Adopt, Don’t Shop! – and its Limitations

I’m a big fan of adopting rescues and very critical of most modern dog breeding.

The rescue part you might have already guessed from Socks being, well, a rescue dog. The goodest rescue dog.

front view of a tricolour small dog lying on the grass

©Giliell, all rights reserved

You might have also guessed that I’m not the biggest fan of most modern breeding, with varying degrees from hatred for puppy mill owners and people who breed dog breeds that are inherently unhealthy (German has the apt word “Qualzucht”, torture breeding) like Frenchies over people who breed dogs that are mostly not suitable as family dogs but being sold mostly to families (Border Collies and Aussies, anybody?) to being mildly critical to dog breeds that need more genetic diversity to counter (manageable) health issues but who aren’t getting any due to stupid breed standards.

I’m not going to call everybody who gets a puppy from a breeder names, just a lot of them, so let’s look at the arguments being made in favour of getting a purebred puppy and which ones hold up, but also at the arguments pro and against getting a rescue.

First of all some necessary information before we start talking past each other:

In Germany and other wealthier European countries there exist two parallel rescue systems. The first one is the local shelters, which are all no kill and will take in pets that are surrendered but also pets that are confiscated or abandoned. The second system is foreign adoption from Eastern and Southern European countries with low animal welfare and kill shelters. Both have their pros and cons and I’ll talk about those as well.

First argument: But I love breed X!

This is the one I can simultaneously understand the most but that also infuriates me the most. Dog breeds have been created over centuries for specific purposes with specific goals in mind, so members of a breed are very likely to not only share a look, but also certain character traits. I mean, who doesn’t love a Golden Retriever? There’s still reasons I don’t have one. So there are people who either want a dog for a specific purpose (i. e. hunting) and get a specific working breed, or there are people who are really looking into which breed fits their lives and get those and I can understand that.

Unfortunately, most people don’t look at all aspects of a breed, they look at the optics or the image. They get a breed that has been popularized by media or celebrities. Border Collies are one of those breeds, as are Dalamtians and most tragically, French Bulldogs. Fuck Lady Gaga, The Rock and the rest of them who popularized Frenchies. In Germany there’s a huge problem with breeds like the Belgian Malinois or Kangals: Both dogs that require experienced owners, lots of attention and real good training, not to mention the right living conditions. But people will watch three videos on the internet and go “awwwww” and now German shelters are full with them, as well as the assorted bully breeds. This is a huge problem and ties in with argument #2.

Second argument: They wouldn’t let me have a rescue dog!

Congrats, so you went to a backyeard breeder, because if you didn’t get a rescue, then no responsible breeder would sell you a puppy. Now, I know that some local shelters can be a bit over the top, but most are not, if you’re being reasonable as to which dog you want. And often there will be no dog available that fits you, because see #1. When we looked for a doggo, we also looked at the local shelters. They had German Shepherds, Malinois, Bullies, their mixes and a very sick pug. These dogs need knowledgeable people and nobody should have given me any of them, should I have applied. Which I didn’t. I went to a (reputable) rescue organisation and yeah, me, a first time dog owner full time working person got a dog. But one that fit our lives.

Third argument: I don’t want a traumatised dog /surprise box that is a rescue

Another argument that holds a bit of truth, but not much. Just like those dogs from the local shelters who are often already demanding breeds now with added issues from bad keeping, a lot of foreign rescue dogs come with trauma and trust issues. Those dogs also need expereinced people willing to work with them and put up with a lot (anybody remember Caine’s half coyote who would keep its bones in her bed? Not everybody’s cup of tea) and should also only be given to such people. Me, I’m not that people. I still found a rescue dog. Socks isn’t the biggest fan of tall men and strangers, but he’s affectionate, smart and very easy to train. It’s also not like every individual of a certain breed will be a perfect example of that breed. The one dog in our doggy school group that had the most issues and the least progress was a Golden Retriever.

Also, as I mentioned, people go for looks and images, but not actual breed behaviour. They get a Dachshund (you shouldn’t) and are surprised that it’s stubborn as fuck. Those doggos were bred to hunt badgers, alone in the dark. They do their own thinking. They get any kind of shepherd and are surprised the dog is herding and nipping. They get a lifestock guarding dog and are surprised that their dog doesn’t listen at all because for centuries those dogs have stayed with the herds without seeing a human for days.

That’s also something you have to take into account when getting a rescue mutt. Pay attention to the telltale guarding dog looks. So yeah, getting arescue requires you to do some thinking and careful choice of dog, but so does getting a purebred.

