Ugh.
That’s all. Just “Ugh.” That’s all I’m saying about the latest attempted coup today
1. What’s going on here? This time, I have no clue. Last week, the U.S. website for Captain Morgan rum was found to be asking visitors to check a box confirming that they were “non-Muslim.” The question was quickly removed, but a different question lingers: Why? Why does Captain Morgan care what religion, if any, a consumer follows?
It is not illegal for Muslims (or anyone) to drink alcohol in the United States, so this appeared to have been related to Sharia law, which does forbid alcohol consumption. . The company swears that “far from being a case of discrimination or an attempt to appease religious zealots, it turns out a technical error was behind the puzzling message.”
That’s obviously a lie: what kind of technical glitch suddenly starts grilling website visitors on whether or not they are Muslim? Someone deliberately added the box. There is speculation that the Diageo company, which owns the Captain Morgan brand, was reacting to a threat from Islamic extremists that violent consequences would befall them if they dared to continue to make alcohol available to Muslims.
That seems far-fetched too, but it’s more likely than a “technical error.”
CORRECTION and UPDATE: There was a lie here, all right, and it was the P.J. Media author Robert Spencer who was the villain. In his article he misrepresented the Metro’s summary of what the Captain Morgan spokesperson said caused the box to appear as the statement itself. This advanced the article’s conspiracy narrative about companies being threatened into enforcing Sharia law, but it was also false. What the company really said was,
Over the weekend, a misconfiguration on our age-gating files for our US Captain Morgan website meant that people were shown our United Arab Emirates age gate window in error. ‘In the United Arab Emirates it is commonplace for alcohol brands to request verification of this kind, in addition to age-gating, in line with UAE alcohol licensing requirements. We corrected this as quickly as possible.’
That made sense, and the mystery is solved. Metro didn’t help by burying that statement after a string of tweets, and I compounded the confusion by not reading the Metro article far enough. A botch all around.
2. Well, it was good to get it off his chest, I guess… Last week Tamarac City commissioner Mike Gelin felt he had to mar an awards ceremony, interrupting it and verbally attacking Broward County Sheriff’s Deputy Joshua Gallardo as he was being honored as an Officer of the Month. NBC Miami reported that after Gallardo and others were honored, Gelin grabbed the microphone and called out to the officer, “It’s good to see you again. You probably don’t remember me. But you’re the police officer who falsely arrested me four years ago. You lied on the police report. I believe you are a rogue police officer, you’re a bad police officer and you don’t deserve to be here!”
Nice.
Gelin was referring to a 2015 incident where he was arrested resisting and obstructing police while they responded to an alleged battery incident. He was not a city commissioner at the time of the arrest and charges were eventually dropped.
The city’s mayor said, in response to Gellin’s outburst, Continue reading
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