The path from…
“All we want is to be free to love”
to…
“Bake the cake or go to jail, motherfcker!”
is becoming quicker and more direct.
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Samizdata quote of the daySamizdata Illuminatus (Arkham, Massachusetts) · Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Culture Wars · Slogans & Quotations July 19th, 2021 |
 36 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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Just wait until that slope gets even slipperier. The cake bakers and everyone else will be assigned monthly quotas to ensure wokeness. Only white owned businesses, of course, due to CRT mandates.
I disagree with this SQOTD.
The battle for the right to love whoever you wish has been won BOTH legally and culturally in USA. Gay marriage is the law of the land thanks to SCOTUS. In 80% of the country NOBODY gives a flying f*ck if you are gay or straight or unicorn. And in 20% of the country very few people give a shi* if you are gay or straight or unicorn.
The leftists I know do not EVEN PRETEND that there is any real resistance in America to the idea that people should “be free to love” whoever they wish – free both legally and culturally.
Therefore, there is no path from “All we want is to be free to love” to… “Bake the cake or go to jail, motherfcker!” because there is no need to proclaim the former.
Bake the cake or go to jail, motherfcker! is where it BEGINS now.
Wrong. This is a decision of the Scotus that cake-bakers could not be forced to make cakes that conflicted with their beliefs. A homosexual couple had tried to force a shop to make a cake with homosexual themes, and lost. I am not sure that they would lose in Australia, but in America these homo-thugs did lose.
NG, the cake-eaters lost that first case at the SC on very narrow grounds. They came back with some better planning (with a view towards exactly how narrow those grounds were in the first case), tried a few more cake orders, and eventually got the state court ruling they were looking for. How many times can this baker afford to to back to the SCOTUS?
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/17/1007594289/baker-fined-for-refusing-to-make-cake-for-transgender-woman
I would have thought that the Cato blog would have mentioned this. What might we do to reverse this?
As I said in an earlier thread on this topic, it’s far past time for the humans to stop giving the orcs credit for sincerity.
They are vicious and predatory. They want to take what the bakers have, and grind their boots in the bakers (and all of our) faces.
So don’t play the game. Malicious compliance is the answer. It only feels dishonest until you consider the motivations and intentions of the gay-cake demanders. And then it feels like justice.
Bake the cake; use salt where the recipe calls for sugar. Use alum where it calls for baking soda. Don’t forget to mix for an extra hour for that good chewy texture. Charge a premium for your labor.
The orcs can have all the f*cking smell-the-glove cakes they want. Hope they enjoy the flavor.
What I don’t understand is Farcebook etc. can deny Trump, and others, access to their platform as they can’t be forced to take a customer they disagree with but this poor cake maker doesn’t have that same right.
I agree with Ferox, although not all the way, they should bake a very expensive cake with inferior ingredients that taste horrible.
They will continue to persecute these people until they are destroyed.
The gay, and other letters, lobby do not just want legal protections: they want your personal, moral approval. They don’t just want civil unions, they want Marriage, in The Church, and the blessing of the Pope…and your blessing. And most of them are fine with having the State force this. It’s scary to think how far they will go to force me to approve, even admire, their choices.
Ferox (July 19, 2021 at 10:28 am):
1) The same Christian beliefs that prevent the baker from just caving in for a quiet life may stand in the way of his baking a malicious cake. (All that “love your enemies, do good to those that hate you” stuff.)
2) I’m sure “love your enemies, do good to those that hate you” seems revoltingly perverse to the weirdo who gets off on ordering these cakes, who will therefore not be trusting enough to eat any of them if ever delivered.
3) All that said, I wonder whether there can be a (parallel to free speech) legal defence of claiming it is rational for the server to judge the customer’s order insincere: “I refused because I knew the order did not truly reflect a desire to eat the cake if I had made it.”
Yeah, could be. Hadn’t thought of that, honestly. But any value system which requires its adherents to bare their necks to the swords of their enemies is going to cease to exist when a sufficiently malicious enemy comes along.
