Welcome to Thursday, November 21, 2024. It’s one week until I fly off to Poland to give two talks at the Silesian Science Festival and, of course, to visit my surrogate parents, Andrzej and Malgorzata, in Dobrzyn. (There will also be three cats to pet: Hili, Szaron, and Kulka.) It’s National Gingerbread Cookie Day, though I prefer the cake. Here are some fancy gingerbread cookies from Wikipedia, glazed with royal icing.
It’s also Alascattalo Day (look it up), National Cranberry Day, National Stuffing Day, World Television Day, Beaujolais Nouveau Day (give it a pass; it’s wine Kool-Aid), and World Philosophy Day. Here’s a photo of a philosopher; can you identify him?
Today’s Google Doodle (click on link) celebrates the final rise of the half moon in November, and you can play a Moon-ey card game there:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 21 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Biden has exacerbated the U.S. standoff with Russia by helping Ukraine with more weapons, this time by supplying them with anti-personnel mines. (Article is archived here.)
The Biden administration has approved supplying Ukraine with American anti-personnel mines to bolster defenses against Russian attacks as Ukrainian front lines in the country’s east have buckled, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Wednesday.
The decision is the latest in a series of moves by Russia and the United States related to the war in Ukraine that have escalated tensions between the two.
The White House recently granted permission to Ukraine to fire longer-range American missiles at targets in Russia, which the Ukrainians did for the first time on Tuesday. Moscow in response formalized a new doctrine lowering the threshold for when it would use nuclear weapons.
Mr. Austin said the U.S. decision was prompted by Russia’s increasing reliance on foot soldiers to lead their assaults, instead of armored vehicles. Mr. Austin, speaking to reporters while traveling in Laos, said the shift in policy follows changing tactics by the Russians. Because of that, Ukraine has “a need for things that can help slow down that effort on the part of the Russians,” Mr. Austin said.
“They’ve asked for these, and so I think it’s a good idea,” Mr. Austin said.
The move is also noteworthy because it is part of a series of late actions taken in the waning weeks of the Biden presidency to bolster Ukraine. President Biden in the past has sought to calibrate American help for Ukraine against his own concern about crossing Russian “red lines” that could lead to direct conflict between Washington and Moscow.
Mines in general have been devastatingly effective in the war in Ukraine, and Russia has made extensive use of them. The mines are planted by hand but can also be scattered remotely with rockets or drones behind opponents’ lines, to catch soldiers as they move to and from positions, a tactic that can assist an offensive.
Land mines, however, have been most effective in defense. A broad belt of dense minefields in southern Ukraine stymied a Ukrainian counteroffensive in the summer of 2023 and gravely wounded a large but undisclosed number of Ukrainian soldiers.
Most anti-personnel mines are small explosives about the size of a hockey puck that are triggered by the pressure of a footstep.
The Biden administration’s decision came despite widespread condemnation of mines by rights groups that cite their toll on civilians, which can stretch for years or decades after conflicts end as the locations of minefields are left unmarked or forgotten. Ukraine is already the most heavily mined country in the world, according to the United Nations.
I’m not so keen on land mines, mainly because they hang around forever if unexploded and can damage civilians. I’m undecided about Biden’s move, but pretty sure that Trump will pressure Ukraine to give up land and end the conflict when he takes office. The missiles may not be flowing from the U.S. any more, but the mines will still be there.
*Several sources, including the Torygraph, the Times of Israel, and the NY Post, report that, in Berlin, there are “no go” areas for Jews and gays, and those are areas where Arabs live.
From the Torygraph (archived here):
Jews and gay people should hide their identity in parts of Berlin with large Arab populations, the German capital’s police chief has warned.
“There are areas of the city, we need to be perfectly honest here, where I would advise people who wear a kippah or are openly gay to be more careful,” said Barbara Slowik.
“There are certain neighbourhoods where the majority of people of Arab origin live, who also have sympathies for terrorist groups,” she said, adding that they were often “openly hostile towards Jews”.
