In this very long podcast I am joined by Mike, a legal expert of sorts who lives and works in Switzerland. We discuss a business takeover gone wrong against the backdrop of Swiss life and culture, and how it compares to other places. You can listen to it on iTunes here, Player FM here, download it here, or listen on the blog by clicking the link below:
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Several readers have asked me if I’ve watched Louis Theroux’s documentary on a polyamorous community, now showing on BBC Three. Alas I haven’t, mostly due to time constraints and the BBC is wise to my VPN, so I can’t hoodwink them into thinking I’m in Lampeter. But I’ll get around to it at some point. Meanwhile, a reader alerts me to this piece:
A few years ago, my then-wife and I decided to more openly embrace an element of our relationship that had been acknowledged since we got together in college: We liked seeing, and sleeping with, other people.
Polyamorists always cite this as if they’ve broken some sort of taboo. Damned near every married man, and probably quite a few women, have the desire to sleep with someone else but they don’t in order to preserve the integrity of the relationship and the benefits it brings.
At one point I was invited to a happy hour in Lower Manhattan for the local poly community.
I might have known all this would be happening in New York, a city seemingly stuffed full of people with meaningless lives. My only surprise is the party didn’t take place in Brooklyn, but I’d hazard a guess most of the attendees live there.
Don’t get me wrong, folks definitely got their flirt on, and plenty went home together. But the night drove home my intuition that there was nothing too radical in polyamory. If anything, it seemed to appeal to gentle, sensitive, somewhat geeky types?—?white-collar hipsters (myself included) of many pleasant backgrounds.
Misfits soy-boys, in other words.
This did not strike me as a group that faced significant oppression. No poly friend or partner of mine has noted a genuine hardship.
That’s because it’s generally practiced by the spoiled offspring of dysfunctional middle-class marriages. But this is a problem, because polyamorists want to be accepted into mainstream society and the best route to achieve that is to claim victimhood of some sort. Hence:
Whereas the poly people I’ve known personally just think of the lifestyle as an arrangement that works for them, the internet’s poly-vangelists are consumed with making it an identity, even claiming it as their sexual orientation, which, again, draws an improper comparison to the struggle for gay rights. They also continue to alienate monogamists, minorities, LGBTQ groups and their fellow polyamorists by indulging in fantasies of persecution.
In other words, the movement is largely formed from a bunch of weirdos inventing persecution complexes in order to gain attention.
The statement also curiously overlooks polyamorists of color.
Probably because polyamory is generally a white person’s pursuit, although I’ve noticed a few western-raised Asian women dabbling in it, probably as a result of identity confusion.
Anti-poly discrimination is “a very first-world problem to complain about,” says Sarah-Louise, a solo poly woman in New York.
For the uninitiated, solo poly is the term to describe someone who has several secondary partners but no primary one. I imagine the term has been invented in order that women can pretend this suits them, having entered polyamory out of desperation to find a partner with the hope they’d at least be someone’s primary. As I wrote in my book:
Despite saying they love each other equally, someone usually ends up being the number two partner of several people, but the number one of nobody.
If, as they often do, women get into polyamory due to low self-esteem, this can’t help very much.
She and I dated there, and she has the most poly connections of anyone I know.
That’s one way of putting it.
She once sublet a room in a Bushwick building expressly renovated for and rented to polyamorous tenants?.
My book was partially set in Bushwick, a neighbourhood of Brooklyn. What a coincidence, eh?
Even so, certain poly individuals nurse a sense of victimhood surrounding their romantic life. I was guilty of this when my parents discovered?—?by an accident of gossip?—?that my wife and I existed in this mold. I fought with my family a lot, which was unusual, and imagined, for the first and only time, that Mom and Dad were old, recoiling conservatives.
Scratch a polyamorist and underneath you’ll find issues with Mum and Dad bursting to escape. And this tweet by the author – included in the article – made me laugh:
Poly is hard in the current culture, and isn’t for everyone. It requires unusually high IQ, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness, IMHO.
— Geoffrey Miller (@primalpoly) June 8, 2018
Because the profiles of the polyamorists I’ve written about on here just scream out unusually high intelligence and emotional stability, don’t they?
Some are chafed that non-poly acquaintances see them as oversexed. “Women are low-value sluts, men are misogynist harem builders, etc.,” as one redditor put it. As a result, poly promoters will go out of their way to defend what some would consider mere promiscuity.
