The ACLU has a timeline showing major US Supreme Court decisions on women's rights. Reading these opinions and noting there dates gives less a feeling of steps to victory than a sense of outrage at the slow pace of progress.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
All this talk of marriage led to some googling and I chanced upon Nolo's page of useful legal info for people doing anything like marriage or living together.
The Neistat brothers broke out the rattle can to holler about iPOD's dirty secret. I'm always a fan of people taking it to the streets when they get screwed by faceless businesses. Plus, they ganked NWA's Express Yourself for the beats-- I'm sure the RIAA will find a way to forgive them.
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Alleged radical eco-terorrist organization, Earth First, is alleged to have a manual on anti-motorcycle booby traps. It is further alleged that this manual was written by the Unabomber under the nom de guerre, "El Ranchero".
Cue the Footloose because New York just got one degree closer to Kevin Bacon!
The NYC Department of Consumer Affairs is ditching the existing cabaret licensing scheme, which means no more dance police telling you it's illegal to feel the funk. Now you can get on the freak whenever you get the nerve to swerve.
Jee-ay-sus Kee-runk!
Update: NYTimes has the story.
I'm told that in Hawaii, "aloha" means both "hello" and "goodbye". This is beautiful and charming and cute, although I admit it hurts my little brain to try to cram two opposing concepts into one word. You would think it gets confusing, that people don't know if they're coming or going. But it works, and "aloha" is a wonderful bit of linguistic economy.
Maybe it was that economy that inspired Hawaii when it found itself in the position that Massachusetts is in right now. In 1996, a Hawaii court ruled that marriage laws discriminating against same-sex unions violated the Hawaii constitution. Hawaii's legislature quickly decided that, rather than abandon the discrimination, it would abandon the constitution. So they put before their voters a choice: to amend the constitution or not?
The voters of Hawaii made their choice. "To amend!" they said. The vote wasn't even close.
That was five years ago. Now we are five years older and maybe five years smarter. And a while a popular vote to provide equal access to civil marriage would still fail, it would be a lot closer. A recent poll tells us that people over age 60 support marriage discrimination four to one while people in their twenties are almost evenly split. Times and attitudes are moderating.
Even the dissenting judges in the Massachusetts case know this. They never manage to get up any good old-fashioned indignation. Instead, they wearily admit, "There is much to be said for the argument that excluding gay and lesbian couples from the benefits of civil marriage is ... hopelessly outdated". In that line you can hear them begging their children not to judge them too harshly.
There are a few ways out of this mess. Massachusetts could just end the discrimination, but we know that's not going to happen without a fight. They could also end marriage, and I think there are a few people angry enough to do that -- they'd rather sink the boat than share it. A more likely solution is to provide civil unions, like in Vermont and California. Civil unions give gays all the legal trappings with none of the respect and dignity of calling it a marriage.
Then there's Hawaii's solution, which is what many people, including Governor Mitt Romney and House Speaker Thomas Finneran, want. They would change the constitution to restrict marriage to unions between "one man and one woman".
And here is where I beg Massachusetts to act with Hawaiian economy and wisdom. Even way back in the dark ages of 1998, people could see that equal access to marriage will eventually be won. And rather than amend the constitution to forever restrict marriage to one woman and one man, Hawaii instead used language that can restrict marriage or free it. Just like "aloha", the same words can be used to destroy or revive gay access to marriage. The short amendment reads simply, "The legislature shall have the power to reserve marriage to opposite-sex couples."
Since times and attitudes are moderating, would-be amenders should keep in mind that a strongly-worded amendment is a time bomb. When social attitudes do manage to catch up to social realities, lots of people are going to want to allow gays equal marriage rights. But amendments that define marriage as one woman and one man will require that constitutions get amended again to make that change.
And people will be fighting and amending instead of moving on with their lives. Marriage activists will take the fight to the federal level to trump state constitutions. And just like in Lawrence v. Texas, they'll eventually win in federal court because judges will realize that judicial relief is the only way to right the wrong.