Fourth argument: I want a dog that was socialised well

It’s one I will let somewhat stand. A good breeder does a lot of work to make sure the puppies have a good start. They will be carefully introduced to stimuli, socialised, and will have some basic connection to humans. It certainly gives you a headstart with your dog. But it also doesn’t mean that you don’t have to work with the dog. As mentioned before, Socks and I go to doggy school. We’re in a group of dogs the same age and have been for the last 6 months. At the start, Socks had some catching up to do, since he didn’t have any training before he was adopted, and was also new to a lot of situations. But by now he has well caught up and is often ahead of the well socialised purebred classmates.

Fifth argument: Good breeders health test their dogs

Another two sided sword. Yeah, good breeders will health test their dogs to some extent before breeding them, but this opens a whole can of worms: Breed specific health issues, fucked up breed standards and genetic diversity. Many popular breeds have so little genetic diversity that all individuals are genetically as close as siblings or first cousins. It’s no use that their pedigree shows no direct inbreeding, they simply don’t have a large enough gene pool. Now taking out individuals with certain traits will further decrease the gene pool. This is why many breeds simply cannot remove certain unhealthy traits by no longer breeding those individuals. Apart from creating more suffering, it’s not possible to create healthier Frenchies by breeding longer snout individuals. It’s only now that we’re beginning to understand how certain things are related. Did you know that white coats and being deaf is related? For decades breed standards demanded a colour that also carried a high risk of deafness, but now breeds like Dalmatians have lost all other healthy allels. Back to the Goldie? I love them, but their hips are fucked. People joke about them eating everything, but just like Labradors most of them are missing the gene that regulates hunger and being full. While the assorted retrievers are not among them, honestly a lot of breeds simply need to go. The giants and the teacups, the brachycephalic dogs, and many many more. No amount of health testing will solve issues that are breed standards, especially if there isn’t a viable population without those issues. They would need to cross in other dogs nad that will never happen. Not only would it change their beloved standards, it would also mean investing money and not making it (that’s also the reason why doodles won’t become breeds).

Does a rescue guarantee a healthy dog? Nope. After all, their gene pool is the same fucked up mess, you’re just combining more. Our neighbours have a lovely rescue mutt who’s going blind. White coat, blue eyes, high probability. But it means that you’re not supporting a sick system.

Sixth (and for now final) argument: Foreign rescues are just puppy mills in disguise / they clogg local shelters 

Again one that has some truth to it. With foreign rescues being pretty popular, it attracts two types of unethical players.

Type one: The puppy mill. They always have cute puppies for adoption. They’re all mutts, so nobody suspects a puppy mill at first and they will tell you some sob story. A good rescue will have all kinds of dogs. They will occasionally have puppies, but you will also be able to get the spayed momma dog after the puppies are weaned.

Type two: The Good Samaritians Without a Plan. While Type one is in for the money, these people are in for feeling good themselves. Their goal is to get as many dogs out as possible without actually making sure that those dogs go to good homes. They will often allow people to adopt just after having seen a cute pic and heard a sorry tale, they will not check before, they will brush over issues and have absolutely no plan B. They do significantly contribute to the local shelter population.

If you ever look into getting a foreign rescue, these are the signs of a reputable organisation:

-There are dogs you cannot adopt. Not all dogs will adjust to a family life. Some are too traumatised to ever trust humans again. You can sponsor them, and they get to live the rest of their days in peace, fed, safe and cared for.

-They work locally. That’s like the biggest point. A good rescue organisation wants to make itself unnecessary. They offer spaying and neutering for the locals, they educate people on how to prevent unwanted litters, thus reducing the number of animals that need them.

-They have foster places where the dogs can adjust and you can get to know the dogs. While they may also do direct adoptions where you get the dog without it having lived with a foster family, they do so responsibly

-They check on you and won’t just give you a dog. The foster lady we got Socks from is a friend of my friends, so we already had a good reputation by hearsay, but she still had us fill out all the forms, talked about problems that may happen and checked us at home to see if our data was correct, the same way a good breeder does.

-They have a plan B. Even with a careful adoption process, things can go wahoonie-shaped. A goood rescue still feels responsible for the dog. Our contract states that we cannot sell or surrender the dog without their approval, if they disapprove the dog goes back to them. That’s an important point. It also means that they’re a lot more careful about whom they give which dog. They want things to work, because otherwise the dog becomes their problem again.

-They never apply emotional pressure to make you adopt a dog. No sob story. No “if you don’t take it, it will be killed”. They may ask for your money (I swear, in the end you pay as much for the rescue as you pay for a purebred, just that you pay a little every once in a while), but never for you to adopt more dogs than you can handle.

-They are honest. If you llok at their website and find dogs with trust issues, there’s a good chance that you can also get one without trust issues and not one who is deeply traumatised but has been lied about.