She told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper that “violent crimes against Jewish people are few and far between, but every act is one too many”.
A fortnight ago, a youth football team from Makkabi Berlin, a Jewish sports club, reported being “hunted down” by youths carrying sticks and knives after a match in an Arab neighbourhood of the city. The victims, aged 13 to 15, said they were spat at and insulted throughout the match.
The incident took place on the same night that migrant gangs filmed attacks on fans of the Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv after a European football match against Ajax in Amsterdam.
Germany has seen a surge in anti-Semitism since the beginning of the war in Gaza, with reported incidents doubling in 2023 compared with previous years.
Since Oct 7 last year, Berlin’s police have opened more than 6,000 investigations connected to anti-Semitism, according to Ms Slowik. Most of these concern online hate speech or graffiti.
Other incidents in Berlin include a football fan being attacked for wearing a scarf with a Star of David on it, a petrol bomb attack on a synagogue shortly after the Oct 7 massacres in southern Israel, and a couple being attacked in a fast-food outlet for speaking Hebrew.
On the day of the Hamas massacres, men handed out sweets in celebration in the Berlin neighbourhood of Neukolln, an incident that shocked Germany and led to deep anxiety over whether the recent waves of migration had made Jewish life less safe.
I wrote to a friend in Berlin about this, and she verified that the “no go” areas are real, though if you don’t let people know you’re gay or Jewish, you can pretty much avoid “incidents”. But what kind of city in the West (especially Berlin, with its WWII history of Nazi leadership) would be unsafe both Jews and for gays. This shows that it’s not just antisemitism at work, but homophobia: in other words, Islamism. And this is why extremist Islam is dangerous not just to Jews, but to the entire democratic West.
*Over at Bluesky, there seems to be some censorship afoot, at least according to Colin Wright:
He adds a second tweet, but since I can’t access Bluesky, readers who can should send me a screenshot of the post.
You have to click a button to reveal what my post says.
— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) November 19, 2024
I asked Matthew, who is on Bluesky, to send me the whole tweet, so here it is:
Well, yes, that seems unacceptable to me, because the site is hiding biological reality. But not having lived at that site (I’m pondering it), I don’t know if the site is as censorious at Twitter was, though I know that Bluesky is seen as a left wing alternative to Twitter. Matthew certainly likes it. WCBM discusses the censorship issues, saying that Bluesky is inundated with censorship requests.
The left-wing alternative to Elon Musk’s X platform is already running into difficulties with its promise to censor “harmful content.”
Bluesky, which has received millions of sign-ups from angry leftists boycotting Elon Musk’s X platform, has admitted that it cannot keep up with the number of moderation and censorship requests from its progressive user base.
In a post from “Bluesky Safety,” the company announced that it was receiving over 3,000 censorship demands per hour, leading to a backlog in its response times.
They explained:
Bluesky has grown by over 3M people in the last week — welcome! With every wave of growth naturally comes an increase in moderation reports. Here’s a status report on how the Trust & Safety team is handling it:
In the past 24 hours, we have received more than 42,000 reports (an all-time high for one day). We’re receiving about 3,000 reports/hour. To put that into context, in all of 2023, we received 360k reports. We’re triaging this large queue so the most harmful content such as CSAM is removed quickly.
With this significant influx of users, we’ve also seen increased spam, scam, and trolling activity — you may have seen some of this yourself. Our team is reviewing these accounts, and you can help us by reporting them by clicking the three-dot menu on each post/account.
We appreciate your patience as we dial our moderation team up to max capacity and bring on new team members to support this load. Your safety is our highest priority, and we’re glad to welcome you to Bluesky!
Bluesky has grown by over 3M people in the last week — welcome!
With every wave of growth naturally comes an increase in moderation reports. Here’s a status report on how the Trust & Safety team is handling it:
— Bluesky Safety (@safety.bsky.app) 16 November 2024 at 00:10
Bluesky was originally established in 2019 by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. However, he has since stepped down from its board and encouraged users to stay active on X.