I’ve yet to see this accusation successfully defended. When they try, they end up describing an ordinary life with the sole distinguishing feature being that of sex with multiple people. For instance:
Polyamorous things I do more of than have sex:
– Emotional processing
– Talking
– Synchronzing Google calendars
– Making bulk purchases at outlet stores
– Cuddling
– Taking pics of lost items to send to multiple partners searching for an owner#morethansex #Polyamory— Poly Role Models (tinyurl.com/ForHireMag1) (@PolyRoleModels) August 21, 2018
With the exception of that last one, this is a description of any adult’s life. A serial killer is defined by his murdering people in succession, not by the fact that he also buys cornflakes and brushes his teeth. For some reason, polyamorists seem to think a list of mundane activities which everyone does is evidence their lifestyles are not defined purely by sex and promiscuity.
Nevertheless, she and many polyamorists point out one of the more severe repercussions of the lifestyle: In isolated cases, poly parents stand to lose custody of children, with their various partners taken into consideration of the home environment.
They have chosen to live a lifestyle which, by any sensible measure, is not a suitable environment in which to raise children. This gives any court charged with making a decision an indication as to where their priorities lie.
In the late 1990s, when a Memphis mom named April Divilbliss appeared on an MTV show that documented her polyamorist home, her young daughter’s paternal grandparents successfully filed for emergency custody of the kid. Back then, Divilbliss?—?a self-described Wiccan?—?said her religious and moral freedoms had been infringed. But years later, she had a much different view, writing that she hadn’t been able to materially care for her daughter, that “polyamory was never really the issue with my child’s custody,” and that the decision to leave her in the care of the grandparents was “the best I’ve ever made” as a parent.”
Well, quite.
And more recently, judges have proven willing to assess polyamorist families as stable and loving units that deserve appropriate custody arrangements?—?even when divorce is involved.
Only in Canada, which is fast becoming a nation beyond parody. I wrote about this case here.
Then there are those who worry that being outed as poly could mean losing a job, especially if they work in a conservative area or industry. The fear is not unfounded; polyamory has made for career setbacks and obstacles, up to and including firing, and generally speaking, there are no legal protections against this.
I rather think it is those with conservative views who run the risk of getting hounded from their jobs by a Twitter mob.
In Australia, a poly woman’s lawsuit against the Catholic social services organization that sacked her was rejected by a federal judge who said the country’s Sex Discrimination Act applied no more to polyamory than to necrophilia or pedophilia?—?a rather unfair association.
Quite right too: polyamory is a coping mechanism masquerading as a lifestyle choice, but I wonder how long it’ll be before they’re granted protected class status. My guess is they won’t be, simply because of the long queue of grifters ahead of them campaigning for the same privilege.
“I know several people who really believe that they’ll lose their jobs in advertising/graphic design/whatever in NYC if people know they’re poly.”
Whereas in reality it’s probably a requirement. The polyamorist I knew worked for several years in graphic design in NYC. The research I did for my book would have been a lot harder were this movement not made up of walking stereotypes.
To make a long story incredibly short, I’m now separated from my wife and living with a partner I met during the marriage
Why, it’s almost as if the whole polyamory thing was to avoid you and your wife admitting the marriage had got boring and you both wanted out. Imagine my surprise.
Yesterday, during a lecture, I was shown this video:
I’ll not ask my readers to watch the whole thing, but the gist of it is that people should change the world by uniting with small groups of like-minded people under whoever steps up to lead the way on that particular issue. The point is, you don’t need to create a demand for a movement, it’s already there; it just needs someone to lead it. Incidentally, the video dates from 2009 so it was rather prescient as far as Donald Trump’s election is concerned.
What I took away from it was that, in an age of increasing secularism, people are flocking to those who can give them the spiritual satisfaction they used to get in church. I’ve mentioned before that people don’t really get more secular, they just shift their faith onto something else; just because they don’t worship at the altar of a regular religion, it doesn’t make them non-believers. A few years ago I read John Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, which includes a history of Mormonism. Its founder Joseph Smith was a teenager during a period called the Second Great Awakening:
The Second Great Awakening was a Protestant religious revival during the early 19th century in the United States.
…
The revivals enrolled millions of new members in existing evangelical denominations and led to the formation of new denominations. Many converts believed that the Awakening heralded a new millennial age.
A combination of economic and social changes had caused many people to grow disillusioned with the traditional denominations, leading to hundreds of sects popping up headed by all manner of chancers promising salvation. Joseph Smith was physically imposing and staggeringly charismatic, and so it was his particular cult that grew into an established religion while most of the others died out. I was reminded of the clamour of the masses to worship something, anything, during the Second Great Awakening when I watched this video. In the 9 years since it was made, I think the clamour has only grown louder.
