Yes. It is. It amazes me that people still cite Holmes's "fire in a crowded theater" bullshit from Schenck v. United States, where the SCOTUS trampled over Amendment I to criminalize an anti-draft protest.
If you shout "fire" in a theater when there is in fact a fire, you could be a hero. If you're on stage as part of the performance and fire is part of the plot of the play, you can shout "fire!". If shouting "fire" in a theater causes people to get trampled, the fault is on the architects or operators of the theater for not providing adequate exit routes, not the speaker. The only rightful liability someone falsely crying "fire" falsely has is civil, not criminal.
Using anonymous speech to say things that are harmful to OTHERS is cowardly and generally speaking not protected by the First Amendment nor should it.
Speech can only harm a person if it is credible. (E.g., I start a credible rumor about you, your reputation is damaged.) Anonymous speech is not credible.
And there is no exception in the First Amendment for "harmful" speech. Nor should there be. Sometimes speech should be harmful to people. "John Doe broke the law!" is harmful to John Doe, but if it's true it should certainly be protected.
Liberal folks, this is your issue. The conservatives and libertarians are all over preserving the right to speech. Where is your support for the same?
Liberals are by definition "all over preserving the right to speech".
Authoritarian progressives are not.
Authoritarian progressives have taken over some of the political and social organs often associated in popular thought with "liberalism". I think this can be traced back to the 1988 Presidential campaign, when Bush attacked Dukakis as a "card carrying member of the ACLU", and rather than pushing back with "yes, I support civil liberties as enshrined in the Bill of Rights -- you don't? Shame on you!", the Democrats began a retreat from those values.
Right, because the only possible alternative to capitalism is Maoism.
Communism, we can all lounge around navel gazing our way through coffee table philosophy books as equals.
Sure, an economic system based on the value and dignity of labor and the idea that the system should be run by and for workers rather than a state-backed aristocratic capitalist class, leads to lounging around all day navel gazing. Obviously.
But there is no such choice in the single most important sphere of all: the children education.
Really? There is no choice? No private schools, no charter schools, no home schooling?
I'm all in favor of arranging public education to grant more choice to students; smaller and more numerous schools and let a student go to any public school in their county/city/state (depending on how taxes are allocated) they like. Maybe even vouchers for secular private schools that take the voucher as the whole tuition (no public funds for religious education, no letting rich kids use tax dollars as partial payment at a school for the 1%ers), though I'm not sure on that point. But to claim that the current system offer no choice is simply inaccurate.
Since 1960-ies the per-pupil annual cost of public schools quadrupled (inflation-adjusted), while the quality of education remains the same (if it has not gotten worse).
Public schools have increased the array of services provided -- free and reduced-price meals, special education, vocational education, and services for disabled or ESL students -- in that time.
Essentially, that inflated number is based on questionable surveys which often fail to distinguish between a regrettable drunken hookup and rape, and is not just about rape but about behavior ranging from grabbing a woman's butt on up through attempted rape and actual rape. (Yes, grabbing someone's butt is bad. It's assault. It's unacceptable. It is not, however, rape.)
Is rape much more common than most people think? Yes. The data is murky but I would be surprised if the lifetime victimization rate for women was less than 5%, 1 in 20. Is it 25%, "eeny-meeny-miney-RAPE!" common? No.
And a teacher sending a student sexy messages over the internet is certainly a breach of professional conduct...but it's not rape.
The open ballot worked fine in the US for 100 years.
Are you seriously referring to the era of American history when slavery and Native American genocide were at their peak, when women and those of the wrong skin color were deprived of the vote, when worker revolts were regularly put down by armed force, when violence at the polls was a regular occurrence, as a time when voting "worked fine"?
The ahistoricalism of American political discourse never ceases to amaze me. Nor does the desire for technical fixes to social problems: to get voters to vote, we don't need on-line voting, we need better candidates, a reform of ballot access and campaign finance laws. (And a preference ballot and ad binding "none-of-the-above" option.)
You are confusing computing with computers. Indeed, a "computer" used to be a human being implementing algorithms with a mechanical adding machine, and then were tube-based electrical systems, and in the future may use something wholely other than semiconductors; computing, however, remains the same. A bubble sort is still a bubbble sort.
Brown was shot because he escalated the situation to a "high risk arrest" by going for the cop's gun. Period.
We have no evidence that Brown was trying to take Wilson's gun, only the word of a cop who's been caught lying before. Cops know that "he was going for my gun" are magic words to justify themselves when they commit murders.
