Apparently, the guy realized CNN was onto him, so the guy took down the offensive material and asked CNN not to publish his identity. CNN agreed on the condition that the guy not post similar material. If the guy posts offensive material again, CNN has a perfect right to publish his identity based on the material newly posted.
CNN is not out for leverage on the guy. They didn't tell him to do anything unrelated to what he actually did. The guy is free to say what he wants under the same conditions of anonymity that anyone else has, which, in this country, are almost never absolute.
Nobody is claiming the speech was illegal. However, the speaker apparently really doesn't want to be identified. CNN has a perfect right to identify someone making public statements about them.
However, you can say "If you do what I don't want, I'll post it." CNN is making no demands of money, goods, time, or services. They made a confidentiality agreement, at the asshole's request, and intend to live by it.
I've read that the theater company did indeed use Obama before Trump was sworn in. Nobody thought it was a big deal.
You could even say the same thing about Kathy Griffins severed head (Creative License). Again, had this been a Conservative and Obama, I'm sure there would be actual Jail time involved.
Empirically false. I saw comparable images of Obama that were never prosecuted. Killing politicians in effigy is an old tradition.
The difference here is that a certain President has this idea that people should automatically respect him, an idea I consider anti-American. He wants special treatment that other Presidents didn't even ask for.
You missed one thing: "Most states define extortion as the gaining of property or money by almost any kind of force, or threat of". You make a good case that CNN would be committing extortion if they were asking for money or property or services or something like that. They aren't.
No, CNN isn't demanding anything. Some guy behaved in an asshole manner, and didn't want to be identified. (Historical note: to the best of my knowledge, this sort of thing has always happened when attacking media.) CNN has a perfect right to identify the author, and the guy stopped being a public asshole. CNN is not asking for any goods or services or money, which would be illegal. CNN has an agreement with the guy, and will assume that it's all off if the guy breaks it.
That may well be legal. Lying to the guy's wife might not be, depending on whether you had good reason to think the guy was cheating with a transexual (what does that matter?) midget prostitute, and depending on whether real harm results. (You can tell my wife that I'm cheating, if you like. I know who she'll believe.)
What you've shown is that expansion in a particular direction is something that can happen. That's not really useful to validate slippery-slope arguments.
I haven't seen people changing gender by the month, or asking for special treatment because of gender. There are people who are unhappy because they get special treatment directed against them. Human society is sufficiently complicated that I think it's better to focus on problems we know we have.
I got annoyed at the DFL (Democratic, really) party in my state mandating exact male/female (masculine/feminine?) balance, so I took pleasure in voting for people who described themselves as non-binary for party roles.
Note that the passion for the subject matter has different meanings for elementary schools, high schools, and colleges, since freedom to choose subject matter increases. When I taught introductory programming in college, if someone didn't want to be there, that was cool. If a student never turned in work, I'd flunk the student, no sweat. That's not realistic for elementary school teachers.
Knowing that home-schooled kids do better on average doesn't say that home schooling is a good idea. We'd need to compare it to other schools, but select only students with parents that are involved in the kids' schoolwork and progress.
You're talking about one break that is centered around a holiday that has been very much secularized over the years. The same is true of Thanksgiving. There are no strictly Christian holidays that people normally get off.
I agree with you on the 20-minute break. When I was in school, I could have used another 20-minute daily break, although not for prayer.
Actually, only about 70% of people in the US identify as Christian, and that's probably an overestimate, since it's easy and safe to answer "Christian" to questions of religion. Anyway, it's not a vast majority. Lots of the founders left no positive evidence of being Christian. Soldiers do tend to be Christian. In any case, what you're discussing is history and current events, not religion.
Our laws are not based on the Ten Commandments. It's perfectly legal to have other (or no) gods, make graven images, ignore the Sabbath day, forget about Mom and Dad, covet what you like, swear, and generally to lie and commit adultery. The remaining Commandments are pretty obvious in nature, things like not killing or stealing. Some of the Commandments are, in fact, unconstitutional in the US.
Legally, rights do not come from the state (there's lists of rights considered pre-existing that may not be infringed), but no source is claimed. At least 30% of US citizens don't think their rights come from that particular god.
And, against that, we have false witness being borne against the ACLU, and your unsupported claim.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to any sufficiently large closed system, regardless of intelligence or life. Local variations happen in complex systems.
Many more mutations are bad than are good, but the bad ones tend to be bred out of the species while the good ones accumulate. New species arise through evolution, although not at the rate they're going extinct now. As a species, we're an extinction level event, and it will take several million years to develop new species. There have been mass extinctions before.
