I disagree, mainly for the reason I stated elsewhere, namely that artificial persons are a silly concept that, among other things obscures the true beneficiary of the business. Not to go all Marxist on you or anything (because I'm not a Marxist) but the dude or dudes who own the means of production of a commodity, either through stock or direct ownership, make money directly from the surplus value of their worker's wages. The ability to collect that surplus (and the sturctures that make such a collection possible) are the things that proceed directly from infrastructure improvements which exist only because of taxes paid by everyone including...wait for it!...the workers themselves! It is absolutely absurd to say that the worker gains an equal benefit per dollar in taxes paid to the individual who is fortunate enough to own shares or stake in the company that produces wealth directly for him or her. Marxism is dumb because the solutions it suggests are dumb; as for the problems it identifies, I would call them more or less spot-on. Besides, isn't it a relatively capitalist position that one should 'pay for what you get' and conversely that one 'gets what he pays for'? I think disproportionate tax burdens bring these principles into closer consonance with reality (something which theories, Capitalist and Marxist both, fail with pretty miserably).
This is why: information, and choice based upon information, is the key to all moral decisions. To take the example at hand: Warren Buffett wishes to donate four-fifth of his income to charities. This action would range from extremely moral to extremely stupid, depending on the starting quantity of cash and the target charities. If Wraren Buffett was (as he is) a Billionaire, four-fifths of his income is an appropriate amopunt to donate, even just from your success viewpoint, as the remaining sum he possesses would still be plenty for him to do pretty much whatever he wished to do. If he were, on the other hand (to indulge in a counterfactual) a mimimun-wage burger flipper, donating four-fifths of his income would be a suicidal act. Likewise, donating to a charity that seeks to save lives would be morally more upright than donating to the Steve Jobs Retirement Fund (despite what the haters believe, Jobs' continued existence does not, in fact, kill people directly.)
Information (in this case, two relevant pieces) makes the difference between morality and stupidity. In reality, such moral choices depend upon many more various pieces of information and a more refined capacity of chice than this admittedly simplified example. No program, nor program principle, could allow a mechanized choice in a situation where the necessary correlations between pieces of information is highly intuitive. No moral choice can exist in an environment bereft of decidable propositions.
My major non-technical problem with your conception, I think, stems from the presupposition that success is the proper goal of moral action. I doubt, if the universe is in some sense an instantiation of a computational algorithm, that that algorithm would be optimized for the benefit of little old us (or even optimizable by little old us). If there is such a program, that program's optimized solution probably has no applicability for us, or if it did, there is no guaratee it would be healthy for us.
I very strongly suspect (especially with your view of a computational universe) that our perspectives are simply fundamentally incompatible. Nevertheless, this has been a stimulating exchange so far.;)
...and yours and mine don't correspond. I would criticize your conception of morality as lacking an important element (a proximate and conscious capacity for choice) which goes beyond a programmatic conception of "rules for success". I have a real problem believing that morality (proper choices, even suceessful choices, by your formulation) can be programmatized, because the situations that require moral choices are highly variable. Since a corporation is a union of several disparate moral agents, none of whom are required to shoulder actual moral responsibility for the action of the corporation as a whole (the twin magics of limited liability and compartmentalization of bureaucracy), there is no singular agent capable of applying the moral programme, if such a thing even exists. Thus, no moral center (that's what I meant by the concept).
Your last comment notwithstanding (because I mostly agree with it, except in situations of dire depression), the rest is an unfortunate simplification for something a little more complicated.
To me, the death tax, or in fact any tax that is levied more heavily towards those who are wealthier, is fair simply because wealthy people derive more benefit from each tax dollar spent proportionally than anyone else. Before you freak out and stop reading, consider:
A middle-class person who pays taxes to go to public school earns an education; a rich person who pays taxes to support a school gains...an educated and skilled workforce.
A middle-class person who pays car and gas taxes earns a road they may drive on; a rich person who pays those taxes gains...a transportation system that allows them to transport their company's goods to far-flung locations and markets.
And so forth. Any person who uses wealth to produce wealth (i.e. true Capitalists) are using the benefits of an infrastructure that most taxpayers can barely fathom. So, yeah, they get to pay a little more.