The platform claims to offer users more control over their online experience, though its real appeal for its users lies in its promise to censor content at breakneck speed.
That is nearly one request for censorship per second! I hadn’t thought, when pondering joining Bluesky, that because it’s populated with disaffected leftists who left X after Trump was elected with the help of Twitter (“X”) owner Elon Musk, it might be subject to pervasive censorship, the purview of “progressives”. And I still don’t know if that’s the case, so I’m still thinking about joining. For one thing, you can embed Bluesky posts directly into this site from the URLs, while you have to go through a more complicated process for “X” tweets. Readers from Bluesky are welcome to give their opinions and advice.
*Reihan Salan, the son on Bangladeshi immigrant, gives recommendations for the incoming Trump administration at the Free Press. His piece is called, “Immigration is a mess. Here’s how to fix it.” First Salan lays out the problem, which you know well, and then gives ten suggestions about how to fix it. He wrote a book on the issue; as he says, “In 2018, I published Melting Pot or Civil War?, a short book on immigration. Despite its provocative title, the book offered a cautious, careful, almost hilariously mild case for immigration restriction.
An excerpt from the article (archived here):
Within 100 days of his inauguration, President Joe Biden took 94 executive actions on immigration, according to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. Taken together, these actions represented a repudiation not only of Trump’s approach, but of long-standing immigration limits that had been embraced by the Clinton and Obama administrations. Spurred on by the activist left, the Biden White House tamped down interior enforcement, rolled back travel and visa restrictions, greatly expanded humanitarian protections, and suspended the highly successful Remain in Mexico program.
By April 2021, it was already clear that something was going badly wrong at the U.S.-Mexico border. At the same time administration officials were loudly insisting that unauthorized border crossers would be expelled, a large majority of border-crossing families were allowed in, which meant that smugglers could still make a compelling pitch to potential migrants—not to mention enormous profits.
Predictably, irregular migration surged. Once the word got out that even the weakest asylum claim would allow you to live in the U.S. for years before you’d get a hearing in immigration court, migrants from around the world decided to try their luck.
I’ll give three of his ten recommendations, but read the archived version to see them all. They seem sensible and not at all Trump-ian:
1. On deportations, take steps that build credibility and support, like expelling criminals and recent immigration-law violators. Those protesting such moves reveal their own extremism, rather than rallying the public to their side. Conversely, deporting people who’ve been living in the U.S. peacefully and productively for over a decade is guaranteed to spark damaging headlines, especially if they have citizen spouses or children, as many of them do. Remember, this isn’t about being sentimental—it’s about maintaining the support the administration will need to bring the border back under control.
2. Under current law, those who seek asylum and can show a “credible fear” of persecution in their home country cannot be summarily deported. To deter weak or fraudulent asylum claims, move quickly to detain all individuals who cross the border illegally and ensure everyone is vetted and passes a credible fear interview before they are released. Work with Mexico and the Department of Defense under a national emergency declaration to build detention capacity. And if these efforts don’t succeed in curbing irregular migration, the administration should work with Congress to further tighten asylum rules.
5. For legal immigration, enact an improved version of the first Trump administration’s “public charge” rule, which bars the immigration of those unable to support themselves. This will help ensure that new legal immigrants can support themselves and their families, which in turn will help restore faith in our immigration system. Immigration agents need more guidance than the previous rule provided; the improved version should require consideration of earnings, education, and age, and explicitly define the weight assigned to each factor.
The last suggestion involves explaining to Americans how immigration, handled properly, can be a good thing. All in all, this seems like a sensible set of suggestions.
*Finally, from the AP’s “oddities” section: “Snack judgment: Spanish court slaps supermarket that fired a worker for eating a croquette.” That’s a clicker if ever there was one!
A Spanish court has upheld a ruling that a supermarket worker was unlawfully fired for having eaten a croquette that was going to be thrown away after not having been sold from the store’s deli section.
The worker was fired in July 2023 after he had snarfed down the fried snack, which was destined for the trash after the store had closed for the day.