 

As you see, I’m not at all unsympathetic to people who responsibly get a certain breed, and I won’t claim that rescue dogs are for everybody, but I’m so sick and tired of those bullshit arguments.

Teacher’s Corner The integrative power of small towns

As you may remember, I now teach at a comprehensive close to home. This has many advantages, but it also means that my private life isn’t as private anymore. From running into parents while shopping over meeting students at the gym before it burned down (I do have a solid alibi for that one) to them playing trick and treat at my house at Halloween. Recently a kid asked me if I lived close to place where I actually live. She’d seen me walking the dog. She lives in a social housing estate on the other side of the street while I live in a street of nice semi detached private family homes.

This got me thinking how in small towns there is pretty little social segregation. Sure, our social backgrounds are different, we still live in the same nice area. The whole town has one primary school where all children of all backgrounds meet. Sure, you can then send your kid to the more exclusive secondary schools after that, but even then they will meet all the other kids at the sports club*. Not even horse riding is safe and we don’t have a golf club.

In big cities, the social housing estate or a poor part of town will have enough kids to fill their own primary school and so will the wealthier parts of the city. Here? No chance. And while there is prejudice against people living in street x, even the snobbiest parents have little chance to keep their kids from knowing “those kids”.

 

*Unlike in many other places, in Germany children don’t do extracurriculars at school but in public sports clubs where they live. If you play football, you don’t play with your schoolmates, but the kids from your town / village and might meet your schoolfriend at a match, playing against each other.

 

A Masterclass of Whataboutism

Another YouTuber that I have unsubscribed from is Second Thought. It was after his latest video We Need To Talk About “Authoritarianism”. I am not going to link to that video because it is a piece of shit and it does not deserve views. If you are interested in its contents, I recommend Vaush’s critique (see further after I have my say).

What Second Thought is doing in this video is nothing but an elaborate form of the nonsensical syllogism (The USA = BAD)=>(The USSR = GOOD). I hate this shit with a burning passion because I have actually either first-hand or at most second-hand experience with many of the things this world-class twit talks about. I mean, however bad the US police is, however bad the US surveillance state is, it really cannot hold a candle to what the USSR has done or what China is doing.

To anyone reading this who might not be a regular on this blog, I have a whole series of blog posts “Behind the Iron Curtain” where I write about my experience with the regime. I was 13 when it collapsed, and the regime was mellowing towards the end, so I did not personally witness the worst things. Yet there is still one visceral fear that people had that I do remember personally, a fear that I feel confident is not widely spread in the USA. The fear that when kids say something wrong in front of the wrong person, their parents can go to jail. My father was in the communist party and even I was told that I must not say some things in public because it could put someone in my family in jail. Children were taught to say one thing at home and a different thing in public. Even though the time of the 1968 invasion was long in the past and the worst of the totalitarian shit did not happen anymore, people still feared to criticize the regime. One day my father came home from a local party assembly and he told my mother “I might go to jail, we will see”. And why did he fear that? Did he steal something? Did he kill anybody? No, he did what he was, in principle, supposed to do at the assembly. He raised valid points of critique at the wealthy oligarchs in the party leadership and said that they should actually listen to what people really need and want and do something about it. Luckily for him, it was towards the end of the regime and as I said, it was starting to mellow a bit at that point. Still, that he even considered that he might be going to jail, despite being a lifelong communist, says a lot about the regime and the culture of fear it fomented.

And now this sheltered, privileged WEIRD WASP asshole is equivocating between the USA and the USSR as if they were both similarly totalitarian but somehow when the USA does a thing, it is bad, but when the USSR did it, it somehow, magically, becomes good and necessary! WTF? I must have been blind to not spot the signs in his previous videos, but this is what here, in the former USSR sphere of influence, gives leftists a bad name. It is already difficult to explain to even highly educated people that the things that were bad about the previous regime were not socialism, but authoritarian oppression. Assholes like this one make it really easy for opponents of socialism here, because he actually says, albeit covertly and obliquely, what those opponents preach – that socialism is inextricably linked with authoritarianism. (I wrote about this in the Behind the Iron Curtain series too -click-).

Further, this clueless clown is using his public platform to critique (mostly validly!) the regime in which he lives and at the same time sings praises of a regime that would have him at best imprisoned and at worst outright killed for criticizing it in even much, much milder form! And he totally fails to spot the irony when he accuses the USA, where he lives, of being worse.