Hey, I'm right there with you regarding the utter stupidity of artifically incorporated persons, but I nonetheless insist that the law has little to do with the simple reality that a corporation, as such, cannot have a moral center, and so I refuse to assign it a moral valence. In fact, I would argue that this is precisely why corporations as persons is a dumb idea: it is missing a key quality that the law assumes all persons responsive to it possess.
Gates isn't a nazi but he uses nazi tactics? Microsoft is evil? WTF??? My parents occasionally give me presents too. Nazi tactics? My boss runs a business that benefits 90% of people who uses her product, but has many unhappy customers due to a bad service ethic...is her company evil? Dude, get some perspective.
Good people do good things. And evil things. Bad people do bad things, and good things. It is not the result that assigns the morality, it is the approbation of the means, the intent, and total content of the person's character. I submit to you that you know basically none of these things about Bill Gates.
Oh, and p.s., Bill Gates, the person, is not isomorphic with Microsoft, the company; hasn't been since the halcyon days of, well, never. The company, if a company can be conceived as a group of people, was always more than him. I also take issue with the idea that a corporation, as an entity in itself, has a moral valence. People are good or evil; corporations are merely a mechanism for a group of people to do something efficiently in a capitalist system.
It would have been two paragraphs; same information, more concise package. It is ironic that computers encourage verbosity in writing as much as laziness in interaction. It is, I suppose, a different sort of laziness: it takes much more effort to convey information efficiently. I personally think the phenomenon is due to a few factors, including the ease of editing, coupled with a lack of real-space confinment for the writing, and also the relative increase in typing speed that relates typing more closely, speedwise, to thought and speech rather than the more plodding pace of hand-writing. Think about it: on AIM or other 'chat' software, the 'writing' is practically in real time, a tempo of delivery for which writing was never designed.
Irrational fear can be potent, and impotency is a great irrational fear of some men. It is little comfort to most that it is said the effect is temporary, since even if the chance is very slight that that assessment is wrong, who really wants to take that chance with their gonads? It's a bug, not a feature, if it truns out there are unintended long term effects!
But of course, if everyone in the world were sensible and logical about all things (including their gonads) then the decision to supress the data and hide the contraceptive effect is a bit silly. It is a minor market anti-hypertensive, but hot damn if it were marketed as a male contraceptive, cha-ching! I imagine that market is significantly larger (and the field is pretty much wide open).
However, it is scientific fact that global warming is due to a lack of pirates, so with the advent of a pirate party global warming will reverse itself!
Wow. Republicans must be pissing themselves with glee. Increase the number of pirates in the world? Why, I wouldn't be surprised if they set up PACs just to funnel money so they won't have to deal with that pesky 'Warming Issue'. Kind of like that other behemoth who funded the underdog run by the psycho art evangelists. Didn't the jolly roger fly under the Apple flag as well?
Oooh. Two sacred cows at once. There's blood everywhere...the Hindus must be furious.
My point was not that nobody would ever make laws that make sense; it was that (historically at least) those who have been empowered to make laws tend to make them on the principle of restricting that which they themselves fear they would do, had theer been more law. For these people, the only effective restriction to behavior is the law (call it a shriveled conscience) because for people this powerful to have been placed in a position to write laws, it is the only thing that they have experienced that can restrain their behavior. I do not have a negative view of the human race in general, only a dim view of what the taste of power does to us. Jack Thompson tries to destroy games because, I imagine, deep down he feels greatly threatened himself in the moral sense by the influence of pixelated boobies and simulated head-shots; he saw them once and they got him off, and he dearly doesn't want kids to be corrupted the way that seeing these thing might have done to him. Absurd speculation? Perhaps, but I can think of no other explanation that makes more sense.
It was qutie clear during the initial debate and ratification fo the Bill of Rights that they were to be understood (and in fact were very clearly written) as restrictions on the Federal Government only. "Congress shall make no law", etc., emphasis on "Congress". There is no evidence whatsoever that there was any other intent (and very few legal scholars believe that without the Fourteenth amendment they ever would); in fact, it is extremely likely that the Bill of Rights would never have been ratified had the states believed that its provisions applied to them: the point of the Bill of Rights was only to assure the states that their own protections (which were uneven but substantial in most cases) would not be abridged by the new and large federal government.