To the people of Massachusetts: If you are going to amend your state constitution to deny gays equal access to marriage, don't say "one woman and one man". Do like Hawaii. Give the legislature the ability to change its mind someday, when all our grandchildren are asking us how it was possible that so many bigots were running around running things.
Aloha.
Polis | 1 Writebacks | #
All this discrimination against gays marrying is going to look awfully foolish 20 years from now. All the haters will be remembered as bigots and retrogrades. Children will be ashamed of their parents. If you have any doubt that attitudes are changing, check out this poll that shows support of equal access to marriage varying inversely with age.
Even the dissenters in Goodridge admit that discriminating against gays in access to marriage is going to look foolish down the line:
there is much to be said for the argument that excluding gay and lesbian couples from the benefits of civil marriage is cruelly unfair and hopelessly outdated
According to the poll, Bush supporters oppose marriage rights four to one while people who want a Democrat in the White House are evenly split. And that's why Bush's reaction to the Goodridge decision is all about pandering to the hate wing of the GOP:
Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman. Today's decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court violates this important principle. I will work with congressional leaders and others to do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage.
I wonder how GW's adulterous brother feels about the sanctity of marriage.
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The NYTimes has a harsh editorial about the "enemy combatant sham" and Bush's use of that designation to incarcerate an American citizen in a naval brig without access to lawyers, with no charges brought against him, and with no trial in sight.
The Times gets extra points for saying things like "mockery of the constitution" with a straight face.
Update: I'm not actually saying we should free Jose Padilla, just that we should charge him. The headline was all about the rhyme. It would be more convenient if his name were Jose Padarja. Life is too rarely convenient. Anyway, no more emails calling me a terror lover, please.
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The highest court in Massachusetts has ruled that the state cannot deny gays the same benefits of marriage that straight people enjoy. This doesn't mean Massachusetts has to recognize gay marriages. There are four options, and the legislature will have to chose one:
- Let gays marry
- Schmarriage - provide civil unions with all the benefits that straight marriages have but without the dignity and respect of calling it a "marriage"
- Amend the state constitution to define marriage as one woman and one man
- Not recognize any marriage at all
The hot money around here is for schmarriage, especially because the Massachusetts constitutional amendment process takes a minimum of three years to complete, and until they can change the definition of marriage they might be forced to adopt one of the other three options. I can imagine a court granting more time, though, if it looks like such an amendment is going to pass.
As we said yesterday, the next step is to get one state legislature. The Massachusetts legislature will ultimately decide which option is chosen. Just like in Hawaii, the court ruling means nothing unless the legislature goes along with it. All the courts can do is force the legislature to take some sort of action.
Update: Read the opinion. I haven't read it all yet, but En Banc has a good summary.
Update: If you're interested in the mechanism for amending the constitution, the first place to look is the Massachusetts constitution itself. Articles XLVIII and LXXXI are the ones you want. Interestingly, a DOMA amendment would need approval not just by two consecutive legislative sessions but also by a majority of the people in a state election. That's a lot of hurdles.
Or is it? If all this seems familiar, it's because we've been down this road before. When the Hawaii courts decided Baehr v. Miike, they too found that the state constitution forbade discrimination against gays seeking to marry. The Hawaii legislature quickly passed an amendment, which was ratified by the voters of Hawaii, and the court's ruling was of little effect.
That was a sad day. I remember I read it in the paper, and I was so angry and upset after reading the headline that I just threw the paper away. Hopefully Massachusetts will bring better news.
Polis | 4 Writebacks | #
Really great table surveying same sex marriage laws in the 50 states. It's sad to see so so much misguided law. But if Lawrence is any hope, it all might be swept away eventually. The next step is to get one state legislature.
Via En Banc.
