Let's Laugh at Europe!

I know blogging has been slow lately but my excuse is iron-clad; I've been playing with my 6 month old granddaughter this past week before she takes her parents off to Europe for the next few months. Priorities.

I think I should start a weekly feature on this blog called "Let's Laugh at Europe." A shortage of material would not be the problem. Ed West at his blog on the Daily Telegraph site has this snippet from the on-going war between EU bureaucrats and nature.

Did you know that male drivers in the United States are 77 per cent more likely to die in car crash than females?

That men, aged 16-23, are four times more likely than the population as a whole to have a crash?

Or that men in their early 20s driving a motorbike after midnight are 45,000 times more likely than the population as a whole to die in an accident?

Insurance is the business of risk assessment, and taking into account the factors that cause risk. This includes age, sex, profession and lifestyle; if you smoke, for example, or travel to dangerous countries, your life insurance is going to be higher. Because either you bear the extra risk and pay the extra cost, or everyone does, which makes no sense either to non-smokers or to the company itself, which wants to offer competitive rates. In this sense life insurance is no different to the way we all discriminate and stereotype individuals as a form of social shorthand; we might cross the road when a group of young men appear, because statistically they are the most likely to attack us. It would be absurd if we did the same to avoid octogenarians or people in wheelchairs, just to be “undiscriminating”.

The same goes for car insurance, which assesses risk based on age and sex, as well as other factors, such as where you live. The simple fact is that, measured by the most important category – safety – women are far, far better drivers than men. Biology almost certainly plays a significant part; perhaps the same hormones that drive a higher proportion of men to become company directors also drive a higher proportion of them to act like morons behind the wheel.

Alas, human nature has fallen foul of the European Court of Justice, which seems to be in competition with the European Court of Human Rights to become the most loathed foreign court in British life. According to the Telegraph:

Lower insurance premiums for women unfair, European court rules

Insurance companies have been banned from selling cheaper premiums to motorists based on gender in a landmark ruling by the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

Using differences between men and women as a risk factor in setting premiums for car and medical insurance and pension schemes breaches EU rules on equality, declared European judges.

The verdict – which applies from December 21 2012 – will force changes in the current standard practice across Europe of basing insurance rates on statistics about differing life expectancies or road accident records of the sexes.

It is hilarious the way that these folks talk about all "discrimination" as a bad thing. They are so undiscriminating.

Feminists, I take it, are confused about whether to rejoice or complain about this ruling. The purists, I suppose, will get their checkbooks out and take the financial hit without complaint in order to rack up another victory for "equality." Others may wonder why feminism, if it is such a great thing, finds it necessary to be so petty and stupid.

Ah . . . Europe! They are like dragon-slayers who, having exterminated all the real ones, now have to practice their art on squashing ants and spiders.

A story like this seems somehow incomplete without some "Israel connection." Is there any way Zionism might be responsible for auto insurance discrimination? I don't see it right away, but such an angle might be the only way to make this story more absurd . . . so it is a virtual certainty that somewhere in Brussels some petty EU bureaucrat is thinking about this issue.