The Three Powers

The impeachment struggle  has been a three-cornered contest, among the three branches of government.   Such a delicate triangular balance  is what keeps things interesting; a contest between but two  comes down to arm-wrestling, and is quickly settled, though maybe settled amiss.

Elizabethan times witnessed a similar struggle among a triad, with monarch corresponding to the Chief Executive, Parliament to the Congress, and the third, robed branch, the clergy, replaced now with the judiciary.

In Elizabeth’s time, the puritans had endeavoured to bring ecclesiastical grievances before the House of Commons;  this, the queen resented, as it seemed that the commons were endeavouring to go outside their province  and legislate on matters which could only be constitutionally dealt with by the clergy in convocation, and by the crown.  In this way, the religious question assumed a constitutional form.

-- Ward & Waller, eds. The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. IV: North to Drayton (1909), p. 305

The parallels here are more than we would have expected, right down to the detail about the “puritans”, neatly re-incarnated in our own day  by the Woke brigade.  And that of the monarch being a Queen -- like our POTUS, though he is  of the drama kind, and not of Tudor blood.

~

The motif of the “Trivet of Conflict” finds its supreme cinematic embodiment in the final scene-sequence of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” -- not a circular firing-squad, but an equiangular shoot-out.   The act plays out, as ideally in the  Seventh Art, without words or sudden motion  till the fatal climax, silent but for the tinkling melody of an antique music-watch  winding down.  Here too, for our own amusement (or that of the blog-observing gods) we may match personages across the spheres:  here,  Good (a.k.a. Blondie) is the Supreme Court (granted, partisans carp at decisions that do not go their favorite way, but that branch is surely the most dignified and even relatively impartial);  Bad  is our naughty POTUS;  and Ugly -- who could that be, but our quarrelsome Congress.

To spare our readers further metaphor, we shall not be drawing comparisons between the branches as enumerated in the Constitution, and the Persons of the Trinity (as explicitly enumerated  nowhere in Scripture, but now held dear).

~

[Update 8 Feb 2020]  For any who deem the Elizabethan analogy  too ennobling for our present sticky pickle, look ye rather to that trio of Stooges, who, in simpler days, brought delight to tots and idlers.  Our pushful POTUS is perfectly cast  as Moe.

[Update 9 Feb]  What sketch of the American polity, with any pretentions to, well, pretentiousness, could be considered complete, without the obligatory obeissance to Tocqueville?  We must check the Tocqueville box.

The basic dynamic of the first two branches of government, whether monarch and parliament, or President and Congress, is a matter of politics and power.   It is the third, robed element, whether the Church or the Judiciary, that is less obvious: with goals and methods less tangible, more nearly timeless.

Historically, as the sway of the Church retreated from the secular sphere, in general  it was not replaced by another body.  America, it seems, was an exception:

Aucun peuple n’a constitué  un aussi grand pouvoir judiciaire  que les Américains.

Chez toutes les nations policées de l’Europe, le gouvernement a toujours montré une grande répugnance à laisser la justice ordinaire  trancher des questions qui l’intéresent lui-même. … A mesure, au contraire, que la liberté augmente, le cercle des attribtions des tribunaux  va toujours en s’élargissant.  …Chez les nations de l’Europe, les tribunaux n’ont que des pariculiers pour usticible;  mais on peut dire que la cour suprême des Etats-Unis  fait comparaître des souverains à sa barre.

-- Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique (1835), vol. I, p. 225-6

[Update]  To have three pre-eminent and even quasi-coequal powers within a polis, is inherently metastable and dramatic, and indeed has found its way into drama.  Cf. the Scottish poet David Lindsay’s morality-play A Pleasant Satire of the Three Estates (Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, in contemporary spelling), 1552

[Update / Antedating]  The structural theme appears in a play of the sixteenth-century dramatist John Haywood.  "The climax to the triangular duel  which forms the main episode of The foure P.P.  is an effective piece of dramatic technique." 

(Ward & Waller, eds. The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. V: The Drama to 1642, Part One (1910), p.95)

Devonshire mini-hemi-monostich

… the thin   Devonian   rain  …

[--Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (1907)]

A Lost Lament of Sir Walter Ralegh

Re banished Ralegh’s  unpublished plaint to Elizabeth, known as “Cynthia”:

There are many fine passages,  none finer than the line

     Of all which passed,  the sorrow only stays

-- Ward & Waller, eds. The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. IV: North to Drayton (1909), p. 54

Of Dullards and Dotards

“Rocket-Man versus The Dotard”:  it sounds like one of those wrestling events that The Donald used to impresario.   And it has elevated the fine old word dotard, which goes back as far as Chaucer,  into the flickering limelight of public attention.  To explain the word  were needless, as there is a nice summary here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/09/21/a-short-history-of-the-word-dotard-which-north-korea-called-trump/?hpid=hp_no-name_hp-in-the-news%3Apage%2Fin-the-news&utm_term=.d98bc93683c2

Note:  The word is sounded with a long "o":  DOTE-erd, almost rhyming with goat-herd.  Likewise the related word meaning 'senility', dotage.

