Not providing a limited public forum based on the viewpoints represented in that forum is not a valid reason in my opinion; however, of your two examples, only the former triggers a First Amendment issue (viewpoint discrimination).
I can see why that is *more obviously* a first amendment violation, but I am actually arguing that, yes, removing a public space simply because the government does not like the message now being presented there *is* a first amendment violation and the Supreme Count needs to actually declare it as such.
I mean, the courts already do a similar thing with voting, and discrimination. They look at the *intended result*, it doesn't matter how 'neutrally' the law looks as text...did lawmakers forbid library patrons from wearing a hat because of some reasonable reason, or was it an attempt to bar Muslim women? Did a voting rule change about the number of people per precinct make any sense, or was it an attempt to make lines longer for black people?
And the nice thing is that Christianists literally have no censor on their mouth. When they remove the 'public display' area, shutting down the ten commandments and the satanic status, they will explain *exactly* that they're shutting that down to *stop a certain religious expression*, although they of course won't be able to conceptualize it as that. (They will call it 'stopping the evil of Satanism'.)
The Supreme Court should slap them upside the face for that behavior, and then override their clearly-non-religious-neutral law removing that public space, and make them keep up the damn statue.
Except that the decision will clearly *not* religion-neutral. It will be made, in fact, *specifically* to target a certain religion, to stop them from getting their message out.
Yes, that has not happened yet, but I can *psychically* predict the debate within the state government. 90% of it will be talking about how this specific statue must be stopped because Satan is evil. There will be no other justification for the law given. They are too dumb to *not* condemn themselves with their own words.
Just because a law the government passes is phrased in a neutral-sounding way does not mean that it is 'neutral'.
Hmmm. I am not sure that costly multi-year lawsuits that may be eventually lost, and thus the cost of removing the Decalogue, and thus (presumably) voters getting mad about the unnecessary expenses and throwing out those who put it there, is “literally no consequences”.
Except that voters *don't* get mad about that. Voters will decide that it was 'the fault' of the Satanists, and be happy about the fact the people they voted into office were able to delay things this long, even if they eventually lost and had to remove the ten commandments.
And it has *no* deterrent effect *at all*. Christianists in other locale are still perfectly willing to waste taxpayer's money with this bullshit.
IMO, these particular “Satanists” don’t *really* want a statue of Satan erected, at least not in any serious way. They want to point out the consequences of the way things are being handled. Which, mission accomplished. To simply have the Decalogue removed would be a “win” for them.
I think I have a fairly legitimate point that Christianists have had years to proselytize to passerbys, and Satanists (Satanistists?) have the *right* to 'proselytize' in exactly that way also. It's a basic matter of fairness. The government cannot just *stop* providing public space because 'the wrong people' start using them.
However, if the *Satanists* don't want to take this any further, that's another matter. We shall see.
I agree it seems unfair/unjust, but I’d rather they [stop doing unconstitutional activity X] rather than [hand off unconstitutional activity X to another group, in the name of 'fairness'].
Letting all people put up random statues is not *really* unconstitutional. I mean, it would be one thing if I was proposing something that actually harmed people (Like if the government only allowed Christians to hold office, I certainly wouldn't be proposing only allow non-Christians), but I'm not really seeing the harm here.
It's a 'government establishment of religion', but in the most trivial sense. Heck, I'm not really proposing they have to take down the ten commandments. I'm proposing they can't just *stop* providing a public space because someone tries to put up something they don't like.
The reason is that Christianists going to keep pulling this bullshit until they actually are faced with the consequences. But if everyone in the nation being able to point to the town in Oklahoma that was forced to keep a *Satanic statue* up for a decade because of their bullshit need to have the 'Thou shall have no other Gods before me' posed on *government land*, well, this will result in other idiotic proposals being rejected, and existing ones removed in a panic, immediately, before the courts can do the same thing to them.
Same with school prayer. Same with all other theocratic nonsense we have to put up with.
As it is now, there are literally no consequences....be theocratic as much as you want, because the worse case scenario is you have to eventually *stop*, after multi-year lawsuits.
No. That is not even slightly workable, or how the government is supposed to behave.
Basically, there needs to be a constitutional test when the government removes a public space, and that test should be 'Did that government remove that space *solely* because there was speech there it did not like? If so, no. Just no. The space remains open for a certain amount of time.'