In a verdict that The Associated Press saw on Wednesday, the Superior Court of Castilla-La Mancha recently rejected an appeal by the supermarket chain Mercadona of a decision by a lower court in May 2024 in favor of the worker.
The company’s policy is that workers are prohibited from consuming any product found in the store without having paid for it previously.
But the superior court found that it was common practice for workers to snack on “ready to eat” food products that were going to be thrown away after closing hours. In its ruling, it also insisted in “the important detail that the worker didn’t eat an entire package of croquettes, but instead one single croquette” that was “not going to be put back on sale the following day.”
The lower court ruling in May determined that the worker be reinstated to his job and that the supermarket chain pay him 39,700 euros ($41,800) in lost wages. The higher court has now added that Mercadona also must pay the worker 600 euros ($633) for his legal fees.
Mercadona did not immediately respond to an email from the AP asking for comment on the case.
The court documents didn’t indicate the flavor of the croquette, which in Spain is a popular food typically made from ham, chicken or cod.
What’s right is right, and the supermarket was simply WRONG. How dare they prohibit a worker from eating something that was going to be thrown out, and on his own time. If he gets sick from eating bad food, it’s on him, but otherwise the worker did nothing wrong.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is really anxious about the onset of winter, when she has to stay inside. She goes through this every year.
Hili: Do you really think that there will be a spring again one day?A: It’s a sure thing.
Hili: Czy naprawdę sądzisz, że kiedyś znowu będzie wiosna?Ja: Z całą pewnością.
And a photo of Baby Kulka:
*******************
Three cat memes today. From Facebook, a wonderful child’s poem:
From Stacy. Poor fellow!
And from Meow:
From Masih. This woman (identified by Masih) doesn’t say anything, for she is under government investigation—for not wearing her headscarf.
Her name is Roshank Molaei—a woman who dared to defend herself against sexual assault in public. But guess what? In the twisted logic of this regime, it’s not the assault that’s the crime; it’s the fact that her hair was showing while she did it.
So now, instead of punishing the… https://t.co/W8jGIL0uIV pic.twitter.com/hyxeDOvBtX
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) November 12, 2024
From Simon, who says that “Larry agrees that he had it coming!”:
Didn't think I'd ever feel sorry for Donald Trump but here we are.
— Larry the Cat (@number10cat.bsky.social) 2024-11-18T09:44:24.785Z
An octopus takes a shark, but the shark goes free; the second tweet shows the awesome camouflage of these animals.
Octopus
shows us
how effectively it can change color to match
its surroundings….. pic.twitter.com/vuRlCBvESj— 𝘚𝘢𝘯𝘢 𝘚𝘩𝘢𝘩 🦋 ثناء شاہ (@meSana220) November 17, 2024
From my feed. Poor kitty!
The shortest walk ever pic.twitter.com/wCTTawn22Y
— Irena Buzarewicz (@IrenaBuzarewicz) November 18, 2024
From the Auschwitz Memorial, a tweet that I reposted:
A Polish girl gassed to death upon arrival at Auschwitz. She was thirteen. 90% of the Jews in that transport were murdered along with her. https://t.co/AM1O9yHGZz
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) November 21, 2024
Two posts by Professor Cobb. First, a beautiful vignette of foxes playing at Oxford:
I ripped this video from Eleonora Svanberg on X (she’s not on 🦋)She wrote: “I'm a PhD student at @UniofOxford and I think I'm living in a fairytale :-)Foxes playing around in the snow at Magdalen College this morning — absolutely magical!”
— Mike Galsworthy (@mikegalsworthy.bsky.social) 2024-11-20T08:55:23.563Z
A new cat to me: the Chinese mountain cat. More on Caturday!
Have you ever heard of the Chinese mountain cat?I hadn't until I read Ruth Kamnitzer's piece on this small cat that was only photographed for the first time in the wild in 2007.news.mongabay.com/2024/11/easy…
— Rhett Ayers Butler (@rhettayersbutler.bsky.social) 2024-11-20T04:48:24.473Z
The pictured philosopher is John Rawls.