Once again I’m going to write about an individual, not so much to lay the boot into him but because he represents a wider phenomenon. A few weeks ago I wrote about a tweet from one Daniel Sugarman, a journalist at the Jewish Chronicle, in which he stood on the still-warm bodies of his murdered co-religionists in order to virtue-signal about Trump. Here’s the tweet in question:
There are no words to describe just how much I hate Donald Trump. https://t.co/KZmNmyyuXw
— Daniel Sugarman (@Daniel_Sugarman) October 27, 2018
Now here’s a tweet he posted yesterday:
Feeling a bit rubbish ???? if anyone can send me some happy things on here it would mean a lot. Thanks.
— Daniel Sugarman (@Daniel_Sugarman) November 22, 2018
This chap is in his twenties and while he might (for all I know) be a good journalist, there is something not quite right about a grown man who clamours for attention as if he were a teenager on Instagram. The problem is he’s not alone. So many prominent journalists and political commentators spend a good portion of their time signalling to the in-group, which usually takes the form of being rather unpleasant about somebody else. Then five minutes later they’re broadcasting to the world they’re unhappy, inviting people to say nice things about them. Natalia Antonova, Laurie Penny, and Oliver Kamm are three examples of prominent commentators who delight in making vicious, denigrating remarks about people in the process of virtue-signalling, while simultaneously using their platforms to bleat about how awfully they’ve been treated, or how unhappy and depressed they are. Cue a chorus of ultra-supportive comments – which is the entire point of course.
This is not the behaviour of functioning adults. I suspect there have always been people who act like this, but these days such behaviour gets rewarded. Indeed, it almost seems to be a requirement in what passes for modern journalism. It’s amusing that these people believe they hold the blueprint for society’s future; it’s less amusing that people actually listen to them.
A reader sends me a job advert. Look at the bottom:
Simply apply through seek today with your CV. Once we have reviewed your details we will ask you to apply online through our Johnson Controls job portal. You will then be contacted by the Branch Manager as appropriate for an interview. Good Luck!
So if HR like the look of you, you can do their admin work by putting all your details into their database. Presumably they’re too busy to do it themselves, what with all that diversity coordination and training Kiwi fire protection specialists require.
You see this with a lot of what are laughably called “support functions” in companies: they exist mainly to deal with administration but write their procedures in such a way the admin burden is put back on the workforce. I’ve worked in a company where the travel department – made up of 20+ people – made each worker get quotes from three different travel agencies and complete a ream of forms which they would then review and possibly approve. When I worked in a smaller company you’d email the travel girl with some basic details and any preferences and she’d do the rest. I also worked in a company where the contracts department made the engineers write the entire contract, after which they’d staple the general terms and conditions to the back of it. I worked in another place where every year my career manager would ask for my CV, which she already had but she wanted it in “the new format”.
People talk about AI robots replacing HR and other admin functions, but from what I can tell that won’t be necessary. If it’s replacing existing brain power, a reprogrammed food processor would suffice.
The French might be odd, but they can hold the line when they want to:
A French court has ruled that posters showing a woman tied to train tracks did not promote violence against women.
The posters were put up around the town of Béziers last December to celebrate the arrival of high-speed TGV trains. They carried the caption: “With the TGV, she would have suffered less.”
The ads faced a legal challenge from a number of feminist groups and criticism by France’s equality minister.
But the court said they were legal, despite the questionable humour.
Would a British court have ruled the same way? Maybe, but they’d have found some other way to get the advert removed (as Sadiq Khan did with billboards showing nice looking women on the London Underground).
But the far-right mayor of Béziers, Robert Ménard, defended his campaign, accusing critics of “political correctness” and pointing to a history of such images in old films and cartoons.
…
After the French court threw out the complaint, Mr Ménard tweeted that the case had been “an inquisition in petticoats”.
Quite right too. Now I don’t know whether M. Ménard is actually far-right given the label is nowadays meaningless, but if so it’s rather illuminating that this is who we now rely on to advocate freedom of speech and push back against corrosive third-wave feminism.
The court in the southern city of Montpellier said the posters had been designed to provoke a reaction, and did not encourage violence against any specific group, including women.
Good. As I said after the Charlie Hebdo attack:
Nothing highlights the cultural gap between France and Britain more than the uncomfortable suspicion that Charlie Hebdo would not have lasted more than a year in the UK before being hounded out of business by the state and its backers in one form or another, as this article makes clear.
I have no confidence this advert would have been displayed in the UK. There’s a good chance anyone posting it would be charged with a hate crime.
From the BBC:
A British PhD student has been sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of spying in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Matthew Hedges, 31, of Durham University, always denied the charge saying he had been conducting research.