But what younger readers may not realize (younger, that is, than four hundred years)  is that such spicy language on the public stage  is by no means an innovation.  For centuries, it has been the practice of controversialists   to belabor their opponents with colorful and inventive epithets.   Shakespeare’s plays well illustrate this.   Yet such slanging was not the province merely of playwrights and pamphleteers:  so sober a figure as Sir Thomas More, early sixteenth-century author and statesman (and ultimately martyr), and the subject of adulatory treatment in “A Man for All Seasons”,  whom no less than C. S. Lewis declared "a man before whom  the best of us must stand uncovered",  was a master of the genre.  His writings

… are by no means free from the scurrility which is characteristic of that age of controversy.  His opponents are “swine”, “hell-hounds that the devil hath in his kennel”, “apes that dance for the pleasure of Lucifer”, and so on.

-- The Cambridge History of English Literature, volume III: Renascence and Reformation (1908), p. 17.

Apes that dance, while Satan applauds!  If only Kim the Lesser had thought of that one!

As it is, this recent use of dotard  likely tumbled out of some old-fashioned Korean-English dictionary, rather than springing from the pen of any antiquarian Pyongyang polemicist.   Nonetheless, we applaud the momentary return to the scene, of this roguish old tatterdemalion vocable.

~

Despite the hoopla, dotard isn’t really so rara an avis as all that;  it should be familiar to anyone well-read.   Much more puzzling to American readers was the word wazzock, deployed back in 2012  against then-Presidential-candidate Mitt the Twit (to use another Britishism) after his lamentable junket to England.  You can read all about the word, and the episode, here:

     Word of the Day: “Wazzock”

And, for more on the variegated vocabulary of our present POTUS, this:

    Verb of the Day: “schlong”

 

[Update 29 October 2017]  French politicians have  of late  been coming up with choice epithets for their opponents.   It’s fun, plus it guarantees headlines.  The latest:  Today’s JDD reports that premier ministre Edouard Philippe has mocked Les Républicains (the current cover-name for the disgraced UMP) as branquignols.  That means they’re barmy.

As for the etymology, the word is likely a blend of branlant ‘unstable’ and croquignole ‘a mild insult’.

 

Mysteries of Cricket

Cricket matches occasionally end in a tie, and often in a draw;  but that does not make it a futile game;  if no side ever won, the game would lose its point.

-- John Watkins, Science and Skepticism (1984), p. 279

Assignment:  Distinguish tie from draw.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6FdBZQw2zQ

I am at last resigned to the fact that I shall never understand String Theory;  and a grasp of cricket  must likewise remain  forever beyond my means.

Given that, Kipling’s dig about “the flannelled fools at the wicket” was quite unfair;  you practically have to be a barrister to make sense of the game.

~

More re the point of a given genre of game:

Within the vocabulary of chess, it makes no sense to say ‘That was the one and only move which would achieve checkmate, but was it the right move to make?’  … as someone might ask, whose purpose in playing chess  was to amuse a small child  rather than to win.

-- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981; ²1984), p.  125

(And what is the point, of this game of life? --  Perhaps, to amuse the gods.)

It would be interesting to imagine extragalactic sociologists or philosophers, provided with a complete, objective and uncommented, play-by-play record of every cricket game ever played, and every chess game ever played; we wonder whether, from these, they could deduce what the point was.  Cf. & contrast the card‘game’ that we children called ‘War’, in which again, the ‘point’ is to ‘win’,  only, each player’s moves being completely determined, the resemblance to any normal game is but feeble;  it’s really just a long-drawn-out, inefficient way  of staging a single coin-flip.

~

Back to cricket, with its arcane distinctions and welter of rules -- surely exceding those of tennis (let along ping-pong), basketball, soccer  and much else.    These come at a cost (we want to shout, Just play the game!), but indeed to such an extent, that what would, from a practical point of view, be counter-productive, must surely serve some sociopsychological purpose, delineating the cultural boundaries of the Tight Little Island.   Rather like the Japanese language, with its complex system of grammatical honorifics, which no-one can master who hasn’t grown up in the culture from birth.  Or Anglo-Catholic worship ritual: unlike in an evangelical church, where anyone can wander in off the street and fit right in, for an outsider to attempt to participate  is continually to find yourself sitting when (suddenly, inexplicably) everyone else is standing up,  or standing up when they are sitting down, or kneeling, or crossing themselves.