Alas, it is apparent now that he is a tankie and a leftie American exceptionalist I have no track with either. Saying that if the USA does a thing it is bad but when the USSR does the very same thing it is good and necessary is not a moral stance. And to top it off, I have also learned that he actually condoned Hamas attack on Israeli civilians, again applying the same “logic” – when Israel does a bad thing, thing bad, when Hamas does the same thing, thing suddenly good. The reality which this fucking piece of amoral shitstain fails to grasp is that sometimes it really is possible that both sides in a conflict can be bad and differing only in a degree. His political principle is not to help the common people around the world, his main political principle is the USA bashing and the USSR glorifying. That is not coherent leftist policy, that is edgy leftist posing. He can do that without me watching his videos.

If you have spare time, you can listen to Vaush’s excellent rebuttal. It is rather long, I listened to it whilst cleaning my room today.

I do not like everything about Vaush, for example, he uses way too many ableist slurs and comes off as arrogant, but the essence of what he is saying here is IMO sound.

The Story of A Succesfull Medium Sized Company

Imagine a small metalworking business that started shortly after WW1 somewhere in Germany. Metalworking, as in making forms for the ceramics industry that the little town is known for. The business grew in the time between wars, it survived WW2 and continued to grow well into the second half of the 20th century. At that time a new market for metal forms began to emerge – injection moulded plastics. The family owning the business latched onto that new market in an ideal way that capitalism is portrayed, by investing in developing new know-how to give them an edge over the competition. And they succeeded, making a name for their company in the business that became a synonym for high quality, albeit at a high price. As a regional employer, the family business had a good reputation too, with some people literally working there from finishing school until retirement and earning wages well above average. It was said that at the end of each fiscal year, the door opened for new modern machinery and a new workforce.

Then came an international giant housed in the USA, interested in the know-how. And since the family no longer had an interest in actually running the business, they sold it to this giant wholesale. The plant became a part of a branch in this corporation, a branch that specialized in injection moulding. Things did not go well from that time on, although it still took decades to become really apparent. For one the prices for customers remained high, but the quality began to drop due to cut corners.

The international corporation had no real interest in keeping the know-how and employment local, despite saying the opposite. The wages were undercut by increasing working hours so in real terms they de-facto stagnated. It was still worth it to work at the company, but it no longer was a job to envy someone and some people started to leave – and as it is, the best ones were the first to go. Attempts to unionize to counter the slow squeeze were crushed by threats to ship the jobs to Eastern Europe and China, something that should not work in Germany but it did. And then the jobs were slowly shipped to Eastern Europe and China anyway. The know-how however is not so easily transferred, and since replacement workforce was no longer educated on-site and the older force started to retire or just leave, it started to get lost.

Then came a worldwide recession. The corporation started to cut corners again by firing thousands of employees worldwide, all the while the CEO and shareholders were despite the crisis earning more than enough money to keep these people employed and still be filthy rich (the CEO alone earned more than 150 (corrected typo) times more than an ordinary employee). The employees finally got fed up and unionized, for what it was worth. As it turns out, it was too late.

After the recession was over, the whole corporation was bought by another international corporation, this time housed in Germany. Things started to look brighter for a very short time since German corporations actually treat their employees better than American ones. But optimism did not last long. The purchase was driven by a desire to own one specific part of the corporation, and injection moulding and manufacture of metal molds were not it. So to offset the immense costs of the purchase, the whole branch was sold off, to another international company housed in the USA.

The new corporate owners swore day and night that they really, really wanted to keep the local businesses and nobody needed to fear for their jobs. There were even articles in local newspapers about how they project to grow the locally employed workforce at the plant I am writing about to more than double, over 400. Yet somehow the number of employees and contracts for this specific plant continued to only go down all the way to 60. At 60 the count stopped and the plant was finally closed, probably because with that few employees it was no longer feasible to actually make money in this business, not to mention that the know-how it took to assemble for half a century was at this point irrevocably lost.

Imagine all that. I do not need to imagine it, I lived through a significant part of the end of that story and I just a few days ago learned how it ended.

No, Sabine, Capitalism Is Not Good and Your Explanation Is Nonsense.

After her misguided video about trans people, I was still willing to remain subscribed because I interpreted it more as poorly thought out than malicious, but the latest video by Sabine Hossenfelder made me unsubscribe, it is garbage and I do not want to waste my finite time on her. She might be an accomplished and competent physicist, but outside of that she talks bull – and I am not all that interested in astrophysics.

It is not garbage in the sense that it contains all invalid information (AFAIK). Still, it is definitively garbage in the sense that the conclusion – as summed up in the title – does not follow from what is being presented. It is disappointingly intellectually lazy and poorly argued.

I am not going into an in-depth analysis, I will try to be as concise as possible.