Since logic dictates that explosions do not happen without a cause
This is your first mistake. Logic doesn't dictate anything. Assumptions (axioms, postulates, whatever) dictate things through logic. We see causality in normal life, but it turns out to break down in quantum mechanics. Conditions after the Big Bang were very different from what we've got today, so there's no reason to think causality is necessary. If you study physics, you'll realize that the things you assume about the world don't necessarily apply on all scales.
The Judeo-Christian God claims nothing. Lots of humans have claimed things on his behalf. The presence of fossils indicates that there was no major wipeout of land species, since we have reasonable continuity from archaic times to now. The presence of sea fossils at high elevation is because the rock formations were upthrust. Learn something about plate tectonics.
You claim all the events of the Bible as historical record (despite lots of bogus historical accounts - tens of thousands of people were at Cannae, and that didn't stop Livy's account from being nonsense), and disregard similar literature elsewhere. If the number of flood myths is significant, why not other sacred literature of other religions? Much of the Bible was written long after the putative events occurred, and the writers were sufficiently sophisticated to use metaphors. There is textual evidence, I'm told, that some parts were inserted later and may be spurious. (I get my information on much of this from an Episcopal priest and her husband. Many of the sermons of hers I've heard are about what the New Testament really says, based on her knowledge of the appropriate Greek and her study of the history.)
There is no objective evidence of Biblical literalism, and plenty of evidence against it. If you're going to stick to it, this conversation is never going to be useful.
Your knowledge of other religions appears to be shallow, and I'd like to know why you think "reality is based on perception" is demonstrably false.
No thanks, I will take the one supported by real science and millions of witnesses.
Go ahead. Any time. I'm not sure how you justify your belief in Creationism though.
There is no evidence or scientific tests that have demonstrated life can come from non life (spontaneous generation).
Which means nothing. We're talking about an event that may happen once per planet in half a billion years, involving things we do not fully understand. There is nothing to suggest that it didn't happen. And, of course, the Theory of Evolution assumes that we have life and examines what happens to it over the eons.
Biological evolution doesn't happen and has never been observed either (a banana becoming a dog).
Creating a new species in life-forms that advanced typically takes a few million years, so you're going to have to be patient. We have observed a new species of bacterium evolving in a lab.
Your grasp of science is very weak if you think that imagination is a substitute for evidence, testing, and results.
You're claiming that what you can't imagine is impossible. We're talking about what's possible here, not what's completely nailed down. If you want to talk about irreducible complexity, name something and I'll see about finding how it might have happened. Fuzzy spots in a scientific theory are completely normal, although obvious spots for further investigation and refinement and possible flaws in the theory.
That's still over $13K a year, which is almost certainly greater than disposable income at $55K/year household income. Certainly $26K/year is unattainable for a median-income household, the type that often has two or more kids. I didn't see any sort of source in the article you linked to, so my conclusion is that it's hogwash.
No, private markets in which rights-of-way are traded.
Private markets? Who sets the rules? If it's every piece of land is owned by somebody and all rights-of-way must be negotiated, nothing will get done. That's why we have public property.
It's expensive to run last-mile connectivity. It's a natural monopoly, and the only reason many people have two broadband choices is because traditionally cable TV and phone service were two separate services. You might want to keep your eyes on the sky and have your DeLameter on you at all times.
The sunlight falling on the object goes down with the square of the distance to the Sun, and what we get of the sunlight goes down with the square of the distance back here. For objects that far away, distance to Earth and the Sun is about the same, and the amount of reflected light we get from it does go down with the fourth power of the distance.
In other countries, the loser of the litigation pays all the legal costs. This discourages frivolous litigation.
It discourages litigation, not just frivolous litigation. If I have a legitimate complaint against a company, and figure I've got an 80% chance of winning (so it isn't frivolous), I would be taking a 20% chance of paying the company's legal fees, likely considerably greater than mine, and possibly going bankrupt. If the judge awards costs and fees to someone with a legitimately frivolous case, that's fine.
If I want to live in a city, I've got numerous choices. I have a choice of many, many cities. I can buy a house or a condo or rent an apartment, to name only three options, and I can deal with a large variety of landlords and realtors. If I want broadband internet, I have three choices, two of them possibly good, and that's better than a lot of the country has.
There are engineering and business solutions, all right. They involve having a last-mile provider, probably a regulated monopoly, who offers connectivity for hire to anyone who wants it.
Exactly what do you envision? Permission for anyone to put whatever they like on public rights-of-way? Should Joe's Bait Shop And Internet Connectivity be allowed to dig a trench across my driveway whenever they feel like it? Burden utility poles until they fall over in a stiff wind? Drop the "market will solve it" noise and suggest specifics.