For an American analogue, we would suggest, not so much our National Pastime of baseball, which physically most resembles cricket, but American football, with its ever-expanding rulebook, its minute schedules of differing penalties for everything from twitching (on the offensive line -- “false motion” -- or the defensive -- “offsides”) to spiking the ball; and its many game-interrupting circumstances. -- What physically most resembles football is rugby;  but here the playing of the game -- the continuous unscripted motion, as in soccer or basketball -- quite trumps the courtly ceremony characteristic of football.

~

There is generally a core of rules that characterize the essence of a given kind of game.  As for the rest, they contribute to its aura of spectacle,  but are not constitutive of the game.

The essense of football is simply that one guy runs with the ball toward a goal, and the other guys try to stop him.   Early football (and kids’ football even today) was largely just that.   Then they added the possibility of a forward pass:  that was a significant addition to the core, constitutive of an extension of the game (Football  v. 2.0), but one in which the earlier nucleus remained aufgehoben:  after all, there are plenty of running plays even in the NFL, and if you laid them all end-to-end, you’d have a simulacrum of original football (though to be sure, they are subtly different, since each play is instinct with the possibility that someone might throw the ball).

The constitutive rules of chess are the powers of the pieces.   That much is sine qua non -- you couldn’t very well specify the moves of all the pieces except the knight, letting that fellow to joust around as the mood might move him.   But now you’ve got a game, which could just as well exist without niggling side-rules like that of castling, or capture en passant (let alone purely ceremonial, non-structural rules like “j’adoube”).

OUTRAGEOUS SCANDAL ROCKS BRITAIN!!!

Heads are wagging  all over Europe:

Ed Miliband tries to defuse ‘two kitchens’ row

ED Miliband has tried to defuse controversy over the kitchen arrangements at his £2 million town house in London - by insisting he only “uses the small one”.
http://www.scotsman.com/news/uk/ed-miliband-tries-to-defuse-two-kitchens-row-1-3718704#comments-area

He can writhe and wiggle all he wants -- this is the most insalubrious outrage since that of the notorious Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson!

Portrait of the perp,
attempting to deny the obvious:

Shameful !!!!!!

Shocking details here:

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLjS3gzHetA

(Must be over 21 to view.)

For further heavy-breathing British scandals, try this:
  L'affaire Keeler

The Great Ingathering

In the wake of the recent attacks in Paris and in Copenhagen (not to mention Brussels and elsewhere, with less publicity), Netanyahu  is once again calling upon Jews to leave Europe and remigrate to Israel.

Parallel to this, the Islamic State has for months been issuing an equivalent appeal to Muslims -- leave the Dâr al-Harb and settle permanently in lands under ISIL control.  (As a second-best suggestion, for those who are unable to emigrate:  Kill your European neighbors.)

Americans will recall something similar from their own history, a/w the name of M. Garvey.

All this is by way of contraflow traffic to Le grand remplacement.

[Update]   There has still been remarkably little coverage of Netanyahu’s invitation -- which is not mere bluff;  witness the Refusenik migration of the 1970s-- in the English-language press.  So here is an alternative:

Нетаньяху посоветовал европейским евреям уехать в Израиль

http://radiovesti.ru/article/show/article_id/160639

Indeed, a typical ploy by the bien-pensant media, against stories they would rather bury, consists in not reporting them until they can instead feature, as the headlined story, someone in line with The Narrative  denouncing what they didn’t want to hear.  That is the strategy of the Telegraph:

Danish rabbi criticises Benjamin Netanyahu's Jewish emigration call

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/11414029/Danish-rabbi-criticises-Benjamin-Netanyahus-Jewish-emigration-call.html

The call itself went unreported; the newspaper hides behind the Danish rabbi.

For more on the ostrich attitude in Scandinavia:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/09/radio-free-sweden.html

[Update, afternoon]  And as though to lend point to Netanyahu’s plea, this just in:

Des centaines de tombes profanées dans un cimetière juif du Bas-Rhin

http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/2015/02/15/97001-20150215FILWWW00177-des-centaines-de-tombes-profanees-dans-un-cimetiere-juif-du-bas-rhin.php

These days it’s a bit of a race:  With each fresh Islamist atrocity, the feelgood press rushes to crank out one of their standard “Fears of a blacklash against Muslims” articles (they keep these in standing type, for reuse as needed).   Yet now the atrocities come so thick and fast, there is scarcely time to gasp “Ne faites donc pas d’amalgame!” before another one must be reported.

And once again, we see an apparent manipulation by the goodthink MSM.