There was a very early US Supreme Court case, quite famous, by the name of Barron v. Baltimore (1833) which asked directly the question of whether the Bill of Rights could be applied to the states (in this case the takings clause of the Fifth amendment). The answer was no; there was no dissenting opinion. Before 1833 there had been no challenge whatsoever to the principle (it was thought pretty obvious).
People only pass laws to prevent behaviors that they can imagine themselves desiring to do. There is, of course, a far far smaller class of laws that exist not to indulge the repressive instinct by proxy, but rather to maintain the social order (do not kill, rape, maim, or steal), but in that category there truly is nothing new under the sun. For everything else, there is the moral crusader.
Ratification of the Civil Rights Amendments was extorted in most cases from the Southern state governments as the 'cost of readmittance' to the Union; they didn't 'ratify' them in any more significant a sense than a cashier 'gives' a robber money. In other words, the act is technically true as described, but emptied of all willful meaning.
Now, don't get me wrong, the 14th Amendment was one hot and happenin' piece of constitutional amending, enabling the protection of the rights of Corporations the country round (and later on, even some black people!) I just think that one ought to be honest about just how it became part of the Constitution. We should not fool ourselves into believing that it was in any way 'voluntary'.
Me, too. I was so disappointed. I would have enjoyed a discussion of the wide variety of freehand hard-copy editng implements. But I suppose that's cause I'm sick in the head. Then again, that there exists a sufficient number of people interested in the actual topic of the article does not speak well for general sanity, either.
I agree. Languages evolve despite any attempt to prevent or guide their evolution. What I do find interesting about the xs' vs. xs's style argument is that I see the first much more often in print, but the second is how nearly everyone pronounces it, leading to a curious divergence between written and spoken English. This is particularly curious since in most cases, the written language usually comforms to a more formal style than the spoken.
But both styles are now generally recognized as correct. Since english doesn't have the equivalent of an Academie Francaise (yes I know, no accents. Well, screw, high school French teachers of the world), thank goodness, it is possible for local variations in common usage to add to to the lexical and syntactic richness and flexibility of the language. For quite a while now, both the xs' and xs's forms have been taught in beginner and college english, and both are in widespread use.
Well, I bow to your amazing powers of deduction. No, wait, I don't, because you have no idea what you are talking about. First, we consulted with an attorney before we undertook the action; he supported our interpretation of the relevant statutes and case law. Second, when we were arraigned, we all pled not guilty (which is not something anyone but an absolute retard would do if they didn't have a case). Third, the charges were dropped due to the state having no case. We were careful, meticulous, did advance research, and consulted with experts. golly gee, if only we had done none of the things we actually did, you would be right! Congratulations.
We didn't sue for precisely the reasons I stated, and no others. Litigation would have interfered with our ability to get the University to change its policy willingly, which (I know this going to sound odd to a pugnacious fellow like yourself) was our first goal. The civilly disobedient action was the last of a long line of tactics, most of which relied on logical and legal argument and moral suasion, and none of which involved skating the ragged edge of the law. If we were the self-righteous prigs that your describe, we wouldn't have bothered with those more civilzed methods for upwards of two years prior to the event.
However, you seem to know much about self-righteousness and imbecility, and coupled with your stunning long-distance mind reading powers and that absolutely staggeringly stupendously gigantic chip on your shoulder, I'm sure you'll go far in life (that is, if you stop being an anonymous coward.) After all, there is nothing that can endear you more quickly to a person than to insult their honor and their work from the shadows with your eyes closed.
No, because as is usual the situation is always more complicated than it originally seems. The protests and indeeed the whole fight was over privacy and disclosure procedures in the student disciplinary system and in particular whether a defendant had the right to waive the right to a closed hearing if they wished for an open one (like if for example a student predicted a high probability that a closed door hearing would lead to getting railroaded by the school). According to RI law it was clearly the case that state disciplinary hearings did have this openable aspect (and it was indeed a State school) and the ambiguities revolved around FERPA (1974) and its proper application to the situation. Still, one must admit it is a very odd (at best) legal doctrine that says one cannot divest themselves of a right at will.