Update: Ms. Manners Morality, who did the work of compiling the table linked above, asked us to link to her main page. In so doing, she referred Ian to her Terms of Use, which I of course haven't read. I wonder if she thinks her terms bind Brutal Hugs and prevent deep linking. Regardless, we're happy to oblige.
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A North Carolina District Attorney took these antidrug and terrorism commercials a little too seriously. He tried to prosecute a meth dealer under anti terrorism laws by arguing that meth is a weapon of mass destruction. Of course, the Court refused to take part in this nonsense.
Lots of people sitting at home will read this and think "I don't see the problem. The DA did something ridiculous but the court kept it from going too far. It sounds like the system worked."
Those people would be wrong. The harm that arose from torturing terrorism law to fight drug cases is that this case was changed from a routine drug case into a terrorism case. And because it was a terrorism case, bail was set for some of the defendants at half a million dollars. And of course people can't meet that burden, so they sit in jail.
Anti-terrorism laws are being used in cases that have nothing to do with terrorism. As a result of that abuse, people are sitting in jail who would otherwise be free.
Maybe you think it's no big deal, that it's ok to abuse the system when only drug dealers suffer. But if you think accused meth dealers should face high bail requirements, the solution is not to pretend these people are terrorists. The solution is to change the laws regarding bail requirements.
When prosecutors twist laws to put people away, we're not living in a society governed by laws. We're living in a society governed by liars who are willing to pretend drugs are weapons as a way to deprive people of their freedom. Drug dealers today. Tomorrow it could be you.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
One of the issues in deciding whether the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay have any legal recourse to American courts is jurisdiction. Can America courts get involved in Guantanamo affairs?
Bush and the lower courts say our courts don't have that power. But most people disagree, and the Supreme Court has agreed to examine the issue.
Of couse the courts can exercise authority over Guantanamo Bay. The argument against jurisdiction is that Guantanamo Bay is not in the US and the prisoners are aliens. In other words, the US courts don't protect non-citizens outside the US.
But that issue is a red herring. Whether we protect non-citizens outside the US is irrelevant to whether the courts have the power to order the Americans running Guantanamo Bay to run it in a way that complies with American and international law. American courts have the power to order Americans to comply with American and international law, not to mention the American Constitution. And that means the American citizens running the prisons are subject to those laws. Even if we're not too concerned that some foreigner might be being abused, we should be quite concerned that Americans might be doing the abusing.
Polis | 1 Writebacks | #
A South Dakota court has ruled that a quadriplegic charged with marijuana possession cannot invoke the defense of necessity, even if he smokes weed to treat tremors and pain.
This is a pretty low-impact decision, as far as I can tell. The statute in question says
A person may not be convicted of a crime based upon conduct in which he engaged because of the use or threatened use of unlawful force upon him or upon another person, which force or threatened use thereof a reasonable person in his situation would have been lawfully unable to resist.
The court basically said that whatever threat his medical condition imposed on the him, the defendant was never threatened by force. In other words, the statute gives an out for criminals who act under duress, people who are illegally forced by others to act against their will. For all the tragedy of quadriplegia, it isn't the same thing as having a gun to your head.
That's not to say they shouldn't let the guy off on other grounds, just that this statute is a huge reach. The court said it was "not unmoved by Matthew Ducheneaux’s circumstances." It just couldn't let him go on this.
Fortunately, this decisions is irrelevant to anybody except South Dakotans.
Via TalkLeft.
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Joshua Micah Marshall pretty much shuts the door on the imminent threat debate. They said it a bunch of times in a bunch of ways, including using the magic words "imminent threat". Fellow Hugger had this to say a ways back.
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I sent an email to John Perry Barlow a few days ago with my response to his essay, which disses Burning Man.
At the end of the email I tossed in an idea that hit me while writing to him. Activists always go on about voting and what we can do to turn party people (i.e. Burners) into voters. The answer is clearly to integrate partying into voting, which means that when you invite burners to a party you're also inviting them to vote. They show up to party and cast their ballots almost incidentally.
