“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.

Lippmann/Friedman

[This post is a placeholder for an essay to come.   For now, let the world’s curiosity build to a frenzy.  When citizens begin to storm the embassies, that will be the time to put it up.   If, tragically, my demise were to antedate such pleasant developments, then it’ll be another case of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”.

In the meantime, click on the Labels below to view our earlier remarks anent these gentlemen.]

(Oh, b.t.w. -- Edwin Drood played a bit part in the Riemann Conspiracy. 

Further informative summer reading.)

Mysticism and Majority Rule

We earlier examined some of the (in practice, in the course of ordinary work) largely unexamined metaphysical and even mystical principles that are required for science.  Here is a sketch of something similar in the realm of political theory.

In his newspaper column for 22 Feb 1954, Walter Lippmann wrote:

There is no way of proving the doctrine that all souls are precious in the eyes of God. … The doctrine proceeds from a mystical intuition.

Nevertheless, he says, following Chesterton, that such a notion must lie behind the democratic ideal, or that ideal is groundless -- metaphysically unmoored.

He then goes on -- in a rather Chestertonian passage of his own -- to observe:

The mystical democrat had said, ‘Gold and precious stones are of no account’;  the literal democrat understood him to say that everybody ought to have gold and precious stones.

He is respectful of the democratic ideal, as well as the mystical intuition behind it;  but polemicizes over and over, throughout his long career, against a tin idol in the hands of the practical democrat, “Majority Rule” (or, as he often puts it, the whim of the plurality or protority, since that’s all you need to win a multiply contested election).

Although the principle of majority rule derives a certain sanctity from the mystical sense of equality, it is really quite unrelated to it.  There is nothing in the teachings of Jesus or St. Francis which justifies us in thinking that the opinions of fifty-one percent of a group are better than the opinions of forty-nine percent.

(Or, in one celebrated case, of forty-nine percent plus five Supreme Court justices.)

*

A related notion, which can be held by someone who is not a democrat in either sense, is that of the Group Mind, or World-Soul, or General Will (Rousseau’s volonté générale).  To make this notion coherent is notoriously difficult.

Lippmann again, in The Good Society (1937):

Many particular interests do not in any conceivable combination constitute the general interest.

And again, in  The Public Philosophy (1955, ch. 3), he not only observes the distinction between “the people” and “The People” (like that of democrats and Democrats), but even between italicized and non-italicized versions of the latter  -- which must have been a tough sell, since in those days  neither typewriters nor newspapes used italics:

… the discrepancy between The People as voters and The People as the corporate nation … A prevailing plurality of the voters are not The People.

Education for Tomorrow, yesterday

In former times you could make some effort to teach people what they needed to know. … But today education means a radically different thing.  We have to prepare children to meet the unexpected, for their problems will not be the same as their fathers’.  To prepare them for the unexpected means to train them in method  instead of filling them with facts …

-- Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery

(Lest this seem like breaking news, note that Drift and Mastery was published in 1914.)

Our schools and colleges are overwhelmed by the growth of the population they are supposed to educate, and they are under enormous pressure -- for the most part irresistible -- to lower their intellectual standards.  There is an ominous tendency in American education to teach more and more students  less and less of the great disciplines  which form the educated man.

… With the declining level of education, with the vulgarization of the cultural standards in our mass society, we shall become a big but second-rate people:  fat, Philistine, and self-indulgent.
-- Walter Lippmann, column for February 4, 1958  (in the aftermath of the Sputnik challenge).

Note well:  What today would be code-words, had other meanings then:  1958 was well prior to the Federal enforcement of integration, and the large Hispanic in-migration; these would only reinforce his point.

Strangely prescient, too, that tossed-off epithet “fat”.   How he would gasp, to see how literally, anatomically true that has become, in much of the country !

Firefox is Evil

Mankind has long been aware of the evil of Microsoft and all its works.   That is why I dumped my PC and bought a Mac, and switched to Firefox from Internet Explorer.

Only…

For the past several weeks, Firefox has been popping up a window, urging download of its own new version.  The options are:  Ravish me now;  Ravish me later.   There is no option for “Go away and die.”