We miraculously found a defendant crazy enough to agree to be a test case (one fraternity was getting royally and unfairly shafted...hey, sometimes it is fair, so we had to be choosy) and we busted into the meeting armed with our legal theory (and an ass-load of local press), hence 'opening it' to the public as the fraternity had requested it be. The school threatedned to arrest us if we did it again. Armed with that comment of course we could lure quite a bit more media to the second one ('hey, they promised an arrest for you guys!'). Think pictures of students in formal attire being thrown up against the wall and frisked and led away en masse...it was a nice public relations coup (and despite appearences, the cops were extremely professional). So,as it turns out we wanted the school to arrest us, because that's what the school had threatened to do if we were to interfere in the school judicial proceeedings again. It was technically a false arrest, since the crime we were charged with was an unsustainable charge and we were asserting that the meeting itself was illegal (and you can't, after all, disturb a meeting in a legal sense if it wa never legal to begin with) and so we used most of the political capital from the fiasco to leverage the school into re-looking at the rules; suing would have looked vindictive. The situation was also complicated by many of the studnets who had been arrested being high-ranking members of the student government, who had to maintain the ability to work productively with the school adminsitration. And of course the final factor in why we did not sue is the same old 'got no cash' reason.
As you might imagine, all in all it was quite a fun time (and boy did I learn more about practical criminal procedure than I ever cared to!).
You have a most entertaining way of making me seem like an idiot.
That is a shame, because that was not my intent at all, nor do I think it particularly true, as a jury system is the best so far for a system addressing the practical epistemological problems of ascertaining motive and you made your point well; I was just (admittedly very crankily) pointing out that your point, which is normally fairly true, ceases to be so when the law is very broad and so invites an unwarranted amount of prosecutorial or other discretion, and is also rarely true when the current public trend is to 'care' about the particular crime at issue. But like I said, I'm kind of a bad person, and so I was probably much meaner than I should have been. Interestingly what you make as a descriptive point I would make as a normative one as an argument agaist the practice of general surveillance; namely, that before a person is charged with a crime someone should care about the infraction, which in turn as a entails someone noticing that a the crime ever happened. If nobody noticed enough to be harmed, it isn't a crime no matter how severe a technical violation it is (there are of course a handful of exceptions to this idea, but it is a general thrust).
You mean, build more prisons? But that's a growth industry! Good for the economy! And keeps the damned riff-raff locked away; heck, they could be out walkin' the streets! Kidding aside, ever since the drug war started in earnest, prison populations have exploded. If they find a juicy new class of people to lock away, it would be wise (if not morally vacuous) to buy stock in prison management and or construction contractors.
You are a very magical man (woman?)! I am in awe of your process, but I still fear your headcrabs. I also seem to recall that magical system having flaws of its own; the sampling process for example, biases towards people who can afford financially to participate in the process and are not wily enough to escape having to do it, and is nothing like a random sample because the parties are allowed to select for secret biases when the group is formed and that representative sample often has more care and concern for what the parties are wearing and their haircuts than the facts in evidence (or so I was told by my Trial Techniques professor; she was a D.A. and would get comments all the time about how red wasn't a good color for her from jurors and that they disliked how mean she was to the denedant by implying he did something bad.)
The current paradigm is throw a wide net, round them all up, and let prosecutors sort them out afterwards. It's the new-and-improved shotgun methodology of law enforcement. And it works! They are almost guaranteed to catch somebody doing something naughty. Once I was arrested during a protest at a university, and charged with 'Disturbing the Peace' along with several other folks. Only later did they realize that in the great state that I live in, the statute forbids them from using DtP for civil disobedience cases. So, after the arrest, they cast about for some other statutory violation to make stick (they failed). I imagine most of the system operates approximately as sloppily.
Don't count on it. WA state laws have no effect on blogs and/or bloggers located in other states
Don't count on that. Each state, via Article IV (section 2) of that fantastic federal constitution of ours provides for extradition between states, it is still not clear how juristidictional issues resolve (is the location of the crime client side? Server side? Both? Is there an interstate element (and hence under federal jurisdiction)?) What happens when a bank robber flees to the Dominican Republic? Do we throw up our hands and say 'well, he's just too damn wily for us!'?