If you look up Google-News for France, the photo illustrating this story, which comes from the worthless middlebrow magazine L’Express, shows a swastika and a slogan in German (“Juden raus” -- ‘Jews out’), making it seem as though the desecration was the work of German(-speaking) Nazis, rather than (say) France-based Salafists.   Yet photos in other sources simply show knocked-over gravestones.  A reader comments:

Je voudrais avertir les lecteurs de L'Express que cet article est un faux, par les images associées à cette profanation inadmissible. Nous voyons des croix gammées et des inscriptions en allemand "juden raus" , cette une manipulation.Le responsable du consistoire du Bas Rhin vient de dire que pour le moment ,on ne pouvait pas connaitre l'origine des graffiteurs , car il n'y avait ni croix gammées ni inscription, donc nous attendons avec insistance , de savoir à quoi joue l'ex-presse.

http://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/societe/bas-rhin-des-centaines-de-tombes-profanees-dans-un-cimetiere-juif_1651812.html

[Update, late afternoon]  A-a-and … the threats just keep on comin’ … this one in Lower Saxony:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/02/rosenmontag-schoduvel.html

German police, keeping a sharp lookout for Pegida hooligans

[Update, a minute later]  Oh and now this:

http://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article137487285/IS-Video-soll-Enthauptung-von-21-Christen-zeigen.html

Mais surtout -- pas d’amalgame !!

[Update, twenty minutes after that]  Mostly, these stories fly by so fast we don’t remember the half of them.  Here we have the Islamists Boko Haram, using children to kill children:

A teenage girl detonated a suicide bomb in a bus station in northeast Nigeria Sunday, killing 16 people, most of them children.

http://time.com/3710469/nigeria-teenage-suicide-bombing/

Just another normal day in the neigh-bor-hood,

here in Dâr al-Islâm.

[Update, evening]  Oh and --

It probably escaped American attention, amid the news (if even that was noticed) of the shutting of its Yemen embassy by Washington (and by Paris, and London -- and Riyadh, and UAE) -- simply too dangerous to maintain a presence--

that Italy too has hurriedly shuttered its embassy in Libya, and repatriated citizens, who  merely by being in Libya  were in mortal peril.

But for all that, Italy has not yet got shut of that country: for now, human traffickers in Libya are sending record numbers of boat people (a medley of Abyssinian ne’er-do-wells, assorted and unassorted flotsam, and inghimâsi infiltrators from ISIL) towards Italy,  which, like a fool, is still running a free ferry-service to gather them up from the grip of Poseiden, and speed them to the welcoming arms of the taxpayers.  Yesterday over 2,000 were plucked from the jaws of death, in a single day!   And to cap it all off, this time the rescuers, so far from receiving the slightest thanks, were held up at kalashnikov-point and robbed.

In case you think that an ISIL threat to Italy is mere speculation or fear-mongering, here is the cover of their propaganda magazine Dabiq from a few months ago, showing certain proposed architectural modifications to St. Peter’s Square:

And Europe just …  keeps … taking it.

[Update]   Nota bene:

The operative, a Syrian in his thirties with a close-cropped black beard, said ISIS is sending covert fighters to Europe — as did two smugglers who said they have helped. He smuggles them from Turkey in small groups, he said, hidden in cargo ships filled with hundreds of refugees. He said the fighters intend to fulfill ISIS’s threat to stage attacks in the West.

(Buzzfeed vom 30.01.2015)

"The jihadists hope to flood the north African state with militiamen from Syria and Iraq, who will then sail across the Mediterranean posing as migrants on people trafficking vessels, according to plans seen by Quilliam, the British anti-extremist group. The fighters would then run amok in southern European cities and also try to attack maritime shipping. The document is written by an Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) propagandist who is believed to be an important online recruiter for the terror in Libya, where security has collapsed in the wake of the revolution that unseated Colonel Gaddafi in 2011."

(Telegraph vom 17.02.2015)

[Update 21 February 2015] ISIL now has a new hashtag:  

    #We_Are_Coming_O_Rome

Yet Italy continues to scoop up its own destroyers from the sea.

[Update 21 February 2015]  Today the terrorist assassin (Nicht gedacht  soll seiner werden) was laid to rest in Denmark.   Despite a freezing rain, reportedly over five hundred sympathizers attended his funeral.

There has been very little coverage of this in the American press, and seemingly none at all in Scandinavian-language media.  (Search on “Brøndby” in today’s news on, say, a Swedish site, and see what you get.)

Further details here:

http://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2015/02/21/01003-20150221ARTFIG00161-copenhague-500-personnes-a-l-enterrement-du-tueur-presume.php

Meanwhile in Boboland:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/20/world/europe/after-attacks-denmark-hesitates-to-blame-islam.html

 

[Update February 26, 2015]  The mainstream parties' charade of thinking about possibly beginning to control immigration, someday, is just play-acting.

David Cameron’s promise to reduce net migrationto the “tens of thousands” before the general election has been blown apart by new data showing the figure has risen by 42 per cent to 298,000 in the past year.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/70bd6232-bd99-11e4-9d09-00144feab7de.html

Actually those figures are rather a slight of hand.  " The gross number of immigrants — 624,000 in the year to September — is the highest on record."  The bien-pensant press manages to minimize that figure, and cite a different figure less than half that, only by subtracting from the real figure  the number of emigrants, which is surprisingly high.  How many of them are leaving the island owing to the influx from the ends of the earth, is not stated.

