politico. “The advantage of the move is that all the generous people who give us their support every year will now be able to give tax-deductible contributions, and that we will be able to do more fundraising, in keeping with our goal to keep growing in the years ahead.’”

This anti-Trump issue of National Review is, in effect, a campaign pamphlet directed against a political candidate—indeed, the cover proclaims “Against Trump”—and, as such, is in clear violation of IRS statutes regulating nonprofit organizations.

The regulations are quite explicit that nonprofit organizations must “not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.”

I’m sorry, I have no cogent analysis to offer; I’m not even sure what the article said. I found it hard to pay attention after cracking up when I got to the part about “the intellectual integrity of the conservative movement.”

That’s a good one!

Secularism is not constitutional

Justice Scalia calls out those who would suppress Christianity in the USA:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said Saturday the idea of religious neutrality is not grounded in the country’s constitutional traditions and that God has been good to the U.S. exactly because Americans honor him.

Scalia was speaking at a Catholic high school in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, Louisiana. Scalia, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 is the court’s longest serving justice. He has consistently been one of the court’s more conservative members.

He told the audience at Archbishop Rummel High School that there is “no place” in the country’s constitutional traditions for the idea that the state must be neutral between religion and its absence.

“To tell you the truth there is no place for that in our constitutional tradition. Where did that come from?” he said. “To be sure, you can’t favor one denomination over another but can’t favor religion over non-religion?”

He also said there is “nothing wrong” with the idea of presidents and others invoking God in speeches. He said God has been good to America because Americans have honored him.

Scalia said during the Sept. 11 attacks he was in Rome at a conference. The next morning, after a speech by President George W. Bush in which he invoked God and asked for his blessing, Scalia said many of the other judges approached him and said they wished their presidents or prime ministers would do the same.

“God has been very good to us. That we won the revolution was extraordinary. The Battle of Midway was extraordinary. I think one of the reasons God has been good to us is that we have done him honor. Unlike the other countries of the world that do not even invoke his name we do him honor. In presidential addresses, in Thanksgiving proclamations and in many other ways,” Scalia said.

“There is nothing wrong with that and do not let anybody tell you that there is anything wrong with that,” he added.

Moreover, the idea that Congress shall make no law “respecting an establishment of religion” does not bar the several States, or the executive branch, from doing as it likes with regards to any religion. The fact that various courts have interpreted this as meaning that Christian football players cannot pray before a football game doesn’t mean that it actually does mean that, it merely means that Christians should use their weight of numbers to do whatever they please.

The public is under no moral obligation to obey the courts. Law that is invented out of thin air can be justly ignored. Whether it can be safely ignored, of course, is another question.

Freedom trumps “free speech”

Eugene Volokh somehow manages to completely miss the salient point. This is why lawyers tend to be intrinsically flawed defenders of freedom; their training predisposes them to miss the forest for the trees:

Monday, a three-judge U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit panel handed down a third opinion in Wollschlaeger v. Governor, the Florida “Docs vs. Glocks” case. Florida law limits doctors’ conversations with patients about guns. The first opinion in the case held that the law wasn’t really a speech restriction, because it just regulated the practice of medicine (a deeply unsound view, I think). The second opinion, issued after a petition for rehearing, changed course and held that the law was a speech restriction, but that — as a restriction on professional-client speech — it had to be judged under “intermediate scrutiny,” which it passed.

First of all, since the State regulates doctors and protects them from competition, they can do anything they want with regards to how they go about their business. Second, as the article shows, what is actually being prohibited is doctors being used as a line of attack against gun rights.

It bans doctors “from unnecessarily harassing a patient about firearm ownership during an examination.” This means, according to the panel majority, that a doctor “should not disparage firearm-owning patients, and should not persist in attempting to speak to the patient about firearm ownership when the subject is not relevant [based on the particularized circumstances of the patient’s case, such as the patient’s being suicidal] to medical care or safety.”

And whenever there is a conflict between gun rights and speech rights, gun rights much always come first, because gun rights defend speech rights far more effectively than speech rights defend gun rights.

But that is a philosophical point, not a legal one, which is why even a libertarian lawyer is likely going to miss it. Here is the crux of his error:

Now I think that the supposed imbalance of power between doctor and patient, like the supposed imbalance of power among students, is quite overstated.

That’s completely absurd. This attempt to turn the medical community into a white-coated Stasi should be shot down in any and every way necessary. 

Muslim immigration ban is constitutional

Furthermore, there is even precedent for it:

Is an immigration ban on Muslims unconstitutional? Probably not. The Supreme Court has held consistently, for more than a century, that constitutional protections that normally benefit Americans and people on American territory do not apply when Congress decides who to admit and who to exclude as immigrants or other entrants. This is called the plenary power doctrine. The Court has repeatedly turned away challenges to immigration statutes and executive actions on grounds that they discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, and political belief, and that they deprive foreign nationals of due process protections. While the Court has not ruled on religious discrimination, it has also never given the slightest indication that religion would be exempt from the general rule.