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree, mainly for the reason I stated elsewhere, namely that artificial persons are a silly concept that, among other things obscures the true beneficiary of the business. Not to go all Marxist on you or anything (because I'm not a Marxist) but the dude or dudes who own the means of production of a commodity, either through stock or direct ownership, make money directly from the surplus value of their worker's wages. The ability to collect that surplus (and the sturctures that make such a collection possible) are the things that proceed directly from infrastructure improvements which exist only because of taxes paid by everyone including...wait for it!...the workers themselves! It is absolutely absurd to say that the worker gains an equal benefit per dollar in taxes paid to the individual who is fortunate enough to own shares or stake in the company that produces wealth directly for him or her. Marxism is dumb because the solutions it suggests are dumb; as for the problems it identifies, I would call them more or less spot-on. Besides, isn't it a relatively capitalist position that one should 'pay for what you get' and conversely that one 'gets what he pays for'? I think disproportionate tax burdens bring these principles into closer consonance with reality (something which theories, Capitalist and Marxist both, fail with pretty miserably).
This is why: information, and choice based upon information, is the key to all moral decisions. To take the example at hand: Warren Buffett wishes to donate four-fifth of his income to charities. This action would range from extremely moral to extremely stupid, depending on the starting quantity of cash and the target charities. If Wraren Buffett was (as he is) a Billionaire, four-fifths of his income is an appropriate amopunt to donate, even just from your success viewpoint, as the remaining sum he possesses would still be plenty for him to do pretty much whatever he wished to do. If he were, on the other hand (to indulge in a counterfactual) a mimimun-wage burger flipper, donating four-fifths of his income would be a suicidal act. Likewise, donating to a charity that seeks to save lives would be morally more upright than donating to the Steve Jobs Retirement Fund (despite what the haters believe, Jobs' continued existence does not, in fact, kill people directly.)
Information (in this case, two relevant pieces) makes the difference between morality and stupidity. In reality, such moral choices depend upon many more various pieces of information and a more refined capacity of chice than this admittedly simplified example. No program, nor program principle, could allow a mechanized choice in a situation where the necessary correlations between pieces of information is highly intuitive. No moral choice can exist in an environment bereft of decidable propositions.
My major non-technical problem with your conception, I think, stems from the presupposition that success is the proper goal of moral action. I doubt, if the universe is in some sense an instantiation of a computational algorithm, that that algorithm would be optimized for the benefit of little old us (or even optimizable by little old us). If there is such a program, that program's optimized solution probably has no applicability for us, or if it did, there is no guaratee it would be healthy for us.
I very strongly suspect (especially with your view of a computational universe) that our perspectives are simply fundamentally incompatible. Nevertheless, this has been a stimulating exchange so far. ;)
...and yours and mine don't correspond. I would criticize your conception of morality as lacking an important element (a proximate and conscious capacity for choice) which goes beyond a programmatic conception of "rules for success". I have a real problem believing that morality (proper choices, even suceessful choices, by your formulation) can be programmatized, because the situations that require moral choices are highly variable. Since a corporation is a union of several disparate moral agents, none of whom are required to shoulder actual moral responsibility for the action of the corporation as a whole (the twin magics of limited liability and compartmentalization of bureaucracy), there is no singular agent capable of applying the moral programme, if such a thing even exists. Thus, no moral center (that's what I meant by the concept).
Your last comment notwithstanding (because I mostly agree with it, except in situations of dire depression), the rest is an unfortunate simplification for something a little more complicated.
To me, the death tax, or in fact any tax that is levied more heavily towards those who are wealthier, is fair simply because wealthy people derive more benefit from each tax dollar spent proportionally than anyone else. Before you freak out and stop reading, consider:
A middle-class person who pays taxes to go to public school earns an education; a rich person who pays taxes to support a school gains...an educated and skilled workforce.
A middle-class person who pays car and gas taxes earns a road they may drive on; a rich person who pays those taxes gains...a transportation system that allows them to transport their company's goods to far-flung locations and markets.
And so forth. Any person who uses wealth to produce wealth (i.e. true Capitalists) are using the benefits of an infrastructure that most taxpayers can barely fathom. So, yeah, they get to pay a little more.