And Christians used to be pretty vigorous in their own defense, once upon a time. Which suggests to me that there is nothing in the religion which axiomatically forbids self-defense in time of need.
This might be one of those times.
Niall:
As you say, I doubt the gay nazis who order these cakes ever intend to eat them. That is hardly the point.
The baker is defending himself and his beliefs – more vigorously than certain church dignitaries I could think of – and if his persecutor came to his shop and tried to kill him, I think the baker would likely defend himself physically. But, compared to (for example) Mohammed’s “kill them wherever you can find them” and use of double agents to assassinate enemies or trick them into killing each other, etc., Christianity (even in the merely ordinary every-day practice of those who are really not looking to spend their time hanging on a cross or similar) is less encouraging to ‘preemptive retaliation’ in general, and has no doctrine of taqqiya in particular so is likewise less encouraging of ‘malicious compliance’.
As the cake won’t be eaten, making a foul one achieves nothing. The symbol of the cake being baked would be trumpeted to people who cannot smell it, let alone taste it – and that is true even if its foulness would not let the baker’s foul persecutor present a fresh suit alleging discriminatory performance. By contrast, the baker may win his second supreme court case – and if he does not, what then? Suppose, just for the sake of argument, he continues the passive resistance path, only now without a court case in prospect.
How do they make him bake his cake? Do they just shut down his shop? What if he web-funds distributing free cakes to the poor and needy (including maybe some poor and needy LGBTQUERTYs, but with no affirming message, just some quote about Christian charity)? Do the Colorado authorities arrest him – at a time when these lefties are un-arresting some less harmless people?
There are of course other ways of resisting and I’m not saying a word against them. But if the baker discovers that his many friends and sympathisers (people like us, for example) are, in effect, resisting passively – blog posts and comments, some funding, but very much not physically there on his doorstep with their ‘screwed to the sticking place’ courage when a bunch of Coloradan activist or state goons turn up – then passive resistance could be the most practicable form of resistance as well as the kind most agreeable to his principles. If the baker has the courage for it (courage indeed – I will not blame him if he no more follows my suggestions than Ferox’s to bake a foul cake) then he could chain his persecutors to this cause.
As for any alternative path, well, this is one issue, the stolen election is another wider one, there are the parents whose kids are being taught CRT, and the lockdown czar who funded the gain-of-function research, etc. I’m not in the US – but I don’t see the cake being the spark.
Just my £0.02.
The left pretends to like small business and hate Big Business – but their behaviour indicates a different agenda.
Everything the left does is about crushing small business – from taking them to court over “Wokeness”, to closing them down with lockdowns (using Covid as an excuse – or some other excuse).
And the left supports “Woke” Big Business Corporations controlling the economy – via shutting independent business enterprises and by handing out vast sums of Credit Money (hint – a ordinary baker would not be welcome at the Federal Reserve.
But there is still a division – the Woke Big Business types (the World Economic Forum types – with the Public-Private Partnership Fascism) see a sort of Saint-Simon future with themselves in charge of the fuyture Collectivist system.
However, the Marxist left has a very different future in mind for the Big Business types (for the handful of vast Woke Corporations) – the moment they stop being useful.
It is much less difficult to nationalise a handful of vast Corporations than thousands of individual business enterprises.
Concentration of the economy is not natural (as Marxism falsely claims) it is artificial – pushed by government regulations and funny money from the banking system (Cantillon Effect).
Then the hard left moves in on their “friends”.
“But the left really care about Gay people” or women, or “Trans”, or racial groups – or whatever.
No they really do not really care about them – it is all a tactic, it really is that cynical. The left USES these groups of people. The objective, as always, is Collectivism – the groups of people are just cannon fodder to be used for that objective.
Not true. In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission the court ruled the commission was unduly prejudiced against Christians in general and the cake shop in particular, i.e. they said and wrote what they were thinking instead of cloaking it all in the proper diversity cant. The court did not rule on the underlying merits of the case. This is the kind of punting SCOTUS does when it doesn’t want to rule on an issue until it gets a case which has an emotional tenor in the direction it wants to rule.