You can challenge the clause in court, true. The court will rule against you, and all you will have accomplished is to make your lawyer slightly richer. Unfortunately, in the US, Congress has made binding arbitration legal, and the Supreme Court has not only agreed, but extended how the Congressional act applies to state law.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently, the guy realized CNN was onto him, so the guy took down the offensive material and asked CNN not to publish his identity. CNN agreed on the condition that the guy not post similar material. If the guy posts offensive material again, CNN has a perfect right to publish his identity based on the material newly posted.
CNN is not out for leverage on the guy. They didn't tell him to do anything unrelated to what he actually did. The guy is free to say what he wants under the same conditions of anonymity that anyone else has, which, in this country, are almost never absolute.
Nobody is claiming the speech was illegal. However, the speaker apparently really doesn't want to be identified. CNN has a perfect right to identify someone making public statements about them.
However, you can say "If you do what I don't want, I'll post it." CNN is making no demands of money, goods, time, or services. They made a confidentiality agreement, at the asshole's request, and intend to live by it.
I've read that the theater company did indeed use Obama before Trump was sworn in. Nobody thought it was a big deal.
Empirically false. I saw comparable images of Obama that were never prosecuted. Killing politicians in effigy is an old tradition.
The difference here is that a certain President has this idea that people should automatically respect him, an idea I consider anti-American. He wants special treatment that other Presidents didn't even ask for.
You missed one thing: "Most states define extortion as the gaining of property or money by almost any kind of force, or threat of". You make a good case that CNN would be committing extortion if they were asking for money or property or services or something like that. They aren't.
No, CNN isn't demanding anything. Some guy behaved in an asshole manner, and didn't want to be identified. (Historical note: to the best of my knowledge, this sort of thing has always happened when attacking media.) CNN has a perfect right to identify the author, and the guy stopped being a public asshole. CNN is not asking for any goods or services or money, which would be illegal. CNN has an agreement with the guy, and will assume that it's all off if the guy breaks it.
That may well be legal. Lying to the guy's wife might not be, depending on whether you had good reason to think the guy was cheating with a transexual (what does that matter?) midget prostitute, and depending on whether real harm results. (You can tell my wife that I'm cheating, if you like. I know who she'll believe.)
Nothing's changed. It was always a bad idea to pick a fight with the media, because they'd defend their own.
What you've shown is that expansion in a particular direction is something that can happen. That's not really useful to validate slippery-slope arguments.
I haven't seen people changing gender by the month, or asking for special treatment because of gender. There are people who are unhappy because they get special treatment directed against them. Human society is sufficiently complicated that I think it's better to focus on problems we know we have.
I got annoyed at the DFL (Democratic, really) party in my state mandating exact male/female (masculine/feminine?) balance, so I took pleasure in voting for people who described themselves as non-binary for party roles.
Note that the passion for the subject matter has different meanings for elementary schools, high schools, and colleges, since freedom to choose subject matter increases. When I taught introductory programming in college, if someone didn't want to be there, that was cool. If a student never turned in work, I'd flunk the student, no sweat. That's not realistic for elementary school teachers.
Knowing that home-schooled kids do better on average doesn't say that home schooling is a good idea. We'd need to compare it to other schools, but select only students with parents that are involved in the kids' schoolwork and progress.
You're talking about one break that is centered around a holiday that has been very much secularized over the years. The same is true of Thanksgiving. There are no strictly Christian holidays that people normally get off.
I agree with you on the 20-minute break. When I was in school, I could have used another 20-minute daily break, although not for prayer.
Sure. It's easy to find authorities on things that are settled. Most of them aren't politicians.
Actually, only about 70% of people in the US identify as Christian, and that's probably an overestimate, since it's easy and safe to answer "Christian" to questions of religion. Anyway, it's not a vast majority. Lots of the founders left no positive evidence of being Christian. Soldiers do tend to be Christian. In any case, what you're discussing is history and current events, not religion.
Our laws are not based on the Ten Commandments. It's perfectly legal to have other (or no) gods, make graven images, ignore the Sabbath day, forget about Mom and Dad, covet what you like, swear, and generally to lie and commit adultery. The remaining Commandments are pretty obvious in nature, things like not killing or stealing. Some of the Commandments are, in fact, unconstitutional in the US.
Legally, rights do not come from the state (there's lists of rights considered pre-existing that may not be infringed), but no source is claimed. At least 30% of US citizens don't think their rights come from that particular god.
And, against that, we have false witness being borne against the ACLU, and your unsupported claim.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to any sufficiently large closed system, regardless of intelligence or life. Local variations happen in complex systems.
Many more mutations are bad than are good, but the bad ones tend to be bred out of the species while the good ones accumulate. New species arise through evolution, although not at the rate they're going extinct now. As a species, we're an extinction level event, and it will take several million years to develop new species. There have been mass extinctions before.