Wow. I read quite a lot of John Rawls in the 70’s, but never knew what he looked like as there were no you tube videos of lectures in those days. I still rely heavily on the thinking in his Theory of Justice. One of my philosophy professors had been a student of his at Harvard. Thanks.
That’s funny – I was struck very hard by the Oxford foxes video the other day – so, knocked into a sort of magic spell – figured maybe it’s “AI” or not, but was quite intoxicating!
What can I say – the architecture, England, gray sky, gentle snow, and foxes?… all it’d need more is Bach sung by King’s Choir and it’s like a serene magic of reality…
Christ Church or Magdalen College Choirs, I hope. Kings is in the other place.
Yes, thanks – it’s just that King’s has a lot of material on my subscription service I can hear in mu mind’s ear right now…. but I’m gonna look those up too since you mention it…
I really like the foxes in the snow video!
+1
Yes Hili. Not only will Spring be here again one day, but long before that, Jerry will be here next week. And look, Baby Kulka is already at the window keeping watch.
Confession: it took a long, long time before I realized that all the pictures of Baby Kulka were not coming from a large store of photos which had been taken back when Kulka was a kitten, but that the cat’s actual name was “Baby Kulka.”
No, her name is really Kulka; I just always call her “Baby Kulka”. I am sorry to give that impression.
She retained her kitten-like appearance for so long, I have always used the prefix “Baby” as a sign of long time affection and familiarity…though of course neither Hili nor she knows that I exist.
OK
Here are a few ideas I’d raise that might be worth bearing in mind (see “Spoiler” if not) :
• ideological purity
• milieu control (to enforce ^^)
• “join us” / joiners
• promises, e.g. of some better way than of a fallen, or decrepit state
These are elements of varieties of New Age theosophical religions. I have noticed these elements in the admixture of BlueSky discourse. Here are two books I usually reference on those points:
Cults In Our Midst
Margaret Thaler Singer and Janja Lalich
1995
Jossey-Bass
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism — A Study of “Brainwashing” in China
Robert J. Lifton
W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., New York
1961
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin also has some out there writing that promotes a sort of New Age transcendence.
Spoiler: it’s about the following dialectic:
Abstract->Negation->Concrete
Social media->X->BlueSky
IMHO whatever floats your boat.
My first reaction to the land mine story was, Why is Biden doing this as one of the last things and didn’t do it as one of the first things when the war started? Mines are dangerous (supposedly the current ones have some sort of shelf-life so they that aren’t going off indefinitely in the future), but they are an important tool for defense.
As to the immigration piece, it’s been clear for years that was has happened is an active policy of the Biden Administration and not an accident. And they’ve denied it right along.
Withholding efficient weapons from Ukraine until too late was also an active policy of the Biden Administration and not an accident.
Yes, it was. Question is why? Was it to wear Russia down over time and cause their economy to collapse due to the weight of the war?
It seems to me we’re left with 2 options. Either support Ukaine with more strength as they are not able to push the invaders out on their own, or push for a negotiated settlement that would see Russia maintaining control of the captured territory. Of course the third option is to keep sending young men to be turned into hamburger on both sides with no chance of any end to the fighting.
Bl**sky is for d*gs, not cats, Ceiling Cat! I’m disappointed in the scientists who have left X for an echo chamber.
Not sure about dog and cat preferences but it’s clearly celebrating its censoriousness. Forget it, I’d say.
If you only have time for one, X is better.
Think of Bluesky as a highway, and when you are censored it is like a lane departure warning.
Please, not “censorship”!
BlueSky calls them “safety requests.”
If so, X is an airport – users announcing their “departure”s.
IMHO I don’t get it. Neither will go away. It’s a free country. Use them while it’s still legal. Etc.