On that basis you can be pretty sure the court will eventually come down against the rights of businesses to refuse service on religious or ethical grounds. It’s just waiting for a case with a less sympathetic business owner. Last I heard there was a new “civil rights” complaint against the same cake shop for some trans thing or other. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission didn’t want to touch it, but a court fined the owner $500. I think that case wending its way through the courts now, and eventually we may find out if there remains in the US any vestigial right to free association.
Aside from christian principals, the baker would be foolish to put anything into the cake.
This is the benefit of media air-superiority: the cake buyers can run a multi-year harassment campaign while the cake-makers will feel the mailed fist of the law at first sign of resistance.
@Slowjoe
This is the benefit of media air-superiority: the cake buyers can run a multi-year harassment campaign while the cake-makers will feel the mailed fist of the law at first sign of resistance.
But isn’t this part of the utter brokenness of the US legal system? I think it is especially apparent with this particular baker who is being tortured by the legal system (though he is notorious enough to get outside help). But corporations from big to small are sued all the time on the most trivial grounds. And it is an assault that they are simply never made whole for. Anyone can sue anyone and cause them horrendous damage and there is little you can do about it except spend all your have until you are destitute. I remember one time I was involved in something that REALLY pissed of an exceptionally rich private individual, a business deal that went bad. And I remember sitting down with him to try to resolve things, and he said it to me directly “I have more money and lawyers than you will ever have, and and can destroy you and your family, take all you have and keep you in court for the rest of your life.” Thankfully he lost interest and went off to buy another private plane or something, but the terrifying fact is that he was right.
It is one of the reasons that medical care is so expensive and actually significantly increases your risk of going to the doctor. There is a famous case, Helling v Carey (on appeal), where a woman under 40 got glaucoma, which lead to blindness, and then sued her ophthalmologist for not detecting it during routine examination. The doctor’s defense was that standard practice at the time was to not test for glaucoma in people under 40. However, the case was found for the plantiff essentially saying “just because nobody else does it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have”, essentially substituting the judgement of the court for the judgement of the medical profession. Since this case, doctors test you for everything, a few times over to cover their butt. Not only does that drive up the cost of medical care it also endangers patients, since not all tests are benign (CT scans, for example, send ionizing, cancer causing, radiation through your body. Even an unnecessary blood draw can cause dangerous infections.)
In any adversarial system where one side has nothing to lose and the other side has a lot to gain you are going to end up with the kind of mess we have today. I just saw it again today in my facebook feed. Some bottom feeder lawyer is trawling for clients against a bunch of strip clubs. Apparently they were using fingerprint readers to check that their membership was valid (I hope they wiped the sensor between each use 😣) which, apparently, in doing so they violated some petty regulation somewhere. So the people whose fingerprints were so misbegotten can get a payoff of $5000, while, of course, the lawyers will get a pay off on multiple tens of millions of dollars. And some small business will be bankrupted for pay for some sleazy lawyer’s new Porsche. Maybe the strip club owner is sleazy as well, but I just mention it since it specifically popped up in my FB feed today.
The American legal system is a disaster because it introduces the ideas of market based systems (competition in lawyers for class action clients and trawling for minor infractions) against people who had no desire to participate in the market and have no benefit from doing so, but are forced to do so against their will. Part of the reason government and, by extension, the legal system works, is that it is so amazingly inefficient and ineffective that all that mass of untrammeled, raw, uncapped power is hamstrung by the bumbling idiots who wield it. The American legal system is so dangerous because lawyers are not bumbling idiots. They are in fact smart and use the power of the market to make the laws actually work, to greatly enrich themselves and impoverish the rest of us. (Which isn’t to say there aren’t some great lawyers doing great work. There definitely are.)
One thing to note is that this sort of ‘sore winners’ seem to be limited to the US. (To the best of my knowledge, which is not saying much.)