Rule, Britannia

If you want to reduce immigration, then a vote for Ukip is indeed the only option.

The same cannot be said for the policy stances of either the Conservative party or the Labour party. Their positions are bankrupt, both morally and intellectually. They have pledged not to out-Ukip Ukip, and then tried to do just that. They have talked tough on immigration whilst pursuing policies they know full well will lead to an increase in immigration. And through their failure to make the case for immigration – a case they know is, in fact, unanswerable – they stand guilty of one of the worst abdications of political responsibility for a generation. Appeasement, masquerading as political populism, itself masquerading as political empathy.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/11436934/No-major-party-has-a-plausible-plan-to-cut-immigration.-They-should-stop-pretending.html

[Update 9 March 2015]  Not making this up, folks.   Sry.

Le ministre de la Défense grec Panos Kammenos, du parti nationaliste des Grecs indépendants, a promis à l'Europe, et en particulier à l'Allemagne, une vague d'immigration s'ils n'accordaient pas leur aide financière à la Grèce. «S'ils portent un coup à la Grèce, ils doivent savoir que demain matin les immigrants illégaux recevront des papiers et partiront à Berlin!», a-t-il lancé, dimanche, devant des militants de sa formation. Il a cru bon de préciser que parmi ces réfugiés, «certains appartiennent à Daech».

http://www.lefigaro.fr/conjoncture/2015/03/09/20002-20150309ARTFIG00302-athenes-menace-d-envoyer-ses-immigres-a-berlin.php

"Nur ohne meine Kippa"

Leonard Kaminski erzählt in der Jüdischen Allgemeinen Zeitung, "warum ich mich in Neukölln und Wedding nicht als Jude zu erkennen gebe". "Seit junge arabisch- und türkischstämmige Berliner auf israelfeindlichen Kundgebungen 'Jude, Jude, feiges Schwein, komm’ heraus und kämpf’ allein!' und 'Juden ins Gas!' skandierten, seit immer wieder Juden und Israelis auf der Straße oder in der U-Bahn angepöbelt und attackiert werden, seit in Brüssel, Paris und Kopenhagen Juden nur aufgrund ihrer Herkunft ermordet wurden, ist eines klar: Die Leichtigkeit auf dem Heimweg von der Synagoge, die mich meine Erkennbarkeit als Jude einfach hat vergessen lassen, ist verschwunden."

(Jüdische Allgemeine vom 05.03.2015)

Encore «la racaille»

A well-informed review of an important new book has just appeared here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/29/books/review/the-french-intifada-by-andrew-hussey.html?ref=review

More anecdotally:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/28/opinion/sylvie-kauffmann-frances-homegrown-jihadists.html

And meanwhile in Paris:

Lundi prochain, l'Algérie affrontera donc l'Allemagne quelques heures après le match France-Nigeria. La seconde des deux rencontres sera l'affrontement de tous les dangers. Depuis les incidents qui ont émaillé les précédents matchs de l'équipe algérienne en Coupe du monde, l'Intérieur est sur les dents. Les échauffourées sont de plus en plus violentes: policiers blessés, saccages en règles de bâtiments, destructions de mobilier urbain, jets de projectiles, incendies de véhicules par dizaines Des incidents qualifiés vendredi «d'insupportables» par le premier ministre Manuel Valls.

Lundi donc, des milliers de policiers et de gendarmes, dont une quinzaine d'unités des forces mobiles, mais aussi des moyens lourds de maintien de l'ordre (canons à eau, hélicoptères pour l'identification de nuit des éventuels fauteurs de troubles), seront mobilisés. Pratiquement comme les soirs d'émeute ou lors des mouvements sociaux de grande ampleur. «Et tout cela pour un soir de fête», se désole-t-on à l'état-major de la Sécurité publique à Paris.

http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2014/06/27/01016-20140627ARTFIG00350-la-police-en-alerte-pour-le-match-algerie-allemagne.php

So, stay tuned for Monday’s big match …

[Update 28 June 2014]  In Los Angeles, a miniature version of the same thing.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-huntington-park-world-cup-crowds-mexico-20140627-story.html#navtype=outfit 

[Update] London, too, is trembling:
http://www.medi1.com/player/player.php?i=5953995

[Update 1 March 2016]  Knock-on effects of dealing with all this:

FREILASSING, Germany — Traffic along one of Europe’s busiest highways, which used to flow unimpeded, now often backs up for miles at a newly installed checkpoint, where a phalanx of German police officers screens trucks and cars for hidden migrants.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/02/business/international/europes-new-border-controls-exact-a-cost.html?_r=0

 

Merkel has much to answer for.