And the only obstacle to voting at parties is that we have to vote at our polling places. But that's not some sort of bedrock principle of American politics. It's just history. We need to change local laws so that residence does not dictate polling place. The touch-screen voting machines currently being touted as the idiot-proof alternative to the butterfly ballot could easily do the simple data management that would allow anybody to vote from any terminal. Terminals could easily match voters to the relevant races in their districts by their addresses.
If people could vote from anywhere, you could throw a great election-night party for like-minded, apolitical lifestyle activists in a venue near a polling place. Then just take people to the nearby polling place in groups. It's old-fashion district or ward-based geographical organizing turned into interest-based organizing. It's a method of getting people to the polls that was proven successful by Tammany Hall, George Washington (Plunkett), and the Mayors Daley.
Now's the time, with all the HAVA funding, to get this (and a million other things) done. Instead we're going to get the dumbest terminals with all the limits of paper and none of the benefits of electronics.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
According to the Vietnam Casualty Search Engine, America incurred 56,851 casualties during the Vietnam War from January 1, 1961 through January 27, 1973. The average daily casualty rate during this time was 13. Every day. 13 people. That's a lot of dead Americans. The median was 4. And these numbers say nothing about the Vietnamese casualties, estimated at a little over a million people.
It gets worse. If you date the conflict from 1963, when things really heated up (the median jumps to 8), the daily average goes up to 15 American casualties. The relatively low medians tell us our data is fairly bottom-heavy, and a look at the data tells us that's true. More days than not, no casualties were taken.
As of November 4, America had suffered 379 casualties in Iraq. The bombing started on March 20, 2003, which is 230 days ago, or 1.65 casualties per day. That's a hell of a lot less than what we faced in Vietnam.
By the way, there were weeks when the US suffered more casualties in Vietnam than we've suffered so far in the entire Gulf War.
None of this is to dismiss the deaths of the American men and women that have died in Iraq. Perspective is useful too, though.
Please note that good data is tough to get, which means my numbers are not exact. I excluded casualties after January 27, 1973 because that's when we pulled out. In addition to the casualties I excluded, I know this database is not complete. There's about 1,000 casualties missing. I don't know whether the missing 1,000 died during the war or after. I know at least one of them died before 1961 and many of them died years later of injuries sustained in Vietnam (as late as 1991).
Peace.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
People are playing Scategories in the comments over at Dean's World. Phrases like "elitist crap" and "full of elitist crap" and "turd merchant" are being flung like so much smelly mud. It's an argument, completely unmoored from any attempt to meet minds or understand points of view. And it's fun to read because we don't really know any of the participants, so the insults hit like cartoon anvils.
As much fun as it is to read about people reaching for each other's throats with rubber knives, it doesn't really get anybody any closer to peace, consensus, progress or any other goal except angry entertainment. And if I want that, I can just pick a fight with my girlfriend-- she's always psyched for ten rounds of passive aggressive pain. It's like virtual reality only realer.
There's a good reason people fight on these issues. Bush made a case for war that an awful lot of people found unconvincing, including me. The people that oppose the war tend to be the people that hate Bush. This is partly because part of Bush's case was "trust me", and a lot of people don't trust him, especially after Bush v. Gore. Doves viewed the case for war in the light least favorable to Bush and his arguments. After Bush led us into a war they couldn't support, anti-Bush Doves could only hate him more.
The Hawks tend to be pro-Bush. This is partly because those that supported Bush were pre-disposed to buying his arguments and believing his policies (after all, liking his policies was one of the reasons they supported him all along). Pro-Bush Hawks viewed the case for war in the light most favorable to the President and his arguments.
As time went on, the Hawks became more convinced the war was right and the Doves became more convinced it was wrong. The distrust has built as each side saw the other's tactics and cried foul, over and over. Each side is essentially saying to the other, "I can't convince you on the merits of the argument, so I'll attack your tactics!" As if that ever convinced anybody.