There is even precedent for Trump’s plan. In 1891, Congress passed a statute that made inadmissable people who practice polygamy (directed, at the time, at Mormons), and in 1907 extended this ban to people who “who admit their belief in the practice of polygamy.” While Congress later repealed the latter provision (the former seems to be still on the books), no court–as far I know–ruled it unconstitutional.

Plenary power doctrine. Shove that in the face of every cuckservative who blathers ignorantly about the unconstitutionality of Trump’s proposed policy. There is more than a century of precedent demonstrating otherwise. Anyone who says a religious immigration ban is unconstitutional is either ignorant or lying.

Furthermore, the Federalist Papers make it clear that the several States have the ability to pass religious bans as well. And in a MSNBC poll, 92 percent of Americans 18-24 said Trump is not going too far in his proposal to ban all Muslim immigration.

After all, they’re the ones who would have to live with them.

SJW “rights” are anti-rights

The city of Houston rejects a politically correct “anti-bias” measure:

A yearlong battle over gay and transgender rights that turned into a costly, ugly war of words between this city’s lesbian mayor and social conservatives ended Tuesday as voters repealed an anti-discrimination ordinance that had attracted attention from the White House, sports figures and Hollywood celebrities.

The City Council passed the measure in May, but it was in limbo after opponents succeeded, following a lengthy court fight, in putting the matter to a referendum.

Supporters said the ordinance was similar to those approved in 200 other cities and prohibited bias in housing, employment, city contracting and business services for 15 protected classes, including race, age, sexual orientation and gender identity. Opponents said the measure would allow men claiming to be women to enter women’s bathrooms and inflict harm, and that simple message — “No Men in Women’s Bathrooms” — was plastered on signs and emphasized in television and radio ads, turning the debate from one about equal rights to one about protecting women and girls from sexual predators.

The cat is out of the bag. Voters now understand that these seemingly innocuous ordinances will be used against them by the sexual freakshows and political activists. What are called “anti-discrimination” measures are violations of the Constitutional right to free association. The entire concept of “civil rights” has proven to be a complete disaster; the worst predictions of the segregationists proved to be optimistic.

Not that the SJWs are giving up any time soon. Notice something very strange about this “news” report. Where are the results of the referendum? It’s like a sports report on the World Series that says the Mets lost, but doesn’t tell you what the score was.

From this, we can surmise that the SJWs lost badly.  And yes, as it happens, that’s precisely what happened as the SJW measure was voted down 61-39.


Houston’s controversial equal rights ordinance failed by a wide margin
Tuesday, with voters opting to repeal the law that offered broad
non-discrimination protections, according to incomplete and unofficial
returns.

The necessity of reprisal

Some interesting and intelligent commentary on John Wright’s post concerning A Time for Peace, A Time for War:

HMSLion: All the codes of chivalry, of diplomacy, and Laws of War work on an assumption that all participants will adhere to them. They represent the Golden Rule in it’s most practical form.

But those codes also recognized the legitimacy of reprisals against violators. A foe who showed no mercy could expect none.

The Enemies of Civilization have realized that there are some people who are so accustomed to acting in a civilized manner that they have forgotten that reprisals are perfectly legitimate. More than legitimate, necessary. It must NEVER be possible to secure an advantage by violating the norms of civilized conduct.

And people are starting to realize it.

I’ll add something else…part of the problem of the West is that the World Wars were fought with a level of savagery that shocked us. They were the modern equivalent of the Thirty Years War three centuries earlier – a conflict fought with a ferocity unprecedented among Christian nations.

The Thirty Years War led to significant changes in international politics with the Treaty of Westphalia, and the formalization of Laws of Warfare. A system that held for nearly three centuries, even in the teeth of the Napoleonic Wars.

The World Wars? There’s been no formal New Laws of Land Warfare, but there’s been no willingness to use nuclear weapons since then. Nor to engage in area bombing of cities. But the lack of a formal document has, I think, hindered the self-confidence of the West. Too many people are obsessively wringing their hands over the past, instead of resolving not to do that sort of thing again.

dgarsys adds: It must NEVER be possible to secure an advantage by violating the norms of civilized conduct. In other words, to keep turning the other cheek in order to “be nice” and “not use their tactics” is to play the iterated prisoners dilemma in “nice only” mode, instead of hammering the violator for betraying you.

As William S. Lind has observed, 4GW is in many ways 0GW, albeit with a technological twist that is primarily based on communications. Both of Mr. Wright’s commentators are correct; the chaos is being stoked by the international community’s legal overreach combined with a practical refusal to permit bad actors to be held to account if it finds them useful to its interests.