For the roster of posts concerning "la racaille", click here.

“Looking at someone up and down” (with Swiss and British update)

[Update 5 November 2013]  Outsource the police state to charity:  The Swiss NGO Terre des Hommes lays a honey-trap for those who prize the bud before it flowers;  those who fall for it find their photos and addresses passed to the police:

L'ONG Terre des Hommes, qui se faisait passer sur Internet pour une fillette philippine, a annoncé aujourd'hui que plus de 20.000 "prédateurs" l'avait contactée, prêts à payer pour voir cette enfant de dix ans se livrer à des actes sexuels par webcam. Plus de mille d'entre eux ont été identifiés.

L'ONG a pu retrouver leurs adresses, leurs numéros de téléphone et des photos d'eux, et a transmis leur identité aux autorités compétentes, en particulier à Interpol.

http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/2013/11/04/97001-20131104FILWWW00424-une-ong-piege-20000-pedophiles.php?m_i=t6qtZtw4L9Btyq0gMX%2B62pGgMrSYElU6mFRtQex2jt1U9jOZw

This is a remarkably efficient way to settle scores anonymously..  Simply pass a mass of addresses to Interpol, of purported pervs & perps, salted among which are those of one’s rivals and enemies.  Now the burden of proof is on them, as they are pilloried.

And people are worried about a federal agency with better things to do than worry about Joe Random’s private life, getting their “metadata”!   Not a patch on Terre des Hommes.

A minor legal nicety:  Notice that, even in the case of those who were genuinely interested, as opposed to just curious or nosing journalistically around, what they stand accused of is not even actually “looking at someone up and down”, since they never did get a glimpse.    Nor was there even a genuine Someone to look at, neither up nor down nor sideways, since the pretended mini-maid was a fiction.

~

Was für Krimi liest wohl Dr. Sigmund Freud?

Schauen Sie mal!

Sigmund Freud und Sherlock Holmes

~

[Update 27 January 2013] An astonishing piece of legal overreach, the doctrine of joint and several liability, is now being pressed into service against individual viewers of forbidden images:

      Article 11,983 of the Lawyers Relief Act

~

In our post below, from October, we noted that France (whose government is now pushing for matrimony of inverts, as well as “familles homoparentales”) has proposed outlawing things like “looking at someone up and down” (though presumably only men ogling women would be subject to actual sanctions).

Now Switzerland jumps into the P.C. soup:  A new law would outlaw, not merely looking longingly at an actual person,  but viewing a photograph deemed naughty in the eyes of the law.   Nay more, even if you are stone-blind  you might be grasped by the long paw of the law, since the basis of legal charges will be simply the register of sites visited on the Internet -- whether or not you actually personally viewed the page.  Indeed, you could easily be charged, and disgraced in all society, for having left your computer at work  unattended, if, during the interval of your absence, a fellow-worker were to surf in forbidden waters.   That it wasn’t you  might be a defence (if you can somehow prove it), at your eventual trial;  but you can still be charged, disgraced, and saddled with bankrupting lawyer’s fees.

-- Stop and ask yourself:  Could that possibly be true?  Am I just making it up?  Have things really come to that?

Well, judge for yourself, from today’s article in the highly respected Neue Zürcher Zeitung:

Auch das blosse Anschauen von Pornografie wird strafbar

Wenn ein Internetnutzer solches Bildmaterial auf die Festplatte oder andere Datenträger herunterlädt, macht er sich strafbar – nicht jedoch, wenn er es lediglich online betrachtet. Das soll sich nun ändern: Auch der besitzlose Konsum soll künftig strafbar sein.

Finde man im Internetspeicher des Verdächtigen entsprechende Daten, so genüge dies.

Als Internetnutzer mag man sich nun fragen, ob es bereits kriminell ist, wenn man beim Surfen ohne Absicht auf eine Seite gelangt, die harte Pornografie enthält. Oder ob man an seinem Arbeitsplatz künftig besser aufpassen muss, damit kein Dritter die Mittagspause oder andere Abwesenheiten ausnutzt und auf dem Computer einschlägige Seiten aufruft. Der Bundesrat betont in seiner Botschaft, dass nicht jeder Kontakt mit harter Pornografie, sondern nur der vorsätzliche Konsum bestraft werden soll. Es werde Aufgabe der Gerichte sein festzulegen, unter welchen Umständen darauf geschlossen werden könne. Laut Bundesrat dürften sich insbesondere die Anzahl der aufgerufenen Seiten und Bilder sowie der Fundort der Dateien als entscheidend erweisen.

http://www.nzz.ch/aktuell/schweiz/auch-das-blosse-anschauen-von-pornografie-wird-strafbar-1.17937444?extcid=Newsletter_14012013_Top-News_am_Morgen

And don’t be fooled by that restriction to “harte” naughtinesses:  in this ephebophilophobic age, that qualification is  interpreted quite broadly, in a way that would have caused previous centuries to gape.   For instance, viewing this painting, from almost two centuries ago, could soon land you in prison:

 

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905):   Cupidon (L'Amour Mouille)

Ha!  Too late!  You looked!   You -  are -  doooomed ....