Each side came to see the other as completely unreasonable. A bunch of dishonest sheep! Mad cows! Hawks have been taken in by Bush's propaganda and mind control. Doves are starry-eyed peacenik liberals who can't get over their anti-Bush bias and deal with the harsh reality of the Iraqi threat. But think of the numbers. Think how many millions of people fight so passionately on either side of this issue. If you believe that many people are really that stupid you have lost all hope in humanity. Give up now.
If you don't give up, you're left in the dirty scrum. And so we have otherwise reasonable, friendly people engaged in ad hominem attacks.
But that's not how it should be. Dean started out saying it's a "lie" to say Bush suggested Hussein was linked to 9/11. I'm sure Dean believed it, largely because he's angry at what he sees as a string of deceptions from the left. But I think he might concede now that reasonable people might see the issue differently, and that being wrong is not the same as lying.
On the other side, lefties assume the worst about everything Bush says. So they say "Mission Accomplished" was a lie. But that's just silly. It was a bit of PR fluff celebrating that we'd taken Baghdad and that Hussein's army had been absorbed into the desert like a summer shower. It was a reasonable thing to say, even if it was optimistic and even if you think the mission wasn't accomplished.
So what do we do about this? Bilateral disarmament? Each side agrees to calm discourse while waiting for the other to make a false move? Of course not. That's a cold war, not warm friendship.
Really, there are only two things anybody can do. You can't be responsible for the other side. You can only be responsible for your own conduct. So stop throwing mud. Take a deep breath and try to see the other side as reasonable or at least see why they take the positions they do. Every time you come to the conclusion that the other side is stupid, start over.
The other thing you can do is police your own side and its tactics. Don't let people get away with sloppiness or deception just because you agree with them. Your side never getting a fair shake isn't justification for snakery.
Doing these two things isn't going to win you any battles. It's not going to teach you any big lessons. But it might relieve some stress, make you a more pleasant person, and win you some friends (not that you really want to be friends with, you know, those people).
Peace.
P.S. My fellow Hugger helped kick off the arguing. That was the Brutal part of Brutal Huggery. This would be the preachy, hypocritical part, as I am as guilty as anybody of crying foul, pointing fingers, and refusing olive branches.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
I know there are Matrix fans out there, so here's my impression of the 3rd installment, which I saw this morning (I can't believe I saw a movie at 9am-- imagine the people who were in this theater at 9am on opening day). Less ponderous and corny than the second one, but just as pretentious. No big revelation scenes. Less shoehorning of plot into dialog. The plot rolls right along, carrying most of the high speak and emotion along with it. The graphics are much better. Unintentionally funny only a few times. Keanu still can't act, but they don't linger on his facial expression much. Overall, it was not as good as the first (hard to accomplish that), but definitely better than the second.
The plot wraps up much as expected. The big fight scenes that just keep getting bigger reached the point of silly WWF-in-the-air pound pound pound at the end. There's no big, exciting insanely choreographed, all over the place fight scene (like the battle to get the Key Master in the second one). No new monsters with weird new powers, although in one scene the bad guys run around on the ceiling and shoot from there. This was not so impressive, as the ceiling was normal height, so it really made no difference in the battle. Instead of a crazy choreographed fight scene there's the big war scene, which I found a lot less interesting.
Go see it, especially if you saw the first two. You'll enjoy it immensely.
And when you're done watching it, watch the The Meatrix and Pong Matrix.
Is it wrong to laugh at things like this? This woman crashed her car while on her cell phone. She crashed into a cell phone store. She was an EMT.
I've had my close encounters with people just like this woman. I've almost been killed on my motorcycle by people talking on the cell, watching TV, eating, reaching into the back seat, etc. And so I say better her than me.