She is basically saying a bunch of good things that temporarily coincided with capitalism being the predominant economic system, declared a causal relationship between those good things and capitalism (completely failing to prove for example that it was capitalism that caused the Industrial Revolution and not the other way around), and called it a day. Several times she mentioned that there were and are bad things happening too, but she either handwaved them away with “that’s another story” or explained them away with “it means we are doing capitalism wrong”.

That is what made me so angry because the same line of reasoning can be used to prove that “socialism is good” too. In fact, that is exactly what some tankies are doing  – they point out the good things that happened in the USSR sphere of influence, handwave the genocides and human rights abuses away as “doing socialism wrong” and call it a day too. I am not willing to give them a pass for this spurious reasoning, and I am not going to give a pass for it to someone arguing against them either.

This line of reasoning could also be used to prove both that capitalism and socialism are bad, just by switching things that are talked about and that are waved away.

As someone who experienced firsthand both “badly performed” socialism and “badly performed” capitalism, I am of the opinion that both words are so broad that without excessive contextualizing they are both essentially meaningless.

This video is a study of cherrypicking.

The Ever Growing Absurdity of UK Knife Laws

Today I stumbled upon these two videos during my breakfast and I listened to them at 1,5 speed. At least this story has a good-ish end:

As an outsider, I have always considered UK laws about knives absurd. The same goes for similar daft laws that are active worldwide (like for example in the USA, Canada, Germany, Japan, and more). If laws were made based on evidence and logic, these would be significantly revised and reduced long ago because they are doing diddly squat to reduce actual crime. Instead, it seems that the UK is going in the opposite direction – more and more vague restrictions that do nothing to solve the problems, but make it easier for the police to harass innocent people.

Vague laws that are difficult to not break and/or that can be interpreted in a dozen of ways some of which can criminalize ordinary people on a whim are a staple of authoritarian regimes. What baffles me is that when it comes to knives, they appear to be a staple of even democratic-ish regimes. I completely do not understand it. And in the UK, allegedly, both of the ruling parties in their ludicrous non-representative voting system agree on this one thing and both parties propose these nonsensical laws when they are in power.

I am not in opposition to regulating carrying certain types of knives in certain situations or areas, although they are not necessary in my opinion. There is no causal link between the crime rate and the availability of any type of knife whatsoever. If there were, the Czech Republic would be absolutely riddled with knife crime. It is not. I was capable of only finding approximate statistics of stabbing deaths and CZ is not an outlier within the EU, there are countries with knife restrictions that are both above and below. I would argue that there is even no correlation between how restrictive knife laws are and how high is the knife-related crime rate, although both of these factors are difficult to quantify with any degree of accuracy.

Inventing ever more ridiculous knife laws as a response to rising crime in some areas (allegedly in the case of the UK to rising knife crime in gang fights in London) is pure “performative governing”, i.e. one that pretends to do something to address a problem without actually doing something that actually would effectively address the said problem.

The Worst Thing Russia Has Done to Socialism

I had recently a get-together with schoolmates from university. Not with my friends from university, who are a diverse bunch of different ages and professions and with whom I meet usually once/twice a year on a hiking trip or New-year celebrations, but with people with whom I studied chemistry. It was a totally depressing experience for multiple reasons, some deeply personal that I am not inclined to discuss with anyone, ever, and some that I shall discuss in this post.

The discussion did get slightly political and at that point I realized that I am the only person in the group who does not think that “socialism” is a dirty word describing an inherently ill-thought-out, dysfunctional, and/or evil political system. Everyone else expressed more or less libertarian or conservative-leaning opinions, although I must say not to the extreme sociopathic extent that can be observed in the US political discourse. After a short debate, I have inadvertently killed it outright with what in retrospect was the nuclear option, although it was not intended as such.

I said, “Correct me if I am wrong, but at this table, I am the only person who actually has worked in the private sector his whole life and is not and was not employed by the state in an in-principle socialistic enterprise.”

What followed was a short awkward silence, re-seating, and a permanent change of subject.

You see, everyone else seated at that table was either an accomplished scientist, a physician, a teacher, a high-ranking military officer, or (usually) a combination of these. Education is free of charge up to a university for anyone willing to take it, even foreigners residing in CZ, as long as they can take the classes in the Czech language. Healthcare is free of charge at the point of receiving, with healthcare insurance being mandatory for the employed and paid for by the state for the unemployed (it could be better by forgoing the middle-man in the form of insurance companies IMO). And the military is entirely financed by our taxes and owned by the state, as it always was.

So, why do these highly educated, highly intelligent, and oftentimes highly accomplished people think that socialism is inherently bad? Probably for the same reasons that I, too, thought so until some fifteen-twelve years ago.