*

Sie fahren also gleich ins Gefängnis.

Was wollen Sie wohl lesen, da drinnen?

Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

[Update 16 March 2014]  Ha!  Sebastian Edathy hat angeschaut!  And now he has fled for his life:

     http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/41/41258/1.html

Plebs tunc canit  clamorosa:

Crucifige, crucifige.

As often, though, in the face of hair-raising news of legal extremism, we are reassured to find the readers are unconvinced.  Here they mock the pretentions of Switzerland (traditionally so lax in the matter of providing banking services to criminals) to become the political-correctness Mouse That Roared:

--------

Das ist das herzige an einem Kleinstaat: Er beschäftigt sich wirklich mit kleinen Dingen. Die grossen (Finanzregeln) überlässt er den Grossen in Washington, Brüssel, Berlin oder schiebt sie wie eine heisse Kartoffel vor sich her (Minder-Initiative)

--

Guten Morgen, Schnüffelstaat!

---

Die Bevormundung der staatl. Behörden wird immer mehr ausgebaut. Bürger werden zu unmündigen Kindern erklärt. Was will man damit erreichen? Mah sieht doch in Staaten in denen von die Prohibition herrscht wie in Schweden oder Finnland, was dabei herauskommt. Es wird unmässig konsumiert. Alles was verboten ist, ist gerade für den Menschen interressant. Nein, das ist ein Schildbürgerstreich. Mehr nicht.

*

Falls Sie im Doktor-Justiz-Sammelsurium

weiterblättern möchten,

Bitte hier klicken:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Deutschtum

*

~   ~   [Original post from Oct 2012]   ~   ~

“Looking at someone  up and down”  : About to become illegal in France:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/28/world/europe/france-is-expected-to-pass-a-far-reaching-sexual-harassment-law.html?_r=1&ref=global-home&pagewanted=print

The provocative, semi-see-through, form-fitting (or padded where the form must be supplied), out-scooped, bust-upthrusting, crotch-clutching, slitted and slotted, streetwalk-ready, stiletto-heel-mounted  and tricked-out with cosmetics   sort of get-up, that is designed to attract such looks, will of course remain legal as before.

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

~

We have a foretaste of the sanctions against looking-up-and-down (here, in the milder version of remarking upon a new dress) from this portrait of Mitteleuropa society in the Vorkriegszeit:

» Du hast ein neues Kleid«, sagte er, um sie betrachten zu dürfen; und hörte sie antworten:

»  Neu?  Du bist bewandert in meiner Toilette ?! «

» Habe ich nicht recht? «

» Doch. «

-- Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (1924)

You can’t win, gentlemen;  you cannot win.

~

Was für Krimi liest wohl Dr. Sigmund Freud?

Schauen Sie mal!

Sigmund Freud und Sherlock Holmes

~

Continuing to plow through Ronald Steel’s classic biography of Walter Lippmann, I stumbled  just now  upon the following passage:  Lyndon Johnson, having been unceremoniously uploaded into the Presidency,

besieged the Lippmanns with invitations to dinner, as though they were old friends.

Such a trifle would normally have seemed NTR, save that, shortly earlier this morning, we had read that French feminists desire  precisely to outlaw such multiple invites;  yet the Legislature, in their haste to rush through new laws trashing males, unaccountably omitted such egregious behavior from the list of punishable infractions:

“When a boss invites 10 times a reluctant employee to dinner, is there a sexual connotation to that?” asked Miss Baldeck, adding that she believed that there was. Yet under the new legislation, it would not qualify as harassment, she said.

Doubtless this oversight will be rectified in the next session.

(Although, in all likelihood  LBJ’s overzealousness would remain protected, since it was man-on-man.  The right of women and homosexuals  to shower with invitations  the objects of their desires, are unlikely to to be infringed. Beélzebub forbid, that any harm should come to thém !)

~

In his classic Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930), Sigmund Freud outlined the psychic price  we pay  for civilization.   Not knocking civilization here -- it’s worth the psychic price.   Every normal male must repeatedly withstand the beckonings of his testes, and is the better for having learned to do so.  Yet some of those who do not share his natural inclinations,  are proceeding extraordinarily far in punishing and repressing that inborn bloom, on the strength of which -- and without which, not -- civilization has managed to survive and thrive, through wind and wars and pestilence.