There have been problems connected to gay marriage outside the US, e.g. churches and religious adoption agencies being prohibited from discriminating; but in those cases it was the legislature/government that caused the trouble: it was not sore winners.
–WRT “the cake won’t be eaten”: my best guess is that it won’t even be ordered. I figure that sore winners go from baker to baker asking for cakes, without committing themselves, until they find a baker who turns them down. Just tell them that you’ll do it, payment in advance, and they’ll go away.
Snorri – the “problems” are the intention. Look up the intent of the people who invented the concept – they had no interest at all in Gay people as such. They was just another group of people the left could USE against “capitalist society” – and Big Business rushed to HELP them.
Paul: quite right — but please note that i have been saying this for quite some time!
(But not before 2012, because that is when i learned about the Italian school of class analysis.)
When i said that the Frankfurt offshoots are not “of the Left”, you were outraged. And yet this is what i was trying to make clear: the Frankfurt offshoots are not opposed to the Establishment (not in the US, not in the EU, and not in the UK), as the constitutional Left and the revolutionary Left historically have been. They provide ideological support, and sometimes extra-legal enforcement, for the Establishment.
Oh, the Left ‘cares’ about GLBT folk, just like it loves all the other people they claim to represent. They own us, after all. And as long as we don’t stray from the reservation, or plantation, or whatever, they won’t attack us unless they ‘need’ to. Too many start straying, they’ll probably start to brand us.
I wonder what the position would be were I to go into a Halal butcher and demand that he sell me pork chops?
Paul Marks: thanks for the reference to the “Cantillon Effect”. I went down the internet rabbit hole on that. I’m surprised as a historian with a focus on technology, which includes “soft” technologies like finance and administrative organizations, that I had never heard of the Cantillon Effect.
Paul Marks: “The left pretends to like small business and hate Big Business – but their behaviour indicates a different agenda.”
Generally agree strongly, although some leftists are quite open in their hatred of small business–witness Michael Moore, for instance.
Snorri the Establishment are the left – they Establishment has been controlled by the left for a very long time. And I am not just referring to the state.
For example, Pope Paul VI was a personal friend of Saul Alinsky (the “Rules for Radicals” person) – and if Saul Alinsky was not the left, then there is no such thing as the left. Nor is just a matter of economic policy – large parts (although not all) of traditions that went back almost two thousand years, ripped up. Language is no small thing – and neither is ritual and ceremony.
When Robespierre was in power, having people killed for violating his price controls, was he not the Establishment? Is Robespierre not the left?
Yes Ellen the left “owns” the people it claims to represent – as soon as any person questions their orders the “You ain’t black” (Joseph Biden’s response to a black person who would consider voting the other way) comes fast and it comes hard.
pst314 – yes I stand correctly, some leftists honestly admit that they hate the “Mon and Pop stores” and family farms, that most leftists FALSELY claim not to hate.
It would depend upon the orifice for which the pork chops were intended …
@Paul Marks
Snorri the Establishment are the left – they Establishment has been controlled by the left for a very long time. And I am not just referring to the state.
I don’t think that is true at all. It is certain that some leftists have been friends with the establishment, but only insofar as the establishment is useful to achieve their goals. For example, in the USA there is nobody more Establishment than Joe Biden, and nobody more Left that AOC, I am sure they loathe each other, but each is useful to the other. Certainly Joe Biden’s policies right now are left, radically left, but I think for only a couple of reasons: firstly he is PINO (President in Name Only), secondly, because I think he is fairly sure they can’t in fullsome measure be implemented, and thirdly because what can be implemented is in line with his actual goals.
Which are what? What is the goal of the Establishment? It is simply this: to ensure re-election and power for politicians and to ensure bigger budgets and more power for government agencies: this is the devil’s bargain struck between these two largely opposing forces. Their goal is to keep things the way they are, while extending their budgets and power. They, for the most part, don’t care what policies are loaded onto the plebeians, so long at they, the patricians are advanced, both maintaining their position and advancing it. The establishment is not at all ideological in the traditional axis, but on a completely different axis.