I’m not too keen on censoring everything you don’t like, but it does feel like there are a lot less trolls. It’s early though. I stopped using Twitter over a year ago. I’ve always thought it was toxic, but Musk’s takeover turned it up to 11. If I want to look at the latest views of some more conservative intellectuals I’ll just google search “Richard Hanania Twitter” for example. I think he has some good points sometimes. I also think the free speech hypocrisy coming from Musk and his acolytes is pretty funny. Three quick examples. Marc Andreesen thinks companies that won’t advertise on X should be charged with a crime. Musk threatened to sue companies that won’t advertise on his platform. Read Jesse Singal’s recent article on Michael Shellenberger. A lot of this free speech talk was a Trojan horse.
A company choosing not to advertise on X is fine. However, a company organising and/or colluding in an advertising boycott against another company, particularly if it involves false or misleading statements about that company, could well amount to tortious interference and could thus be actionable.
And while Twitter may not be perfect, it is the free-est speech major platform that we currently have, and that is important and merits support.
Companies may also have wanted to not associate with a company that thinks the algorithmic amplification of Alex Jones was vital to free speech. Or just the general toxicity many people feel the platform actively promotes. “Conspiracy” was the word Andreessen used. Everything is a conspiracy. “The orchestrated advertiser boycott against X and popular podcasts must end immediately. Conspiracy in restraint of trade is a prosecutable crime.“-Marc Andressen 11/8/24. Right after the election too. How does a company prove they choose not to advertise versus collude to boycott? Be interesting to see what kind of influence Elon has over Trump and by extension the courts.
Just seen this on Twitter by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton:
“I have opened an investigation into a possible conspiracy by advertising companies to boycott certain social media platforms.
“It is completely unacceptable and un-American that the Department of Justice under the Biden Administration failed to enforce antitrust laws against its perceived political allies.
“Trade organizations and companies cannot collude to block advertising revenue from entities they wish to undermine.”
[To add: again, companies can make their own decisions on this, but they cannot collude; the evidence of collusion would be things like emails to other companies discussing it.]
I was kicked off Twitter (pre-Musk) for daring to suggest that there might be some linkage between ‘trans’ status and mental health. The fact that I cited the medical literature, was if anything, a strong negative.
“Progressives” censors are a blight. BlueSky will be like pre-Musk Twitter.
Progressive censors aren’t a problem if you specifically joined because you knew that certain viewpoints would be censored in the name of “safety”.
True. That group will be happy. A classic echo chamber.
For noncontroversial topics I guess it’s fine.
I agree the censorship is a problem. I certainly don’t agree with progressives on a number of issues. I just get tired of constant trolls. Including the owner. IMO pre-Musk Twitter was very toxic. Post-Musk is worse still.
My understanding of the landmines are that they are specifically designed with a built in shelf-life of only a few weeks, after which they are inert.
Isn’t censoring non-woke opinions the entire point of BlueSky? For more reactions to Colin Wright’s “sex is not a binary” tweet see here.
[BlueSky reminds me of Atheism Plus, a website that disappeared up its own purity spiral.]
Thank you for that link. Revealing.
I can’t confirm that this is genuine (it’s apparently been deleted now), but if so WTAF is going on over there? https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GctINLnWgAAUOXW
Exactly. Many who left Twitter/X for BlueSky, Mastodon, etc. were those who were threatening violence to people who don’t agree with them. Someone commented that they aren’t leaving X because they can’t say what they want, but because someone else says something that they don’t like.
Free speech is always a double-edged sword, and the whole point is that the speech one doesn’t like should be free. What about Alex Jones and so on? Calls for violence? The community notes features seems to be useful.
How much antisemitism is tolerated at Bluesky?
Correct, it’s a feature, not a bug. To a lot of the users on Bluesky, stating that sex is not a spectrum constitutes hate speech, and hate speech in that worldview should be stopped. This also means that the reaction comments to Wright’s post that you shared are not mean or hateful, they are a righteous fight against oppression.
I’ve been spending more time on it because friends keep telling me that it’s a kinder, gentler X, plus I’ve seen a lot of cool astrophotography, but I’m seeing a lot of pretty vicious stuff on there. The difference is that it’s directed against the right, so that makes it ok for the typical Bluesky user. Overall it’s way too much of an echo chamber for me.