Thus, there are much more bizarre provisions in this “anti-harassment” law, than you are likely to read about in the anglophone press, where reports of the legislation have been sanitized for popular consumption:

La loi sur le harcèlement (Le Figaro)

Avec la loi sur le harcèlement sexuel, la transphobie a fait son entrée au Code pénal.

"Voilà ce que l’on n’invente pas."  (French for:  You can’t make this stuff up.)

 

 Some readers who, unlike their legislative representatives, have not yet taken leave of their senses, respond:

La transphobie ? On n'a vraiment des gens desoeuvrés dans ce pays (payés grassement de plus) pour pondre ce genre de choses et légiférer dessus.

That riposte is mild, and basically does not go beyond the confines of politics.  But the malaise which Freud addressed  is stated sensibly by another reader:

Je ne sais pas si je suis transphobe, mais sûr que cela me dégoûte, je n'y peux rien, c'est physique.

That is no more than the wholesome, instinctive reaction, of any normal person, confronted by these surgically self-emasculated grotesques.  The French law is trying to make us swallow a centipede.

La Manif pour tous, le 13 janvier 2013, sur le Champ-de-Mars.

Recommended reading:
Dann mach doch die Bluse zu - Ein Aufschrei gegen den Gleichheitswahn (Birgit Kelle)
In Deutschland wird heftig diskutiert: über Frauenquote, Krippenplätze, Sexismus, über die Gleichstellung von Mann und Frau. Der eigentliche Skandal ist aber, dass diejenigen, die zu Hause bleiben und unsere Kinder erziehen, die Dummen sind. Warum eigentlich? Es ist doch das gute Recht jeder Frau, ihr Leben so zu leben, wie sie es glücklich macht. War der Feminismus nicht einst genau dafür eingetreten? Auf dem Weg der gleichen Rechte ist etwas verlorengegangen. Nämlich die Freude, einfach Frau zu sein. Dieses Buch ist eine Ermutigung für alle Frauen, die es gerne sind, es zeigen und das auch nicht ständig rechtfertigen müssen. Für Mütter, die gerne Mütter sind und die berufliche Laufbahn hinten anstellen. Sie alle haben in Deutschland keine echte Lobby. Es ist höchste Zeit, gegen den Gleichheitswahn aufzustehen.

[Update 29 September 2013]  Spurred by a horrendous case of child murder, Britain is moving to further restrict access to Internet porn.  As written, the proposal is measured and reasonable:  a default filter on such material, which is  however defeasible at individual request.  But remember Hardin’s law:  “You can never do just one thing.”  Thus consider:

“They wanted to block extreme pornography, and I said nothing, then they wanted to block material that infringed on copyrights, and I said nothing, and then they started to block Web sites with extreme messages that didn’t quite agree with the government line, and I still said nothing,” said Alex Bloor, business development manager at Andrews & Arnold, a British Internet service provider popular with computer savvy subscribers. “This is the thin end of a massive wedge.”

They cite the recent case of a man who was denied access to an online version of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” due to its “violent content” while doing research at London’s British Library.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/britains-harsh-crackdown-on-internet-porn-prompts-free-speech-debate/2013/09/28/d1f5caf8-2781-11e3-9372-92606241ae9c_story.html

~

Now here's a lady you can look u-u-u-UP ...

and down... and not go to prison, neither!

Guaranteed of age!

Dames, dames, dames

~

[Update 1 Oct 2013]  Minor British doings like that  seldom get much coverage on this side of the pond,  but the current New Yorker has a nice Talk-of-the-Town by Lauren Collins:

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2013/10/07/131007ta_talk_collins

[Update 15 Oct 2014]  Too hot to handle;  just links:

www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-john-grisham-troubling-statements-about-child-porn-20141016-story.html#navtype=outfit

www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/10/16/in-defense-of-john-grisham/

[Update 21 April 2016]  For other images that Germans in particular are forbidden to behold, try this:

    http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/09/flagge-verbot.html

Update 9 Dec 2016]  And now this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/world/europe/vladimir-putin-russia-fake-news-hacking-cybersecurity.html?_r=0

Foes of Russia Say Child Pornography Is Planted to Ruin Them

CAMBRIDGE, England — His indomitable will steeled by a dozen years in the Soviet gulag, decades of sparring with the K.G.B. and a bout of near fatal heart disease, Vladimir K. Bukovsky, a tireless opponent of Soviet leaders and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, is not a man easily put off his stride.

But he got knocked sideways when British police officers banged on the front door of his home on a sedate suburban street here early one morning while he lay sick in bed and informed him that they had “received information about forbidden images” in his possession.

“It was all very bizarre and disturbing,” Mr. Bukovsky said. “This is not normally the language of a free society,” he added, recalling how his old K.G.B. tormentors used to hound him and his friends over texts and photographs declared forbidden by the Soviet authorities.

Here Russia simply hands the petard to the West, which hoists with it.