Hey, I'm right there with you regarding the utter stupidity of artifically incorporated persons, but I nonetheless insist that the law has little to do with the simple reality that a corporation, as such, cannot have a moral center, and so I refuse to assign it a moral valence. In fact, I would argue that this is precisely why corporations as persons is a dumb idea: it is missing a key quality that the law assumes all persons responsive to it possess.
Gates isn't a nazi but he uses nazi tactics? Microsoft is evil? WTF??? My parents occasionally give me presents too. Nazi tactics? My boss runs a business that benefits 90% of people who uses her product, but has many unhappy customers due to a bad service ethic...is her company evil? Dude, get some perspective.
Good people do good things. And evil things. Bad people do bad things, and good things. It is not the result that assigns the morality, it is the approbation of the means, the intent, and total content of the person's character. I submit to you that you know basically none of these things about Bill Gates.
Oh, and p.s., Bill Gates, the person, is not isomorphic with Microsoft, the company; hasn't been since the halcyon days of, well, never. The company, if a company can be conceived as a group of people, was always more than him. I also take issue with the idea that a corporation, as an entity in itself, has a moral valence. People are good or evil; corporations are merely a mechanism for a group of people to do something efficiently in a capitalist system.
n/t
It would have been two paragraphs; same information, more concise package. It is ironic that computers encourage verbosity in writing as much as laziness in interaction. It is, I suppose, a different sort of laziness: it takes much more effort to convey information efficiently. I personally think the phenomenon is due to a few factors, including the ease of editing, coupled with a lack of real-space confinment for the writing, and also the relative increase in typing speed that relates typing more closely, speedwise, to thought and speech rather than the more plodding pace of hand-writing. Think about it: on AIM or other 'chat' software, the 'writing' is practically in real time, a tempo of delivery for which writing was never designed.
Irrational fear can be potent, and impotency is a great irrational fear of some men. It is little comfort to most that it is said the effect is temporary, since even if the chance is very slight that that assessment is wrong, who really wants to take that chance with their gonads? It's a bug, not a feature, if it truns out there are unintended long term effects!
But of course, if everyone in the world were sensible and logical about all things (including their gonads) then the decision to supress the data and hide the contraceptive effect is a bit silly. It is a minor market anti-hypertensive, but hot damn if it were marketed as a male contraceptive, cha-ching! I imagine that market is significantly larger (and the field is pretty much wide open).
Of course. Ramen!
However, it is scientific fact that global warming is due to a lack of pirates, so with the advent of a pirate party global warming will reverse itself!
Wow. Republicans must be pissing themselves with glee. Increase the number of pirates in the world? Why, I wouldn't be surprised if they set up PACs just to funnel money so they won't have to deal with that pesky 'Warming Issue'. Kind of like that other behemoth who funded the underdog run by the psycho art evangelists. Didn't the jolly roger fly under the Apple flag as well?
Oooh. Two sacred cows at once. There's blood everywhere...the Hindus must be furious.
My point was not that nobody would ever make laws that make sense; it was that (historically at least) those who have been empowered to make laws tend to make them on the principle of restricting that which they themselves fear they would do, had theer been more law. For these people, the only effective restriction to behavior is the law (call it a shriveled conscience) because for people this powerful to have been placed in a position to write laws, it is the only thing that they have experienced that can restrain their behavior. I do not have a negative view of the human race in general, only a dim view of what the taste of power does to us. Jack Thompson tries to destroy games because, I imagine, deep down he feels greatly threatened himself in the moral sense by the influence of pixelated boobies and simulated head-shots; he saw them once and they got him off, and he dearly doesn't want kids to be corrupted the way that seeing these thing might have done to him. Absurd speculation? Perhaps, but I can think of no other explanation that makes more sense.
It was qutie clear during the initial debate and ratification fo the Bill of Rights that they were to be understood (and in fact were very clearly written) as restrictions on the Federal Government only. "Congress shall make no law", etc., emphasis on "Congress". There is no evidence whatsoever that there was any other intent (and very few legal scholars believe that without the Fourteenth amendment they ever would); in fact, it is extremely likely that the Bill of Rights would never have been ratified had the states believed that its provisions applied to them: the point of the Bill of Rights was only to assure the states that their own protections (which were uneven but substantial in most cases) would not be abridged by the new and large federal government.
