Category Archives: culture

The PRC’s Territorial Aggrandizement

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This is an example of the People’s Republic of China’s practice of Rule by Law, rather than Rule of Law.

Among other moves and countermoves involving the PRC’s attempts to seize and annex the South China Sea, here at the expense of the Republic of the Philippines, the latter haled the former into arbitration under the UN’s Law of the Sea Convention. The proximate case was the PRC’s military aggression against the RP over Scarborough Shoal, a collection of islands and rich fishing waters well within the RP’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

After first denying the legitimacy of arbitration at all, now the PRC is arguing that the arbitration panel has no jurisdiction in the matter because the dispute involves the PRC’s “territorial sovereignty over several maritime features in the South China Sea, which is beyond the scope of the Convention.”

Sure. The PRC has claimed the Sea, therefore the Sea is the PRC’s. By law. Because the Law of the Sea Convention doesn’t interfere with sovereign territory.

Do We Want To Do Business with Racist Europe?

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That’s a bit polemic, but this is an important matter.

Leicester City Council in England last month voted to boycott goods made in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. All services run by the council will be free of any product or technology made in any of the settlements. The motion “condemns the Government of Israel for its continuing illegal occupation of Palestine’s East Jerusalem and the West Bank” and resolves “to boycott any produce originating from illegal Israeli settlements.”

And more “Zionistfrei:”

Pro-Palestinian campaigners lobbied the town’s [Kinvara, Ireland] retailers, restaurants and cafes to expunge from their premises anything produced in Israel. All the businesses agreed, meaning Kinvara is now, in the eyes of anti-Israel agitators, morally pure. It is held up as a model town by numerous European backers of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS, movement.

And

[T]he French city of Lille in October ripped up its twinning accord with the Israeli city of Safed.

And on and on.

Never mind that the Palestinian Unity Government is sworn to the destruction of Israel, and Iran has as its paramount national goal the erasure of Israel from the map. Their “product or technology” are jake in Leicester City, Great Britain, and elsewhere in Europe.

Shades of Europe’s Judenfrei of the last century.

Who’s the Rape Victim in the “Jackie” Story?

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University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan suspended until January the entire fraternity system at UVA. She did it on the basis of a newspaper story whose author—Sabrina Rubin Erdely—and which paper’s editor—Will Dana—consciously and openly stated that they had done nothing to fact check the claims made by this “Jackie” person and which Erdely published.

On the heels of that, we get Zerlina Maxwell writing in another newspaper article headlined

we should generally believe rape claims

That headline, incidentally, originally appeared in the online edition as automatically rather than generally, but apparently The Washington Post thought it better to weasel-word things a tad. What Maxwell said in the body of her article, though, remains unaltered:

We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says. … Even if Jackie fabricated her account, U-Va. should have taken her word for it….

Which UVA did: not only the allegedly involved frat was suspended, all of them were. As far as I can tell, as of my writing of this the fraternities remain suspended, even with the “Jackie” story exposed as false. I’ll be happy to update this article if someone can show me that Sullivan has lifted her suspension prior to 9 Jan 15.

As a result, particularly of Sullivan’s actions, but actively aided and abetted by Maxwell and triggered by Erdely’s now known to be false story, an entire institution and every member of it has been irretrievably smeared. These young men have had their reputations trashed, or alternatively will no longer be able to claim affiliation with their fraternity or any part of the Greek system.

Worse, the victims of real rape now have an additional hurdle—credibility—to overcome as a result of these three women’s…behavior. Actual rape victims are being raped a second time, in advance.

YGTBSM

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In the aftermath of “Jackie’s” claim of being a gang-rape victim at the University of Virginia (has the school reinstated the fraternities, by the way?) falling apart under the weight of her lies, we get this from Zerlina Maxwell, of The Washington Post, a woman who represents herself as an actual lawyer, as well as a writer of newspaper articles.

This is what we mean in America when we say someone is “innocent until proven guilty.” After all, look what happened to the Duke lacrosse players.

In important ways, this is wrong. We should always believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says. Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.

So, I guess all those black men who were lynched—without even the nicety of a trial before an all-white jury, mind you—on a woman’s mere accusation of rape were correctly hung.

She says,

This is not a legal argument about what standards we should use in the courts; it’s a moral one, about what happens outside the legal system.

Because women are outside our legal system. Because it’s the moral thing to do to string someone up—literally or figuratively—and get around to an investigation afterward. Never mind that that’s just going to spring-load the investigation to justify the lynching regardless of any actual facts. Which is what Maxwell and her ilk are trying to do with “Jackie.”

The victimization of the accused, apparently, has no importance. After all, he can’t be a worthwhile human being, else a woman wouldn’t have accused him in the first place.

Never mind that, to alter this lawyer’s closing argument just a touch,

The cost of disbelieving [the accused man], on the other hand, is far steeper. It signals that that [men] don’t matter and that they are disposable….

Thoughts on European Inflation and Tax Policy

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Michael Heise, Chief Economist at Allianz SE, had some in his op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, but I want to focus on just a couple, for the mindset implied as he—and Europe’s politicians—address inflation and tax policy.

They [tax and ultralow-interest rate policies] encourage risk taking among investors searching for yield, potentially leading to malinvestment. They affect the distribution of income and wealth between the less affluent, who are most affected by low returns on bank deposits, and the wealthier, who tend to benefit most from rising share prices. Finally, perhaps most important, ultralow interest rates discourage savings for retirement and slow down the growth of existing pension assets.

“Ultralow rates encourage risk taking.” Yeah? And? That’s a business decision; no government need be—no government should be—involved in that. A free market will do a far better, far more efficient, with far prompter sanction application job of regulating risk taking businesses.

“Affect the distribution of income and wealth.” Yeah? And? To the extent such distributions can ever be bad, a free market is the best way to raise the prosperity of the least, and if the wealthy get wealthier, so what? The poor still are less poor. No government mandates or regulations can hope to match the prosperity creation that is freedom in the market.

“Ultralow interest rates discourage savings for….” This is true, and the ECB’s decision to artificially depress interest rates is negligently harmful to the poor, the retired, and those trying to save for retirement. Further, ECB and sovereign nation interferences in the market for debt instruments is purely political, and so it’s wholly unpredictable (who can tell when a politician will decide it’s in his interest to do something different?). That unpredictability seriously damages the ability of anyone to save for their future.

Tax policy shouldn’t be used for social engineering; optimally, it should be used only to fund basic government. The free market is a better place—more efficient, and faster acting—than government from which to regulate interest rates and risk. Even in social democrat Europe.