This is your first mistake. Logic doesn't dictate anything. Assumptions (axioms, postulates, whatever) dictate things through logic. We see causality in normal life, but it turns out to break down in quantum mechanics. Conditions after the Big Bang were very different from what we've got today, so there's no reason to think causality is necessary. If you study physics, you'll realize that the things you assume about the world don't necessarily apply on all scales.
The Judeo-Christian God claims nothing. Lots of humans have claimed things on his behalf. The presence of fossils indicates that there was no major wipeout of land species, since we have reasonable continuity from archaic times to now. The presence of sea fossils at high elevation is because the rock formations were upthrust. Learn something about plate tectonics.
You claim all the events of the Bible as historical record (despite lots of bogus historical accounts - tens of thousands of people were at Cannae, and that didn't stop Livy's account from being nonsense), and disregard similar literature elsewhere. If the number of flood myths is significant, why not other sacred literature of other religions? Much of the Bible was written long after the putative events occurred, and the writers were sufficiently sophisticated to use metaphors. There is textual evidence, I'm told, that some parts were inserted later and may be spurious. (I get my information on much of this from an Episcopal priest and her husband. Many of the sermons of hers I've heard are about what the New Testament really says, based on her knowledge of the appropriate Greek and her study of the history.)
There is no objective evidence of Biblical literalism, and plenty of evidence against it. If you're going to stick to it, this conversation is never going to be useful.
Your knowledge of other religions appears to be shallow, and I'd like to know why you think "reality is based on perception" is demonstrably false.
Go ahead. Any time. I'm not sure how you justify your belief in Creationism though.
Which means nothing. We're talking about an event that may happen once per planet in half a billion years, involving things we do not fully understand. There is nothing to suggest that it didn't happen. And, of course, the Theory of Evolution assumes that we have life and examines what happens to it over the eons.
Creating a new species in life-forms that advanced typically takes a few million years, so you're going to have to be patient. We have observed a new species of bacterium evolving in a lab.
You're claiming that what you can't imagine is impossible. We're talking about what's possible here, not what's completely nailed down. If you want to talk about irreducible complexity, name something and I'll see about finding how it might have happened. Fuzzy spots in a scientific theory are completely normal, although obvious spots for further investigation and refinement and possible flaws in the theory.
That's still over $13K a year, which is almost certainly greater than disposable income at $55K/year household income. Certainly $26K/year is unattainable for a median-income household, the type that often has two or more kids. I didn't see any sort of source in the article you linked to, so my conclusion is that it's hogwash.
Private markets? Who sets the rules? If it's every piece of land is owned by somebody and all rights-of-way must be negotiated, nothing will get done. That's why we have public property.
It's expensive to run last-mile connectivity. It's a natural monopoly, and the only reason many people have two broadband choices is because traditionally cable TV and phone service were two separate services. You might want to keep your eyes on the sky and have your DeLameter on you at all times.
The sunlight falling on the object goes down with the square of the distance to the Sun, and what we get of the sunlight goes down with the square of the distance back here. For objects that far away, distance to Earth and the Sun is about the same, and the amount of reflected light we get from it does go down with the fourth power of the distance.
It discourages litigation, not just frivolous litigation. If I have a legitimate complaint against a company, and figure I've got an 80% chance of winning (so it isn't frivolous), I would be taking a 20% chance of paying the company's legal fees, likely considerably greater than mine, and possibly going bankrupt. If the judge awards costs and fees to someone with a legitimately frivolous case, that's fine.
If I want to live in a city, I've got numerous choices. I have a choice of many, many cities. I can buy a house or a condo or rent an apartment, to name only three options, and I can deal with a large variety of landlords and realtors. If I want broadband internet, I have three choices, two of them possibly good, and that's better than a lot of the country has.
There are engineering and business solutions, all right. They involve having a last-mile provider, probably a regulated monopoly, who offers connectivity for hire to anyone who wants it.
Exactly what do you envision? Permission for anyone to put whatever they like on public rights-of-way? Should Joe's Bait Shop And Internet Connectivity be allowed to dig a trench across my driveway whenever they feel like it? Burden utility poles until they fall over in a stiff wind? Drop the "market will solve it" noise and suggest specifics.
Mandatory arbitration clauses are legal in the US. Judges below the Supreme Court have no flexibility here.
You can challenge the clause in court, true. The court will rule against you, and all you will have accomplished is to make your lawyer slightly richer. Unfortunately, in the US, Congress has made binding arbitration legal, and the Supreme Court has not only agreed, but extended how the Congressional act applies to state law.