A court in Abu Dhabi has declared him guilty of “spying for or on behalf of” the UK government. His family claim the verdict is based on a false confession.
The PM said the UK was urgently seeking talks with the Emirati government.
Theresa May said Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt was “seeking a call with Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed”.
Mr Hunt said he was “deeply shocked and disappointed” by the verdict.
I read the entire article hoping to discover the details of his arrest and what the UAE authorities thought he was doing, but alas it’s comprised mainly of people saying how unjustly he’s been treated. To get further details you have to follow a link:
Mr Hedges, 31, a PhD student at Durham University in the UK, was convicted by the Federal Court of Appeal for attempting to procure sensitive information during a trip to the Emirates this year.
…
Mr Hedges was first arrested at Dubai International Airport in May after an Emirati man told police he had been asking for sensitive information.
And from an earlier BBC report we learn:
His family said he had been researching the impact of the Arab Spring on the UAE’s foreign policy and security strategy when he was arrested.
So what form did this research take? Who did he approach, and what information did he ask for? Clearly he was after something which couldn’t have been obtained sitting at home on the internet. Frankly, if you’re going around the Middle East asking individuals about their country’s foreign policy and security in the wake of a series of violent revolutions in neighbouring states, you’re likely to annoy the wrong people. And why are we relying on what his family is saying?
Vice-Chancellor of Durham University, Professor Stuart Corbridge said the conditions Hedges was held in “breached his human rights”.
“[And] this judgement has been delivered in the absence of anything resembling due process or a fair trial,” he said.
“There has been no information given on what basis Matt was handed this sentence and no reason to believe that Matt was conducting anything other than legitimate academic research.
Then why not elaborate on the form of this research? And did the university not warn him of the dangers of poking your nose into government affairs in the Middle East?
I’m reminded of the case of British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe (see here and here), who trained Iranian journalists on behalf of the BBC, found herself in jail when she went back home, and all our media could do is obscure her activities and declare she was innocent. Now she might be, and Matthew Hedges might be too, and I am certain neither has had a fair trial. But can someone ask some basic questions before we start wrecking diplomatic relations with yet another country?
Over the weekend a couple of readers alerted me to a video that was doing the rounds on Twitter of what looked like a couple of diminutive British police officers patrolling downtown Mogadishu. Inevitably for that part of the world, a bunch of hooded thugs gave the two – a man and a woman – a good thrashing. I later learned that the incident happened in London and the tweet had been deleted. Now we have Plod bleating:
Violent suspects could be released by police if officers do not get “backed up” by members of the public, a federation leader has warned.
Given the British government invites violent thugs from abroad to live among us and the justice system ensures they are free to continue being violent thugs in perpetuity, I feel ordinary folk are entitled to ask what, exactly, will change.
Ken Marsh spoke out after a video of officers being attacked was shared widely on social media.
Several cars can be seen driving past the encounter without stopping.
Met Police Federation chairman Mr Marsh said: “We don’t come to work to get assaulted, and if we’re not going to be backed up…then what is the point?”
What is the point, you say? Funny, I’ve been asking that question for quite some time now. And I love how the police have spent years elevating themselves to special status whereby only they can have weapons, only they can protect you, only they can do X, Y, and Z and ordinary people “must not take the law into their hands” but instead wait for Plod to show up three days later. Yet here they are whining that they don’t want to come to work if the public won’t join them in hand-to-hand combat with a bunch of feral thugs the very same police forces won’t let us criticise.
However, Mr Marsh added this did not mean he was asking members of the public “to suddenly jump in to assist police officers, because we are highly trained in what we do”.
Yes, your high-level of training is apparent in the video. Oddly, forty-three hours of diversity training followed by a week-long seminar on unconscious racial biases didn’t adequately prepare these two officers for encountering actual diversity and vibrancy on the streets. That aside, what do you want the public to do, other than meekly go to jail where you can keep an eye on wrongthinkers more easily?
A member of the public wearing a motorcycle helmet helped the male officer, but several cars went past without stopping.
So drivers navigating city streets are supposed to be able to asses whether they should stop and intervene in an ongoing ruck they happen to drive by? What idiocy is this? And even if they did realise what was going on, as I said before, why risk it? The potential downsides vastly outweigh any upsides, even if the police were deserving of the public’s support.
Talking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Mr Marsh said: “If the public now think it’s OK to stand and film and mock my colleagues…then we are in very dangerous grounds.
“What I’m trying to get across is the simple fact that society has changed so much lately that it seems to be OK [to be] more interested in mocking us and filming us.”