We are the generation who still remembers the times behind the Iron Curtain. And although we did not experience the most brutal phases of that regime, it was still pretty bad at the time we were children. But when I tried to explain that what was wrong with that regime was not the “socialism” part but the “totalitarianism” part, it fell on deaf ears. I have managed to disconnect these terms in my mind, they have not. To them, the association between the two is too strong and they are seen as inherently intertwined.

And this might be, paradoxically, exactly because they never worked for a private company that habitually abuses its employees. They never experienced the disproportionate difference in negotiating power between a non-unionized workforce and an international corporation that feels laws need not be obeyed, if they exist at all in the first place. They had no first-hand experience with high-ranking managers of such corporations and thus did not get insight into their thinking (heck, I even met some who apparently thought that even laws of physics can be circumvented, although in reality that was possibly just a psychological pressure to force employees to commit fraud with plausible deniability). In short, they lack the experience that would show them that not all the propaganda we were shown as children were lies, and not everything that Marx wrote was misguided –  a lot of it was, unfortunately, very spot-on and true.

And for this perception of socialism being inherently and unavoidably totalitarian, I blame Russia and the version of socialism it imposed by force on the rest of Eastern Europe. I have already written about this in part 35 of my “Behind the Iron Curtain” series. Only I did not think that this legacy survives that strongly in my generation. Even after the literal Iron Curtain fell, apparently people keep its bad legacy in their minds still. And my conclusion that such mental barriers might be more difficult to remove seems to be, unfortunately, supported by my recent experience with my schoolmates from university.

Crypto, Scams & Ableism

Since the Scam Banking Fraud fiasco in the crypto world, I have looked a bit more into cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Not much, just to satisfy some curiosity. That curiosity brought me to the YouTube channel Coffezilla (which I recommend). And today I would like to mention a bit unsavory and unfortunate thing that crops up in just about every discussion about cryptocurrencies and associated scams – comments along the lines of “People this stupid deserve to be scammed”. Sentiments akin to this are very prevalent and I must say, I disagree with them now although I do have an inner tendency towards such thinking too and I have to reason myself out of it in some specific cases and I would possibly say these things too about twenty-five years ago.

Why is that? I mean, why is this sentiment so prevalent? I do not know of course, but I can speculate.

I think it is in part because a lot of people in the west are conditioned to believe in the Just World Fallacy. In most fiction, the villains get their just desserts and the good guys more often than not win. We are taught that hard and honest work is rewarded and that crime does not pay. This cultural bias is everywhere and unavoidable. And it is inherently ableist because no matter how difficult it is to actually meaningfully measure intelligence, it does exist, it does wary among people and some people are innately, with no fault of their own, less capable and thus more susceptible to being hoodwinked. There is a reason why so many e-mail scams have appallingly bad grammar and spelling and why so many phone scams are targeting elderly people.

It is not all though. Another part of this is in my opinion that a lot of people enjoy the warmth of a slightly smug feeling of being superior to someone in some way. “Haha, how those poor suckers could fall for THAT.” This is understandable to some degree in insecure people who are still finding themselves but not appropriate for well-adjusted adults. As for myself, today I have plenty of personal experiences to put me down from my pedestal whenever I feel like climbing one – the most recently my tribulations of obstinately plugging the wrong cable into the wrong hole for two days and wondering why things do not work. I know I am not completely stupid and still, my brain sometimes does things that a duckling would deem daft. Not to mention the GIGO principle, which can lead even the best of the best minds astray.

And even when one knows that the world is not just and that smart people can do daft things for a variety of reasons, I guess many people also know at least someone who is definitively willfully stupid and simply cannot be reasoned with because they refuse reason on principle. The most egregious examples of these people are all those creationists, flat-earthers and Q-anoninsts out there. But is it OK to say that someone deserved to be scammed because they ignored warnings and information given to them?

I still don’t think so. If they really were given credible warnings and ignored them for example, then they are to be blamed at least in part for their misfortune in such a case, but they do not deserve it. Saying that someone deserves to be scammed implies that scamming is an act of justice.

It is not. It is an act of malice, a betrayal of trust, and nothing is gained by it. The victim may become less naive and trusting as a result, but that is only a good thing in a society where there are scammers. And whilst being naive and trusting is unwise in our world, it is not malicious or harmful, and punishing it thus makes no sense. A scammer deserves to be judged and locked up. A scammee deserves help.

I’ve Been Robbed

Maybe “robbed” is not the exact word, because no violence or threat thereof was used, but I’ve not been pickpocketed either. I have definitively had money stolen from my person.