One other thing: my feeble brain keeps seeing “Bluesky” as either “Bluesy” or “Bluey”. In verbal conversation I call it blue sky, but when I read it I have a weird short circuit going on.
On the Spanish worker fired for eating food destined to be thrown out. I worked at a discount dented cans supermarket. The prices were great and for employees stuff we couldn’t sell we could keep. (And we had an employee discount on salable items as well.) Well we all started to go overboard on items that we thought were unsellable but we’re really ok. Our boss finally had to be able to review our unsalable cans before we could take them. This suddenly reduced the amount of waste items. There was also was an employee who took several perfectly fine pounds of sliced ham, claiming it was out of date. She got fired.
That’s a good question as to when your property becomes free for others to help themselves to. When you are “about to throw it out anyway”, or only when it actually reaches the dumpster? And even then, stuff left out for trash collection may have salvage value to the municipality which it uses to defray the cost of trash collection. That’s why it doesn’t want bums rummaging through Blue Boxes to harvest aluminum cans (and strewing the worthless plastic all over the street.)
In some places, discarded food waste has a cash value to the owner, who can sell it to animal feed producers, or for composting.
As you point out, for management to permit “no-foul” pilfering by employees does encourage some employees to stretch the rules. If management condones this behaviour it may not be possible to fire the out-right thieving employee for cause and make it stick. The Spanish grocery store may have been down this road before and retrenched to a strict no-pilfering rule to make its position clear: you don’t have five-finger discount rights to help yourself to my food.
What the Spanish Court has done is placed an arbitrary limit on the property rights of the owner of the food in the grocery store, a limit that will be determined by the employee who wants to justify stealing from him.
Good context Leslie.
There are lots of egs of stuff like this where something seems insane and clickbaitable but the story behind it, the context or the 2nd order effects aren’t always obvious.
Like the trans toilet debate which started with a few (genuine) edge cases in 2014. As trans became aspirational, cool, and wildly popular, AGPs and other free riders changed the dynamics.
D.A.
NYC
You can get a phone app on which businesses post notices of surplus food that they aren’t going to sell, but don’t want to throw away. You see the post, claim it and pay for it (very cheap), and go pick it up. You are not always sure exactly what you will be getting, but you don’t pay much for it. Sort of a multi-win, for the buyer, the seller, and the cause of reducing of food waste.
A win-win. That’s how I felt about this store. The owner was an evangelical Christian and had refurbished an old IGA store. It had interesting antique shop signs as decoration and wasn’t fancy but in addition to the low prices you never knew what you might find as goods came from all over the country. This was food that would have been thrown away and instead was being sold at a large discount, while providing employment to the local community.
Yep, same issue in the product engineering and manufacturing company I work for. We test a lot of items, and those tested items are discarded, with many of them in new condition. We tried letting employees take the post-test articles home for personal use after testing, but this drove a lot of abuse of the privilege: excess parts and assemblies were ordered so that staff could be sure to get an untested item, testing was not being done fully so that parts were in better condition, parts were ordered even after the test cycle was done, and a lot of the items ended up on eBay. We put a stop to this (after numerous warnings) and our test budget dropped significantly. It’s a shame that we discard these like-new parts, but the incentive for abuse was too significant even with management oversight. In fact we recently fired a couple of engineers who took parts from dumpsters and took them home after this ban was put in place. Human behaviour is what it is.
Dad got sacked from Marks and Spencer in the early 1960s when he kept some oranges that he had been told to throw out into the rubbish bin behind the shop.
I’ve seen the photo of the single cat pawprint in snow elsewhere on the Interwebs, captioned “The tiniest nope”, which is, in my humble opinion, even funnier.
So cute! 🐈🐈🐈
I know Reihan Salan a bit. I even have his book on my bookshelf.