Repeatedly, I clicked “Ask me later”, and hoped that it would eventually tire.  But as the Devil well knows, we tire before he does.  So at last I clicked, Do me.

One immediately saw the benefits of fiber-optic:  The caption said “Downloading… estimated time left 2 hours and 40 minutes” -- but no sooner had it posted that, than it switched to “estimated time left 7 minutes” and then immediately to “seven seconds”, and then, abandoning all pretense at precision,  “several seconds”.  And several seconds later, it was done.

Only…

A  message popped up, grim and terse in the style of traffic tickets or dunnings from the IRS:  “Firefox has detected an incompatibility with Google Desktop search 1.1.”

Now… Google Desktop search is the one program with which I am entirely satisfied.  For years, Microsoft operating systems got lamer and lamer at finding your files; how this Mac might do it, I have no idea; but Google just works.   So I was gratified to read the penitent subsequent message:

We are mortified that so basic an incompatibility should have escaped beta-testing.  All the engineers involved have been fired, and the executives executed.  Reverting to original version …

Only, no;  that’s not what it said.  It said:

Google Desktop has been disabled.

There was no appeal -- no “Undo” -- no “Torture the Firefox executives instead”.

Firefox is evil.

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

(Hey guys, gotta pay the bills...)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TWpcZGE_q4

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

Footnote:

It lied.  It may have tried to disable mighty Google desktop (whose wrath will be terrible), but the thing still works.   We have, thus, “a tyranny tempered only by its incompetence”, in Walter Lippmann’s phrase.

En revanche:  It silently swiped the default browser page I’d set up, replacing it with a less useful changeling. 

A friend told me how to fix this… but in this changing world, specific instructions may apply only to specifically configured machines.  I was obliged to reply:

Thanks for the suggestion.
Unfortunately, on this computer, there is no such option under "Edit".
Under "Firefox", I did find something that said "Use current pages"  --sic, plural, which makes no sense.  And running "Help" on "use current page" brought up something about color and HTML. 
But when I clicked it, being on the main Google/Mozilla page, or even when I specifically pasted in the URL,
it threw that away and substituted... one of my mailboxes, of all things.

Never mind, I eventually found out how.  It’s quite easy once you know how to do it -- but then, a safe is easy to open, once you know the combination.

Firefox is evil.

~

[Update 23 Nov 2011]

Once again an alarming pop-up invaded my screen, warning me that, unless I immediately downloaded many more megabytes of unknown content from Firefox, their defective product might allow very bad things to happen to my computer.

So naturally I complied.  And this time was pleased to see that a preliminary window noticed the presence of Google Desktop, and inquired whether I desired to retain this.   Much reassured, I replied that I would indeed, thank you very much.

Churn churn churn, download bytes upon bits hopefully not malware… Done.

And yet, after all that -- once again a message that Firefox refuses to play in the same sandbox as Google Desktop  and that the latter has accordingly been disabled !

Fortunately they lied.  Or perhaps they tried:  but the Great God Google (terrible is His name) eats firefoxes like fireflies, for breakfast.

Whitehead’s God

 In his inexhaustibly suggestive masterpiece, A Preface to Morals (1929), Walter Lippmann writes:

There is a God in Mr. Whitehead’s philosophy, and a very necessary God at that.  Unhappily, I am not enough of a logician to say that I understand what it means to say that ‘God is not concrete, but He is the ground for concrete actuality.’ …  A conception of God, which is incomprehensible to all who are not highly trained logicians, is a possible God  for logicians alone.

No more indeed than this, can I presume to have advanced, by the arguments in the series of essays towards a Theologia Mathematica.

For the mystic experience, or the calm and certainty that lies at the heart of real faith, I can hardly argue.  You see, or you do not see, the deep red rose.  You feel, or you do not feel, the breath of a breeze on your cheek. 

An Impassioned Plea for a Liberal Theology

 In his classic work of 1929, A Preface to Morals, Walter Lippmann thus characterizes the up-to-date theology of the Modern Business Man:

I have examined the alleged pronouncements of an all-knowing God.  Some of them are obviously untrue, some are rather repulsive;  others, however, if they are properly restated, I find to be exceedingly good.

Hear, hear.