A bunch of people are upset that CBS is pulling the plug on its Reagan miniseries after conservative critics blasted the script as overly critical fiction. But CBS isn't completely pulling the plug. They're licensing the series to Showtime. True, they're caving to pressure, but this isn't brown shirt thuggery, as some complain.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
I'm not the only one who opposes Question 3. Eli Pariser, of Move On mass mailed a few reasons to vote no on Question 3. In it, he says
The New York Times, Newsday, The New York Sun, and The New York Amsterdam Sun also have written editorials opposing it.
And he links the NYTimes editorial. The only problem is that when you read the editorial, it doesn't actually oppose Question 3. It criticizes Mayor Bloomberg for the way he's promoting Question 3, but nowhere does it take a position on whether Question 3 should pass.
This kind of exaggeration of the opposition to Question 3 is sloppy at best and dishonest at worst. It's a tactic the left decries when used by the right. It's no less outrageous when used by the left.
Incidentally, I went to Move On's web site to find somebody to email about this issue. Couldn't find anything. It's a little odd that an organization that is all about the grassroots doesn't put email addresses on its web site. I'm a big fan of Move On, but if this is how they conduct themselves, maybe that's going to change.
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Rosemary, writing for Dean's World, gives props to Andrew Sullivan for his indignation over Andy Rooney accusing Bush of connecting 9/11 and Hussein. In the comments, Dean Esmay says the proposition that Bush "led people to believe that Saddam had something to do with the 9/11 attacks" is a "lie".
Here's some of what we know:
- Bush described Hussein as an 'ally of Al Qaeda' in his May 1 speech.
- On December 9, 2001, Dick Cheney said on Meet the Press it was 'pretty well confirmed' that Mohammed Atta met with a "senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service". He repeated the allegation on March 24, 2002 and September 8, 2002. These repetitions came even after the FBI and CIA debunked the allegation because Atta was in Florida when this meeting supposedly took place. In September, 2003, Cheney again referred to the meeting, this time saying the notion had been neither confirmed nor discredited.
- Cheney also referred to Iraq as "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
That's not the same thing as saying Hussein provided resources or planning that directly resulted in four hijacked planes. But the proposition is that Bush "led people to believe" or "suggested", not that Bush "claimed". The proposition is that there is a "connection" or that Hussein "had something to do with" 9/11, not that Hussein was pulling Bin Laden's strings.
Of course, when asked point-blank if there was evidence that Hussein was involved in 9/11 specifically, administration officials said either "No" or "Don't know". But Bush and Cheney's remarks surely led some people to believe a connection existed (between September 11, 2001 and September, 2003, the percentage of people that believed in the connection went from about 3 to 70). And if the leading was intentional and Bush and company knew there was no connection, such leading can only be called misleading.
So what this comes down to is whether you think the remarks were designed to foster the connection between Hussein and 9/11. This administration is incredibly on-point when it comes to public remarks. And I don't think they're unaware of how impressions get created. Hussein = terrorism and Al Qaeda = 9/11 isn't a tough equation to decode.
Regardless, even if you believe that the evidence favors the view that Bush's remarks were not made with the intent to mislead, you would have to concede that there are some rational people who would look at this evidence and conclude Bush was misleading us. And if that's the case, the assertion that Bush "led people to believe that Saddam had something to do with the 9/11 attacks" might be wrong, but it's not a lie.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
Tomorrow is election day, and I know most of you aren't going to vote. There are no large races, no hotly contested seats. But there is a ballot question that needs your attention. So take a few minutes to go to the polls and answer a very important question:
Vote NO on Question 3. Question 3 is the non-partisan elections proposal put up by Bloomberg. Non-partisan elections is a plan to eliminate party primaries and just throw everybody together in a non-partisan primary. The top two vote-getters would then have a run-off in November.
The plan is hugely flawed for a lot of reasons. I'll spare you the detailed rant, but the short version is this: Third-parties (like the Green and Working Family parties) will lose the power and influence that comes from cross endorsing candidates. Your ability to cast protest and third-party votes will be eliminated because there will be NO third-party candidates in November. The proposal will make it easier for wealthy independent candidates (like Bloomburg) to win. The proposal will make it easier for Republicans to win because it reduces the power of the entrenched Democratic party. New York's campaign finance program (the most progressive in the nation) might not survive this change intact.