About that cat-eats-yarn poem: the drawings are cute for sure but the poem is not original. Apparently:
Your secret philosopher: John Rawls. – ( ‘)>
Nazi symbolism is banned in Germany except for limited-use cases and can be punished with jail time. Apparently in Germany it’s OK to beat up a Jew for being a Jew as long as you don’t wear a swastika when you do it.
What exactly gave you the impression that “in Germany it’s OK to beat a Jew for being a Jew”?
The police are obviously investigating and trying to prevent incidents. You are basically doing the hysterical “How dare you ask what she was wearing” routine of the woke left. There are areas where people who hate Jews live. If those people act on their hate, they get prosecuted. What else do you want? Premptive mass deportations for wrongthink?
Better protection for Jews and gays in areas where they get attacked for their identity is what I want, rather than telling them to just stay away.
First of all, I’d like to invite you to re-read the Nooz. The police didn’t tell them to “stay away” but to be careful when openly expressing Jewish or gay identity.
The police is already active in such areas and they are bound by law to protect any citizen from attacks – which they will do, no matter if Jewish, Christian or Muslim, gay or straight.
Again – you are making the claim that it’s unreasonable to ask citizens to be careful and reduce risks. Are you also saying that it’s unreasonable to tell scantly clad, attractive and drunk girls to be careful when entering a frat house? Should police accompany every such girl to make sure there is no unwanted approaches?
Measures are being taken to reduce the threat. Imams who preach anti-semitism can be and are ejected. Religious hatred is an aggravating factor in sentencing. Those measures have been further tightened – possibly even too much:
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-passes-controversial-antisemitism-resolution/a-70715643
Sadly the edit time is already over – so sorry for double posting. I couldn’t help but notice on the second pass, that you apparently still have the impression that “in Germany it’s OK to beat a Jew for being a Jew as long as you don’t wear a swastika when you do it.”
Care to retract this?
Given that the views of people who hate Jews were well known, it would have been a good idea not to let them immigrate in the first place.
+1
Are you referring to Arab Muslims in general? Many – if not most – of them are born in Germany and have German citizenship.
You think at the German border Arab immigrants are asked “Do you hate ze Jew? Yes? Very well.. come on in!”? Freedom of (and from) religion is a basic tenet. Discrimination on the basis of religion is against our societal rules. I am also critical of Islam – but it’s the basis of our society to extend enough trust to every individual to uphold our rules. Punishment and ejection only comes after a crime has been committed or attempted. Putting exceptions and special privileges in for the Jews will only fan resentment. Jews and gays should enjoy all the protection every German citizen (with a similar risk profile) enjoys – no more and no less.
Here is a recent poll from Gallup, that known haven of Russian assets, stating that Ukrainians now want, by a margin of 52-38, a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible. Support for continuing the war has declined in every region of the country, with those who live in the eastern part the least enthusiastic, with 63% wanting the war to end as soon as possible and only 27% wanting to fight on. Moreover, of those who want a negotiated end to the war, more than half are open to territorial concessions. (And, yes, I understand that demographics could be skewing those results in the East.)
https://news.gallup.com/poll/653495/half-ukrainians-quick-negotiated-end-war.aspx
This was the strategy of Biden, Scholz and most other Western leaders: to give Ukraine weapons and ammo just enough to fight a slowly losing fight, until the bravest defenders would die or be maimed, the majority of citizens would want any end to the war, and Western public opinion would be “tired” of it and eager to reward the aggressor and have peace at the expense of Ukraine.
But history teaches that this strategy only breeds more war.
Land mines are a very touchy subject that I stay on the fence on.
Granted, the worst examples of the damage they do to children and so on are ones left by rogue groups at random to harass them.
The US is subject to international agreements where they’re both mapped out and set up in a planned manner and even the field marked.
The worst cases have been from unmapped and chaotic setups, often intentionally done for the purpose of harming non-combatants. Basically terrorism.
”I’m not so keen on land mines, mainly because they hang around forever if unexploded and can damage civilians.“
I heard on the radio that these mines have batteries which run out after a certain time and hence don’t pose a long-term threat.