And of course it's irrevelvant whether Brown tried to get control of Wilson's gun earlier in the confrontation. Brown was not trying to do so when he was murdered, he was (according to the majority of witness testimony) attempting to surender.
Yes there are good reasons for going to Mars. Greatest among them is to safeguard the species from any catestrophic impacts on Earth they would extinguish us.
No potential impact to Earth would render it less hospitable to life than Mars is. For speicies survival a set of fortified underground bunkers/mini-cities would be far more practical -- and unlike Mars, we do have the tech to do that.
The suggestion that we currently have the technology to colonize Mars is, in brief, ridiculous. No human has been move than 500 miles from Earth's surface in over four decades, and the farthest we've ever sent a human is under 250,000 miles; at its closest, Mars is 38,000,000 miles away. We do not know how to safely get a human being that distance through interplanetary space, and the first few people we try to send are quite likely to die.
That investment of blood and treasure might be worthwhile if there was something useful for humans to do when they got there, but there isn't. We'll get better scientific results by building and sending better robots.
There is no practical reason to send humans to Mars in the near-term -- say, next five centuries. Especially not when all of our resources are needed over the next century or so to put human civilization on a sustainable footing. We can probably do some useful stuff with humans in Earth orbit and maybe on Luna, but deep space is for robots.
The only justification to put humans on Mars is some vague hand-waving about "inspiration" -- i.e., it's a huge performance art project. Maybe someday humanity can afford that. But not now.
Science fiction isn't fiction that has elements that aren't science but might appeal to geeks who like science....Science fiction is science that is fictional. Very different animal and naturally restrictive.
You are using a defintion of a term, which is at odds with the defintions of that term used by almost every other educated native speaker of English. This will probably make it hard for you to communicate. You might want to look to that.
Luckily, he is James Risen from the New York Times... If he were James Rosen from Fox News...he would be labeled a criminal co-conspirator and flight risk by Eric Holder so that they could trace his phone calls and emails.
They snooped on Rosen. That's bad.
They snooped on Risen and threatened, repeatedly over the past six years, to lock him up. That's worse.
Both journalists were attempting to enable the American people to keep tabs on the U.S. government (supposedly "theirs", in reality owned by corporate interests and the security-industrial complex). Your partisan take on the matter is counter-factual.
We love to rag on cops, but they do a dangerous job
Farmers are more likely to be killed on the job than cops are, and most cops who die on the job die in vechicular accidents, not assaults. Cops' seige mentality is bullshit.
If you start firing cops for every mistake or worse, jailing them, you quickly run out of cops
(Of course a citizen watch would be a huge social/poltiical change. But I'm not sure anything less than a huge social/poltiical change would fix the problem.)
You and OP look to be in the same clan when he claims they're doing this "in a rather violent manner". Hyperbole much?
An unjustifed arrest is assault and kidnapping. It is a violent crime.
That's true even when the pigs (and those who trample citizen's rights deserve that epithet) don't apply chemical weapons or electrical torture devices, or beat citizens into submission, or use lethal force.
If I forced someone into a cage at gunpoint for no good reason, I would go to jail for a long time. The same should apply to a cop.
I guess you've never seen a regular web user. They don't write documents at the same time they're reading a website.
At home, perhaps their media masters have managed to turn the web into as passive and one-way a medium as television. But at work, even these drones are quite likely creating documents in a word processor, or e-mail messages in their MUA, or entering data into a web form, while referring to another document (e-mail message, website).
There is a reason that every physical desk is in landscape mode. Put documents next to each other.
And you're thinking that George Washington was one of those idiots who thought a little tyranny would work out well?
George Washington the aristocratic slaveholder who crushed the Whiskey Rebellion, screwing over farmers (including many Revolutionary War vets) to pay off bondholders? I'd say "a little tyranny would work out well" might be a decent description of his stance, sure.
Things that were illegal didn't suddenly become legal just because they weren't explicitly mentioned in the Constitution.
No, but unless they fell under the Constitutional powers of the feds, they remained state crimes, not federal ones.
OTOH, some things that were illegal in the states did suddenly become legal when the 14th Amendment was passed. Any laws restricting free speech, religious liberty, etc., as well as any provisions creating unequal protection, were null and void from that point on.
Of course, the state often operates under unconstitutional, null and void laws anyway, as much as it can get away with. Jim Crow was illegal, marriage inequality is illegal, much of the War on Drugs and the War on Guns and the War on Copying is illegal, but they've got the guns.
That statement is not consistent with Supreme Court jurisprudence.
Correct. The point is that SCOTUS jurisprudence often has fsck-all to do with the Constitution.
For example, the first amendment has been held *not* to give you the right to incite violence. (See Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire.)