Here is what you don’t get, Paul: ***to you*** “the left” means something very different from what it meant in continental Europe, at least up to ww1; arguably up to the collapse of the Soviet Union, or even later. That is to say, for most of the time the word was used.
And anyway, what does this have to do with what i wrote?
Wrong: according to Steven Lukes, when Robespierre got to power (and hence became the Establishment), he no longer claimed to be ‘of the left’. The use of the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ was suspended until the Bourbon restoration. After which, ‘the left’ was usually quite moderate — and once it achieved its moderate goals, it turned into ‘the right’, without changing anything in its ideology. Which proves that ‘the left’ and ‘the right’ are words which have absolutely nothing to do with ideology. (You might want to check how Adolphe Thiers turned from a man ‘of the left’ to a man ‘of the right’ without changing ideology.)
And again: what does this have to do with what i wrote?
One quick point: Robespierre was not at all “the establishment”. The point of the “establishment” is that it is long established; it is from this fact that most of their behaviors arise. Their goal is the maintenance of the established order, and momentum on the track toward more power and money. Robespierre, if my memory serves me correctly, was executed a mere five years after the storming of the Bastille. He definitely doesn’t constitute the establishment. He was part of the opposite of the establishment, and agent of overturning the establishment.
And as I like to remind those who like to bleat on about the need for a revolution: French revolutions are far more common than American ones.
Fraser: I did not read your comment yesterday, because i was crafting mine (and doing a bit of research related to it). But i am, at least broadly, in agreement with it.
Perhaps what is unusual about the US today is that somebody as radical as AOC collaborates with the establishment: i cannot think of a precedent. But the moderate, constitutional ‘left’ has collaborated with the establishment in other times & places.
–As for the definition of ‘the establishment’:
My definition would be that it is the faction of the ruling class that has most of the power. The ‘ruling class’ being the small minority of people, EACH OF WHOM has much more power than the median citizen.
(NB: Reagan and Thatcher were, and Trump is, members of the ruling class; but none of them was really a member of the establishment. And of course, while there is always a ruling class, there need not be an establishment in every time and place.)
But your definition seems perfectly compatible: after all, it takes some time, after the previous establishment has been dethroned, for a new faction to achieve supremacy.
The contrast that i make is between Animal Farm revolutions and Glorious revolutions.
But it’s not just a matter of chance whether a revolution turns out to be Animal Farm or Glorious. I believe that Glorious revolutions tend to have some features in common, so that one might predict (short of certainty of course) whether a revolution will turn out to be Glorious or not.
Snorri Godhi
But it’s not just a matter of chance whether a revolution turns out to be Animal Farm or Glorious.
I think I have mixed feelings about the Glorious Revolution, and certainly don’t hold it in the same esteem as the American one. It was really a bunch of elites switching things up to their advantage, really a revolution of the old guard to restore the status quo from before James II and all his “papish ways”. The American revolution really was a grass roots revolution of people who had enough of the elites bossing them around. Perhaps the most revolutionary act of that time is when Washington refused a crown, or when, after two terms as President he said “Enough”, and went home.
As to the Glorious Revolution, ask the people of Ireland, I am sure they’d prefer pigs to oranges any day.
If so, it would have been an Animal Farm revolution.
The Founding Fathers were very much elitist. Most notably, Washington and John Adams.
Frasor Orr and Snorri.
At the heart of the American Establishment are Harvard, Yale and the rest of the Ivy League (and the schools that send children to these universities).
These places (the schools – as well as the universities) have been under leftist control for a very long time. If one seeks an answer to the question what corrupted American law, the answer “the Harvard Law School” is fairly accurate.
And it is not different in the United Kingdom.
Keynes and the Apostles Club were quite normal for Cambridge even a century ago.
What is more Establishment than the Apostles Club or the Bloomsbury Set in London? (Keynes was both).
And what is more leftist?
The left are the elite (the heirs of Plato) – they despise the “Babbitts” the ordinary people in the Mid West (hence the mocking novel by Sinclair Lewis) and they despise the British “Babbitts”, such as Alfred Roberts of Grantham (Mrs Thatcher’s father) just as much.