Sorry, what did you expect? You’ve made it abundantly clear you’re not on the public’s side, so why should they hold you in anything other than the same contempt you have for them? You were warned, time and again, that this would happen and what did your colleagues do? Go ultra-defensive, engage in self-gratifying circle-jerks, and threaten anyone who doesn’t kow-tow to you. You’ve brought this on yourselves.
He added: “We’re going to come to a point where we’re going to start pushing messages out to our colleagues: ‘Risk-assess it dynamically and, if you think you can’t detain a person, just let them go’.”
If the public doesn’t hold you in higher regard, you’ll carry out yet more risk assessments leading you to shirk your responsibilities? Yes, that’ll help turn things around.
A former Met officer, who left the force in 2014, said officers were attacked on a daily basis.
By people who, if criticised on social media, can look forward to the sight of their detractors being arrested by the Met for hate speech. Perhaps you ought to work out whose side you’re on?
Assistant commissioner Steve House of the Met Police said: “Whilst officers should never expect to be attacked as part of their job, a core part of officer safety training is ensuring they know how to respond to volatile situations.
Which is rather hard to do if diversity and inclusion are the driving factors in police recruitment and retention.
“This training is substantial and delivered in accordance with national guidelines and we regularly review it to make sure it is fit for purpose.
Then please explain the scenes in the video.
“Officers are also issued with personal protective equipment to help protect them and the public.
And if they don’t have them, they’ll stay in the car and watch their subordinate get murdered. Yes, we know.
We’re going to see a lot more of this, as we are of this:
Hundreds of residents have formed a ‘vigilante’ neighbourhood watch group following a failed campaign to increase the number of police officers on the streets.
The community watchdog group, known as ‘We Stand Determined’, stage twice-weekly patrols across Birmingham since it was set up on social media three weeks ago.
Members say they are working together to report any dangers the community may face across Britain’s second largest city amid fears crime is spiralling out of control.
…
Three organisers, only known as Wayne, Tracy and Michael, said they founded the group after discovering a friend had been attacked in his home by thieves armed with hammers.
A corrupt, dysfunctional, politicised police force who treat the public with contempt leading to vigilante groups forming in order to stop ordinary people being attacked with hammers. Britain is turning third world under our very noses.
So how did this happen, then?
A dead sperm whale that washed ashore in a national park in Indonesia had nearly 6kg (13 lbs) of plastic waste in its stomach, park officials say.
Items found included 115 drinking cups, four plastic bottles, 25 plastic bags and two flip-flops.
The carcass of the 9.5m (31ft) mammal was found in waters near Kapota Island in the Wakatobi National Park late on Monday.
I thought carrier bags had been banned from French supermarkets and bars in London no longer provide drinking straws, so how come we have a dead whale in Indonesia? Ah yeah:
Five Asian nations – China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand – account for up to 60% of the plastic waste that ends up in oceans, according to a 2015 report by environmental campaigner Ocean Conservancy and the McKinsey Center for Business and Environment.
The European Parliament has voted for a complete ban on a range of single-use plastics across the union in a bid to stop pollution of the oceans.
MEPs backed a ban on plastic cutlery and plates, cotton buds, straws, drink-stirrers and balloon sticks.
Next up: hosepipe bans in Surrey to prevent drought in Ethiopia.
Remember when gay marriage was all about liberty and equality? It seems like a long time ago indeed:
One of Australia’s leading wedding magazines, White, is shutting down following its refusal to feature same-sex weddings.
Founders Luke and Carla Burrell, who are Christian, say the magazine became the target of a damaging campaign after Australia voted to legalise same-sex marriage last year, and a number of advertisers withdrew their support.
…
Earlier this year, hundreds of wedding industry professionals boycotted the magazine over its lack of LGBTQI diversity.
I suppose there’s no government involvement so it’s just people voting with their wallets, as is their right. It’s all a bit puritan, though:
The couple said they did not want to “create a social, political or legal war” that would only divide people and do “more damage than good”.
But they said they received a “flood of judgement” and were not given enough time or space to work through their thoughts and feelings.
“It’s a long and continuing journey, it’s not black and white, there are so many grey areas that need to be explored.”
Gay marriage has gone from a fringe issue which no mainstream politician would risk their neck to endorse to one where businesses are being closed down because their owners don’t agree with it, all in the space of a decade.
Former contributors told Hack in August they did not want to force the magazine to publish same-sex weddings, but only to make their views clear.
And if those views differed from yours, you’d boycott them. I have a feeling that, when the battle lines really start to get drawn up and serious civil unrest beckons, a lot of people will consider the issue of gay marriage when choosing sides. The way it’s been brought in, and subsequently used as a political tool, seems to have hacked off a lot of people who aren’t saying much, but the murmurings are there.