A perfect example. Chaplinsky was engaging in exactly the sort of political speech that most requires protection and was in no way inciting violence. He called somebody a nasty name, that's all. The Court's absurd and immoral decision had neither law (i.e., the text of the Constitution) nor reason on its side.
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Who's stopping you? It's here.
Yes. It is. It amazes me that people still cite Holmes's "fire in a crowded theater" bullshit from Schenck v. United States, where the SCOTUS trampled over Amendment I to criminalize an anti-draft protest.
If you shout "fire" in a theater when there is in fact a fire, you could be a hero. If you're on stage as part of the performance and fire is part of the plot of the play, you can shout "fire!". If shouting "fire" in a theater causes people to get trampled, the fault is on the architects or operators of the theater for not providing adequate exit routes, not the speaker. The only rightful liability someone falsely crying "fire" falsely has is civil, not criminal.
Speech can only harm a person if it is credible. (E.g., I start a credible rumor about you, your reputation is damaged.) Anonymous speech is not credible.
And there is no exception in the First Amendment for "harmful" speech. Nor should there be. Sometimes speech should be harmful to people. "John Doe broke the law!" is harmful to John Doe, but if it's true it should certainly be protected.
Liberals are by definition "all over preserving the right to speech".
Authoritarian progressives are not.
Authoritarian progressives have taken over some of the political and social organs often associated in popular thought with "liberalism". I think this can be traced back to the 1988 Presidential campaign, when Bush attacked Dukakis as a "card carrying member of the ACLU", and rather than pushing back with "yes, I support civil liberties as enshrined in the Bill of Rights -- you don't? Shame on you!", the Democrats began a retreat from those values.
Right, because the only possible alternative to capitalism is Maoism.
Sure, an economic system based on the value and dignity of labor and the idea that the system should be run by and for workers rather than a state-backed aristocratic capitalist class, leads to lounging around all day navel gazing. Obviously.
Er...are you suggesting that the beginning of recorded history was somewhere near 1816? Or did you just put two random sentences together? :-)
Really? There is no choice? No private schools, no charter schools, no home schooling?
I'm all in favor of arranging public education to grant more choice to students; smaller and more numerous schools and let a student go to any public school in their county/city/state (depending on how taxes are allocated) they like. Maybe even vouchers for secular private schools that take the voucher as the whole tuition (no public funds for religious education, no letting rich kids use tax dollars as partial payment at a school for the 1%ers), though I'm not sure on that point. But to claim that the current system offer no choice is simply inaccurate.
Public schools have increased the array of services provided -- free and reduced-price meals, special education, vocational education, and services for disabled or ESL students -- in that time.
Overall, public schools have equivalent or better outcomes than private schools with the same level of spending per student.
And Texas's public school spending is near the bottom compared to other states, so trying to link this to some supposed overspending on schools does not fly.
Yes. For people who use real computers, middle button = "paste selected text".
People who use real computers but have not yet found the one true pointing device, the 4-button Logitech Marble Mouse Trackball.
Yes, actually, it does. That the idea of so-called "mental illness" obscures this is one of the problems with mislabeling various problems of living as diseases.
Really? You heard such an extraordinary claim, but apparently made zero effort to look into its validity?
Here you go. And here. And here.
Essentially, that inflated number is based on questionable surveys which often fail to distinguish between a regrettable drunken hookup and rape, and is not just about rape but about behavior ranging from grabbing a woman's butt on up through attempted rape and actual rape. (Yes, grabbing someone's butt is bad. It's assault. It's unacceptable. It is not, however, rape.)
Is rape much more common than most people think? Yes. The data is murky but I would be surprised if the lifetime victimization rate for women was less than 5%, 1 in 20. Is it 25%, "eeny-meeny-miney-RAPE!" common? No.
And a teacher sending a student sexy messages over the internet is certainly a breach of professional conduct...but it's not rape.
No, they're stuck with the universe Abrams left them. A universe which makes no sense, where starships are irrelevant because transporters can move people over interstellar distances (from Earth to the Klingon homeworld), and where a cure for death has been found in Khan's blood. Not to mention the absurd political situation, with a corrupt Starfleet operating accord to some bizarre system of personal prerogative of individual commanders rather than any rational chain of command.
Are you seriously referring to the era of American history when slavery and Native American genocide were at their peak, when women and those of the wrong skin color were deprived of the vote, when worker revolts were regularly put down by armed force, when violence at the polls was a regular occurrence, as a time when voting "worked fine"?
Here's how we used to vote. Any claim that this system "worked fine" is disconnected from reality.