The Central Planners in Washington D.C. are just as much the left as the people smashing and burning buildings in Portland Oregon.
Indeed the latter are normally the children of the former.
They do not go to prison Fraser and Snorri – not normally.
Normally after a few years of smashing and burning (and attacking people) they get “good jobs” in the government and corporate bureaucracy – and in the universities.
If neither of you have noticed that the left are the establishment you really have not being paying attention.
Richard Ely was the most influential American academic as far back as the early 1900s – the mentor of both T. Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, was not Richard Ely not on the left?
Look at all the “Social Reformers” in British academia and politics at the time – who was NOT a “Social Reformer” who was NOT on the left (at least to some extent).
The attitudes of the senior people in the FBI are much the same as the attitudes of the rioters in Portland – they just dress better.
And people go from being “Earth First” terrorists to being senior government bureaucrats (or senior Corporate managers) without any real change in their opinions.
The establishment elite are the left – and they have been the left for a very long time.
The leaders of society are the people seeking to destroy society.
Look around you in the Western world – it is obvious by their policies.
The opinions of the people who gather at Davos and other venues (both government and corporate) are not really different from the college students nocking Andy Ngo to the ground and then seeking to kick his head in.
They are all the heirs of Plato – they all wish to destroy Civil Society and replace it with a Planned Society.
They are the Collectivists – the left.
The sign of the left (what sums them up) is a boot stamping down on a human face – for ever.
Whether that boot has “FBI” or “Portland Rioters” on it – makes no difference.
As the Chinese say – the security forces are just “the official bandits”.
What are the right? The ordinary person trying to make an honest living and bring up their family – that is the right. The “Babbits” the establishment elite (the left) hate and despise. They may be shy about being called righteous (fearing it means self righteous – which is to be avoided), but that is what they are.
And that can be a very poor man, or a very rich one (such as the Marquis of Rockingham – the richest man in England in his day) – both can be righteous men standing against evil, as best they can. Even if it means their own death.
Nor is it just men. The fictional character of “Miss Marple” was a representative of a very real type.
The “old woman” mocked by Progressives for centuries “I met an old woman who said that the new government old age pensions were socialism” (1900s – the crowd told this were supposed to laugh at this point) or “I met an old women who said the government had no business asking who was in her house” (1800s – again the crowd was supposed to laugh as this opposition to the Census of 1801, the despicable Walter Bagehot was still mocking such an “old woman” in his “The English Constitution” of 1867).
But it is the “old woman” who will not compromise in the face of evil (the left – the left hand path to Hell) – no matter how strong it is, or what the price of resisting the left hand path is.
I know you are the murderer Mr Smith – you were desperate and the temptation of the money was too much for you. Now you can either finish your tea and give yourself up – or you can kill me as well, or rather you can try to do so Sir.
Each person struggles between good and evil (the righteous path and the left hand path) all through their lives – that is what being a person is (it is the terrible moral burden of free will – moral agency, the knowledge of good and evil and the moral responsibility to choose good and reject evil, each day).
We should not hate those who fall into evil – for that can be any of us, on any day.
Only death frees us from this terrible burden. So, again, we should have compassion for those who fall into evil – even as we fight them (if need be to the death). For they are OURSELVES – just ourselves who have stepped onto the left hand path, and can not find the strength to get off it.
We all fail at times – we all fall into evil.
And we can all (if we truly make the effort) redeem ourselves – although to truly do so often costs us our life.
Hence the old saying “he did not live well, but he died well – he died trying to make up for what he had done”.
We all die – and to die trying to save the innocent is not a bad way to go. Not a bad way to try and get off the left hand path.
For example, by a person turning against the mob they themselves were once part of – knowing that the mob will tear them to pieces, but giving the innocent intended target time to escape.
Paul: if you don’t address the points that i made (which have nothing to do with US or even the UK), then i do not see the point in continuing this conversation.