There was a very early US Supreme Court case, quite famous, by the name of Barron v. Baltimore (1833) which asked directly the question of whether the Bill of Rights could be applied to the states (in this case the takings clause of the Fifth amendment). The answer was no; there was no dissenting opinion. Before 1833 there had been no challenge whatsoever to the principle (it was thought pretty obvious).
P.S., I'm a yankee.
People only pass laws to prevent behaviors that they can imagine themselves desiring to do. There is, of course, a far far smaller class of laws that exist not to indulge the repressive instinct by proxy, but rather to maintain the social order (do not kill, rape, maim, or steal), but in that category there truly is nothing new under the sun. For everything else, there is the moral crusader.
Ratification of the Civil Rights Amendments was extorted in most cases from the Southern state governments as the 'cost of readmittance' to the Union; they didn't 'ratify' them in any more significant a sense than a cashier 'gives' a robber money. In other words, the act is technically true as described, but emptied of all willful meaning.
Now, don't get me wrong, the 14th Amendment was one hot and happenin' piece of constitutional amending, enabling the protection of the rights of Corporations the country round (and later on, even some black people!) I just think that one ought to be honest about just how it became part of the Constitution. We should not fool ourselves into believing that it was in any way 'voluntary'.
Me, too. I was so disappointed. I would have enjoyed a discussion of the wide variety of freehand hard-copy editng implements. But I suppose that's cause I'm sick in the head. Then again, that there exists a sufficient number of people interested in the actual topic of the article does not speak well for general sanity, either.
I agree. Languages evolve despite any attempt to prevent or guide their evolution. What I do find interesting about the xs' vs. xs's style argument is that I see the first much more often in print, but the second is how nearly everyone pronounces it, leading to a curious divergence between written and spoken English. This is particularly curious since in most cases, the written language usually comforms to a more formal style than the spoken.
But both styles are now generally recognized as correct. Since english doesn't have the equivalent of an Academie Francaise (yes I know, no accents. Well, screw, high school French teachers of the world), thank goodness, it is possible for local variations in common usage to add to to the lexical and syntactic richness and flexibility of the language. For quite a while now, both the xs' and xs's forms have been taught in beginner and college english, and both are in widespread use.
Well, I bow to your amazing powers of deduction. No, wait, I don't, because you have no idea what you are talking about. First, we consulted with an attorney before we undertook the action; he supported our interpretation of the relevant statutes and case law. Second, when we were arraigned, we all pled not guilty (which is not something anyone but an absolute retard would do if they didn't have a case). Third, the charges were dropped due to the state having no case. We were careful, meticulous, did advance research, and consulted with experts. golly gee, if only we had done none of the things we actually did, you would be right! Congratulations.
We didn't sue for precisely the reasons I stated, and no others. Litigation would have interfered with our ability to get the University to change its policy willingly, which (I know this going to sound odd to a pugnacious fellow like yourself) was our first goal. The civilly disobedient action was the last of a long line of tactics, most of which relied on logical and legal argument and moral suasion, and none of which involved skating the ragged edge of the law. If we were the self-righteous prigs that your describe, we wouldn't have bothered with those more civilzed methods for upwards of two years prior to the event.
However, you seem to know much about self-righteousness and imbecility, and coupled with your stunning long-distance mind reading powers and that absolutely staggeringly stupendously gigantic chip on your shoulder, I'm sure you'll go far in life (that is, if you stop being an anonymous coward.) After all, there is nothing that can endear you more quickly to a person than to insult their honor and their work from the shadows with your eyes closed.
Did you sue them for false arrest?
No, because as is usual the situation is always more complicated than it originally seems. The protests and indeeed the whole fight was over privacy and disclosure procedures in the student disciplinary system and in particular whether a defendant had the right to waive the right to a closed hearing if they wished for an open one (like if for example a student predicted a high probability that a closed door hearing would lead to getting railroaded by the school). According to RI law it was clearly the case that state disciplinary hearings did have this openable aspect (and it was indeed a State school) and the ambiguities revolved around FERPA (1974) and its proper application to the situation. Still, one must admit it is a very odd (at best) legal doctrine that says one cannot divest themselves of a right at will.