The ahistoricalism of American political discourse never ceases to amaze me. Nor does the desire for technical fixes to social problems: to get voters to vote, we don't need on-line voting, we need better candidates, a reform of ballot access and campaign finance laws. (And a preference ballot and ad binding "none-of-the-above" option.)
What an amazing unprecedented breakthough idea.
You are confusing computing with computers. Indeed, a "computer" used to be a human being implementing algorithms with a mechanical adding machine, and then were tube-based electrical systems, and in the future may use something wholely other than semiconductors; computing, however, remains the same. A bubble sort is still a bubbble sort.
We have no evidence that Brown was trying to take Wilson's gun, only the word of a cop who's been caught lying before. Cops know that "he was going for my gun" are magic words to justify themselves when they commit murders.
And of course it's irrevelvant whether Brown tried to get control of Wilson's gun earlier in the confrontation. Brown was not trying to do so when he was murdered, he was (according to the majority of witness testimony) attempting to surender.
No potential impact to Earth would render it less hospitable to life than Mars is. For speicies survival a set of fortified underground bunkers/mini-cities would be far more practical -- and unlike Mars, we do have the tech to do that.
The suggestion that we currently have the technology to colonize Mars is, in brief, ridiculous. No human has been move than 500 miles from Earth's surface in over four decades, and the farthest we've ever sent a human is under 250,000 miles; at its closest, Mars is 38,000,000 miles away. We do not know how to safely get a human being that distance through interplanetary space, and the first few people we try to send are quite likely to die.
That investment of blood and treasure might be worthwhile if there was something useful for humans to do when they got there, but there isn't. We'll get better scientific results by building and sending better robots.
There is no practical reason to send humans to Mars in the near-term -- say, next five centuries. Especially not when all of our resources are needed over the next century or so to put human civilization on a sustainable footing. We can probably do some useful stuff with humans in Earth orbit and maybe on Luna, but deep space is for robots.
The only justification to put humans on Mars is some vague hand-waving about "inspiration" -- i.e., it's a huge performance art project. Maybe someday humanity can afford that. But not now.
You are using a defintion of a term, which is at odds with the defintions of that term used by almost every other educated native speaker of English. This will probably make it hard for you to communicate. You might want to look to that.
They snooped on Rosen. That's bad.
They snooped on Risen and threatened, repeatedly over the past six years, to lock him up. That's worse.
Both journalists were attempting to enable the American people to keep tabs on the U.S. government (supposedly "theirs", in reality owned by corporate interests and the security-industrial complex). Your partisan take on the matter is counter-factual.
Farmers are more likely to be killed on the job than cops are, and most cops who die on the job die in vechicular accidents, not assaults. Cops' seige mentality is bullshit.
(Of course a citizen watch would be a huge social/poltiical change. But I'm not sure anything less than a huge social/poltiical change would fix the problem.)
An unjustifed arrest is assault and kidnapping. It is a violent crime.
That's true even when the pigs (and those who trample citizen's rights deserve that epithet) don't apply chemical weapons or electrical torture devices, or beat citizens into submission, or use lethal force.
If I forced someone into a cage at gunpoint for no good reason, I would go to jail for a long time. The same should apply to a cop.
At home, perhaps their media masters have managed to turn the web into as passive and one-way a medium as television. But at work, even these drones are quite likely creating documents in a word processor, or e-mail messages in their MUA, or entering data into a web form, while referring to another document (e-mail message, website).
There is a reason that every physical desk is in landscape mode. Put documents next to each other.
George Washington the aristocratic slaveholder who crushed the Whiskey Rebellion, screwing over farmers (including many Revolutionary War vets) to pay off bondholders? I'd say "a little tyranny would work out well" might be a decent description of his stance, sure.
No, but unless they fell under the Constitutional powers of the feds, they remained state crimes, not federal ones.
OTOH, some things that were illegal in the states did suddenly become legal when the 14th Amendment was passed. Any laws restricting free speech, religious liberty, etc., as well as any provisions creating unequal protection, were null and void from that point on.
Of course, the state often operates under unconstitutional, null and void laws anyway, as much as it can get away with. Jim Crow was illegal, marriage inequality is illegal, much of the War on Drugs and the War on Guns and the War on Copying is illegal, but they've got the guns.
Correct. The point is that SCOTUS jurisprudence often has fsck-all to do with the Constitution.
A perfect example. Chaplinsky was engaging in exactly the sort of political speech that most requires protection and was in no way inciting violence. He called somebody a nasty name, that's all. The Court's absurd and immoral decision had neither law (i.e., the text of the Constitution) nor reason on its side.