Another reason every civic and good government non-profit in the city opposes this plan is based more on process than outcome. Bloomberg is pushing this proposal through without providing for the usual (and in some cases mandated) public debate. For example, the commission he formed to "review" the proposal admitted to rubberstamping it. He's spending millions of his own money to promote this proposal (I'm sure you've gotten the mailings from the Committee to Empower all New Yorkers), which makes the public debate incredibly lopsided because he's the only guy in the game with the cash to spare on this issue.
Nobody has actually fleshed out the proposal. It's just a vague idea with all of the details left out. And because nobody really knows what the proposal will actually look like in practice, people are having a really hard time gauging how much damage this proposal will do. Many believe Bloomberg is selling the least harmful version of the idea to get it voted on but then will implement it as the most harmful version he can shoehorn into the ballot language (he really dislikes the party system).
I'm all for changing the two party system, but this is not the change we need.
Please go to the polls tomorrow. Please vote NO on question 3.
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Nathan Newman takes Eugene Volokh and Eric Muller to task for saying our founders would have supported a Constitutional right of a person to grow a vegetable on his farm and sell it to his neighbor without government interference.
Newman cites some 18th century instances of government interferece in private economic dealings to show that while laissez-faire was once a guiding American principle, it wasn't always so. He cites a requirement to mill flour at a specific mill and a suit by ferry operators against bridge builders for interference with monopoly rights.
I'm no scholar of American legal history, but I think that Volokh, Newman and Muller might all benefit from remembering that the Constitution was all about the federal government. My gut says that our founders (the Antifederalists at least) would have agreed that states could legitimately meddle as much as Newman shows but that the federal government should stay out of neighborhood turnip markets.
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Wolf says porn raises the bar on attractiveness and desensitizes men to the sexuality of real women. How does she know this? She asked a bunch of student girls. Maybe she should have asked some guys if they're any less interested in getting laid. I bet half of them would have propositioned her (Dude, I bagged Naomi Wolf!). Maybe the problem isn't enough porn. Maybe it's not enough beer.
Why should we trust Wolf, anyway? Her obediance to the alpha-male has led her to spurn Gore and join Bush's crusade against porn. As usual, Bush goes to far. We don't need protection from porn so much as we need protection from crappy porn.
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John Perry Barlow disses Burning Man as a distraction from the real work of opposing the Bush administration.
People need to stop taking Burning Man and its participants so seriously. It's a good time enjoyed by .01 percent of the population. People have fun there. But most of those people don't give two figs for politics, and the ones that do are gutter punk anarchists more likely to pass out meth than fliers. We're not the most creative, intelligent and passionate members of the opposition. We're not some left-wing Davos in the desert.
If Burning Man didn't exist, would-be burners wouldn't be burning city hall to force political change. We'd be throwing stupid parties in Dumbo and LIC where we dress like road warrior plushies and have nerdy sex. We'd spend lots of evenings shrooming in the park and wondering why we can never get any really good acid. In other words, we'd be living much like we do now.
Burning Man might be a carnival of vanity, but surely no more so than Barlow's Dead Head scene. Take away the scene and all you have is a bunch of burning heads. Not exactly the foot soldiers of revolution.
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One of my fellow Brutal Huggers thinks anti-SUV sentiment is wrong. Well, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration disagrees. When mid-size SUVs were compared to large passenger cars, the NHTSA discovered that
Mid-sized SUVs were nine times as likely to involve a rollover fatality and twice as likely to cause a fatality in occupants of other vehicles.
Maybe your SUV isn't evil because you're wasting resources and spewing pollution. But it's definitely evil because your decision to drive an SUV instead of a large car kills people. Murderer.
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