When I went shopping with my parents today, I was approached by a man who pretended to want to exchange a 2,-€ coin for smaller ones to be able to take the shopping cart. I have looked into my purse and I told him that I do not have the exchange, at which point he started approaching me and touching my purse as if trying to search for the change himself. I batted his hand away several times and I told him to not touch it but he did not understand Czech and he also either did not understand or (possibly) pretended to not understand Russian and German too, despite telling me that he is German. During this exchange, an elderly lady approached and told me that he stole money from her under the same pretense moment ago and that she has just found out when she saw him trying the same thing on me. At which point I closed my purse and endeavored to call the police.

He of course scarpered. I did not attempt to hold him up, I do not think that would be very wise.

Only when talking to the police later and explaining what happened I have found out that despite my attempts at keeping him away, he did successfully manage to snatch some bills from my purse, over 150,-€ worth. I never carry big amounts of cash and I would not have even this much if I had not needed some cash the previous week, of which this was just the rest. I might not have even noticed the theft at all, but I keep € and crown bills separately and the € compartment of my purse was suddenly completely empty.

Any act of kindness won’t go unpunished. The most jarring result of this is that I shall be more wary of panhandlers and generally of anyone asking for any help. I do not feel quite well right now. A shitty human just made me into a worse human too. That pisses me off more than the loss of money.

Children, Accessibility, and being an entitled ass

This post was brought to you by my brother in law, so it might get ranty.

Let me preface this by saying that I absolutely support people being child free. Honestly, I don’t know anybody working in education and with families who isn’t a strong supporter of contraception, family planning and thinking long and hard about whether being a parent is something that you should do.

I’m also the first to admit that children are not smallish adults, but have certain characteristics beyond age and height that make them different from adults. It’s something that makes people who like working with children enjoy their company, it is something that makes parenting an amazing journey, and it’s something that makes others not enjoy either of these things.

Nevertheless, children are people, they are part of society, they should have their needs met and accommodated. There are very few spaces where children don’t belong, and those are for their own protection, say a Shisha bar. For the rest of spaces: think about how this space can be made child friendly. Many restaurants already do this: they have a children’s menu, they have play corners (one of our favourite Asian buffet places has a whole room), and if you think about it, it’s a smart move, because children will only grow up to value a sit down meal in a nice restaurant if they learn how to behave there while young.

But there’s another level of accessibility and that is for parents. We’ve talked about this before: If you organise something, say a sceptics’ conference or something like that, think about how you can provide childcare. Because if not, overwhelmingly women will be unable to attend your event. I mean, you can go full Sam Harris and blame your sciency manly vibes that scare off fragile little damsels, or you can ask yourselves: what can we do to make sure parents can attend?

Which gets me to a different level, which is private life. And of course you get to set all sorts of boundaries  here, but you also have to live with the consequences. There’s a plethora of “Am I The Asshole” posts on Reddit where somebody decides to have a child free wedding and is then super offended when the parents in their lives decline, especially when it’s their siblings. Sorry, but weddings are expensive, and getting childcare on top of it costs a lot of money, the people who are usually watching your children are probably at the wedding as well (Hey mum, could you watch our kids while we go to your daughter’s wedding?), not to mention trusting some babysitter enough to leave them for several days. And, yes, let’s face it, parents do take this shit personal. Their children are pretty important people in their lives and if you frame their existence as a complete nuisance and burden to everyone who is even just in the same room, they might decide that your friendship isn’t worth it.

Which gets me to my brother in law. He is and has always been super entitled. He’s 11 years younger than my husband and didn’t grow up so much with a sibling than with a third overindulgent parent and he’s used to the whole family catering to him. The last two times he moved, my husband of course helped him, which meant driving a few hundred kilometres each time. I can’t remember even being reimbursed for the fuel, and I especially can’t remember him lifting a single finger when we moved. Because those are services he thinks his family has to provide.

Now he has invited us to his birthday. Come on, Giliell, you say. You said he was super entitled, but now he’s inviting you, that’s nice! Only… Well, remember the couple of hundred kilometres? Going there means spending the night. Spending the night means getting hotel rooms. For the great honour of being invited to his birthday he already expects us to spend a few hundred €. He lives in the Black Forest. Hotels ain’t cheap there. And well, we would have coughed that up, if not for the original subject of this post. We’re still in a raging global pandemic, the little one isn’t vaccinated yet, and sleeping in a hotel with her is totally out of the question for us. So we asked him, could the children stay with him for the night? I mean, his flat is bigger than our house, he has a guest room where his parents are staying, and a living room, and a studio, and a fucking library, but he doesn’t have space for his nieces. He really doesn’t want them to be in his space, because you never know. It’s not like we asked them to watch two toddlers who would paint the walls with his acrylics, or tear the pages from his books. They’re two well behaved teens who basically just want the Wifi password and food. Also his parents, who are watching the kids regularly, are also there. But nooooo, he’s afraid for his precious belongings. Which is totally reasonable in his eyes. Yet our fear for our kid is totally irrational, you know? Guess who’s currently being made out to be unreasonable…

Behind the Iron Curtain part 37- 1st of May

These are my recollections of a life behind the iron curtain. I do not aim to give perfect and objective evaluation of anything, but to share my personal experiences and memories. It will explain why I just cannot get misty eyed over some ideas on the political left and why I loathe many ideas on the right.