We miraculously found a defendant crazy enough to agree to be a test case (one fraternity was getting royally and unfairly shafted...hey, sometimes it is fair, so we had to be choosy) and we busted into the meeting armed with our legal theory (and an ass-load of local press), hence 'opening it' to the public as the fraternity had requested it be. The school threatedned to arrest us if we did it again. Armed with that comment of course we could lure quite a bit more media to the second one ('hey, they promised an arrest for you guys!'). Think pictures of students in formal attire being thrown up against the wall and frisked and led away en masse...it was a nice public relations coup (and despite appearences, the cops were extremely professional). So,as it turns out we wanted the school to arrest us, because that's what the school had threatened to do if we were to interfere in the school judicial proceeedings again. It was technically a false arrest, since the crime we were charged with was an unsustainable charge and we were asserting that the meeting itself was illegal (and you can't, after all, disturb a meeting in a legal sense if it wa never legal to begin with) and so we used most of the political capital from the fiasco to leverage the school into re-looking at the rules; suing would have looked vindictive. The situation was also complicated by many of the studnets who had been arrested being high-ranking members of the student government, who had to maintain the ability to work productively with the school adminsitration. And of course the final factor in why we did not sue is the same old 'got no cash' reason.
As you might imagine, all in all it was quite a fun time (and boy did I learn more about practical criminal procedure than I ever cared to!).
You have a most entertaining way of making me seem like an idiot.
That is a shame, because that was not my intent at all, nor do I think it particularly true, as a jury system is the best so far for a system addressing the practical epistemological problems of ascertaining motive and you made your point well; I was just (admittedly very crankily) pointing out that your point, which is normally fairly true, ceases to be so when the law is very broad and so invites an unwarranted amount of prosecutorial or other discretion, and is also rarely true when the current public trend is to 'care' about the particular crime at issue. But like I said, I'm kind of a bad person, and so I was probably much meaner than I should have been. Interestingly what you make as a descriptive point I would make as a normative one as an argument agaist the practice of general surveillance; namely, that before a person is charged with a crime someone should care about the infraction, which in turn as a entails someone noticing that a the crime ever happened. If nobody noticed enough to be harmed, it isn't a crime no matter how severe a technical violation it is (there are of course a handful of exceptions to this idea, but it is a general thrust).
You mean, build more prisons? But that's a growth industry! Good for the economy! And keeps the damned riff-raff locked away; heck, they could be out walkin' the streets! Kidding aside, ever since the drug war started in earnest, prison populations have exploded. If they find a juicy new class of people to lock away, it would be wise (if not morally vacuous) to buy stock in prison management and or construction contractors.
You are a very magical man (woman?)! I am in awe of your process, but I still fear your headcrabs. I also seem to recall that magical system having flaws of its own; the sampling process for example, biases towards people who can afford financially to participate in the process and are not wily enough to escape having to do it, and is nothing like a random sample because the parties are allowed to select for secret biases when the group is formed and that representative sample often has more care and concern for what the parties are wearing and their haircuts than the facts in evidence (or so I was told by my Trial Techniques professor; she was a D.A. and would get comments all the time about how red wasn't a good color for her from jurors and that they disliked how mean she was to the denedant by implying he did something bad.)
The current paradigm is throw a wide net, round them all up, and let prosecutors sort them out afterwards. It's the new-and-improved shotgun methodology of law enforcement. And it works! They are almost guaranteed to catch somebody doing something naughty. Once I was arrested during a protest at a university, and charged with 'Disturbing the Peace' along with several other folks. Only later did they realize that in the great state that I live in, the statute forbids them from using DtP for civil disobedience cases. So, after the arrest, they cast about for some other statutory violation to make stick (they failed). I imagine most of the system operates approximately as sloppily.
Don't count on it. WA state laws have no effect on blogs and/or bloggers located in other states
Don't count on that. Each state, via Article IV (section 2) of that fantastic federal constitution of ours provides for extradition between states, it is still not clear how juristidictional issues resolve (is the location of the crime client side? Server side? Both? Is there an interstate element (and hence under federal jurisdiction)?) What happens when a bank robber flees to the Dominican Republic? Do we throw up our hands and say 'well, he's just too damn wily for us!'?