One of the central dogmas of the regime was the notion that everything is for the common workers, the laborers, and peasants. Those were deemed not only essential for the proper running of society (not wrong), sometimes to ignoring that intellectuals actually have useful functions too.

The International Worker’s Day was a state holiday, and we were taught at school a bit about the history behind it. Not much, as far as I remember, but the actual reasons behind the holiday were discussed and even in hindsight, most of them were valid then and are valid now.

However, as it is with authoritarian regimes, the good came with the sidedish of the bad and sometimes downright ugly.

1st of May was an official day off of work and school, so officially people were free to spend that day as they choose. In every town and moderately sized village, there was a procession and a speech by some party representative, but attending was not compulsory. In the sense “it is voluntary, but you have to go”.

I did not like the processions that much, because I do not like crowds and loud noises. But I did attend. I do not remember much, only two experiences come to mind at least somewhat vividly.

The first experience was an extremely strong feeling of embarrassment when our local firefighter truck was driving along the procession, shouting propaganda and encouragements for cheering from loudspeakers. I did not like it and even to my socially stunted mind, it was clear that nobody else liked it either. If the day is so glorious, if our country is so great and the party so beloved, why on earth do the people need to be egged on to cheer and shout slogans by an obnoxious a-hole with a megaphone? I did not put it in those words exactly, but those were my feelings.

The second experience was the chastising of one of my classmates who was not a member of Pionýr and whose family did not attend the parade one year. In a small town, this did not go unnoticed and our class teacher did call him out publicly during class for this. There were no other repercussions other than the public shaming, but I did not enjoy seeing that at all.

In both of these instances, I have subconsciously sensed a deep disconnect between the messaging we get and the true state of affairs. That cognitive dissonance was not particularly strong, but it was there and it was nagging. When the regime finally fell, a lot of the things that did not make sense to me as a child started to make sense later.

Later in life, I was surprised that much of what I have been taught to see as “Capitalist countries” also celebrate the holiday, oftentimes including the parades and speeches, but without the voluntary compulsory nature. I am afraid that in my mind this holiday will always be tainted, as it is in the minds of many of my generation.

So, Howsda Brexit Goin’?

The UK is supposed to leave the EU finally and definitively at the end of this year and as each week some deadline is being set only to be ignored/postponed again, it is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. I will not pretend to be very well informed on the negotiations and everything with them, but I would like to shortly muse about one phenomenon that I see online.

Before and after the vote for Brexit, the Brexiteers with Farage, Rees-Mogg, Johnson and similar upper-class twits were all saying how easy it will be to close a comprehensive trade deal with EU and how after being freed from the EU restrictions they will be able to also negotiate much, much, much better deals with everyone else. After all, the UK is the fifth-largest economy in the world and the EU needs the UK much more than vice versa, so negotiations will be easy because the UK holds the longer end of the stick, etc. And even if no-deal happens, no biggie, cuz everyone else will clamor to fill the gap in business with the EU.

So far the UK has closed several trade deals with other countries, and most of them are just copy-pasted trade deals that those countries have with the EU. The trade deal with Japan is worse (for the UK) than the one the EU has. And the trade deal with the EU does not go so well so far. In fact, it seems that hard Brexit is creeping ever closer.

And the rhetoric of online brexiteer experts is suddenly concentrated on how the EU bullies the UK and tries to punish it for leaving. The EU is the bad guy, of course, refusing to back down and give the UK everything it wants. To which I would say – so what?

Those brexiteers who will inevitably blame the EU for any negatives that befall the UK due to this mess seem to me to fail to grasp a blatant contradiction in their own reasoning. Not only in claiming that the UK is bullied by someone who, supposedly, was supposed to have a weaker negotiating position. But also they are often hardline libertarian capitalists, for whom negotiating from the position of power with the intent of screwing the other party completely over is a good thing. So by their own logic, even if the EU is the bully (which I do not think it is) and is just trying to screw the UK over to teach it a lesson (which I do not think it is) they should just admire the business acumen and negotiating strength of the EU instead of whining how persecuted they are, shouldn’t they?

It looks like the British Brexiteers do show here one common characteristic of conservatives the world over. They fire the sweepers, then the drop banana peels on the floor willy-nilly and when they inevitably slip and fall flat on their arse, they blame everyone else.