Kim, its actually the new rich that are obsessed with letting everybody know home much money they have. The old rich tend to think thats all terribly boorish.
Or to put it another way, the new rich are signaling about how rich they are.
The old rich are signaling that everyone already knows how rich they are. They're literally signaling they don't need to signal.
In a superhero movie, there's a simple rule on how hard the bad guys must be to beat: They must be *slightly* harder to beat than it seems plausible the good guy can manage.
If they're too easy, the whole thing is stupid. If they're too far, you require all sorts of ass-pulls to justify how they can be beaten.
They need to be slightly too hard until some point in mid-battle, at which point something is revealed (Not an ass-pull, a Chekhov's gun from earlier. Or a *very* small ass-pull.) that can beat them.
This should repeat over and over in every battle. At least, for important battles. You can show them giving out an asskicking at the start of the movie to establish the character, or to establish new toys, or whatever.
Often this Chekhov's gun isn't even an ability or anything, it's just some *other* guy from before showing up to help.
Constantly ramping up the bad guy in new movies is just idiotic when it's the same hero with the same abilities. In fact, doing that often causes major problems in comic books where the heros get new powers as the plot demands, so it's exceptionally stupid for that to start infecting movie superheros.
The exact same thing happened in the craze that swept the South a decade ago.
An LGBT group want to start a club at school? Ban them! Oh, that's not allowed? Well, just Ban all clubs from the school!
Fuck this idea and the horse it rode in on.
There are legitimate and illegitimate reasons for the government to provide, and stop providing, public spaces and public access to things. 'Only people we like tend to use it' is not a valid reason to provide such access, and 'People we don't like sued for access and now they can use it also' is not a valid reason to *stop* providing access.
I wish we had a Supreme Court that I believed would be willing to state that.
Hilariously, this it the Supreme Court that said it was invalid for the Federal government to remove a specific level of Medicaid funding to the states, for perfectly valid reason of providing health care to everyone. But we all know they'd have no problem with any level of government just randomly refusing to provide funding to something because 'the Satanists' managed to get near it.
Is it weird that I'm imagining that sentence starting out like 'This! is! SPARTA!', but then transitioning into the song Oklahoma?
This! Is! Ooooo-klahoma where the wind comes sweeping down the plain...
But, anyway, this is the sort of thing you can see coming from a mile away, that literally everyone *except* the Christianists saw coming from a mile away.
And I would argue it would actually be a constitutional violation for them to *now* change the rules, remove the ten commandments, and disallow any moments there. You can't just change the rules when a 'religion you don't like' decides to put something up.
I'm sick and tired of theocratic assholes giving Christianity special privileges for *decades*, eventually being forced to open then up to everyone in theory, operating for another decade or so, and then removing those privileges *the second* anyone else steps in to use those privileges. No. Just no. Government does not get to operate that way.
The ten commandments got X years, the Satanic statue gets X years. Period.
Heh, I deleted exactly my paragraph about 'moral issue' from my post because I thought it was getting off-topic. Let me recreate and expand:
'Moral issue' for society does not mean 'I am calling you immoral'. Saying a society-wide problem, like poverty or lack of health care or human trafficking, is a moral issue means it is immoral for humanity *as a whole* to not respond to it.
Just because there are people out there who are poor, and poverty is a 'moral issue', does not demand that you, personally, give them all your money. It demands that we, *as society*, do something about those people. It demands we push for societal change.
A moral issue for society is not the same as a moral issue for a person. There are plenty of things that it is *really* stupid for society to do (For example, gutting our manufacturing base) that is rather hard to pin on any individual person, and the problem isn't any individual instance of it...the problem is that it happens so much. (In this example we have ended up with an entire society supported by loans instead of actual production.)
Incidentally, both sides seem to misunderstand when the other side says 'moral issue'. For example, if the religious right says gay marriage is a 'moral issue', it does not incidentally follow that they are saying any individual gay person is immoral, or even that a married gay couple are immoral, and the left should nor assume that. Saying it's a moral issue just means they think there is some collective harm to society that we, as society, need to deal with.
Of course, that caveat is ruined by the fact the religious right often do immediately go on to say that individual gay people are immoral. ;) I'm just saying it could in theory be a moral issue without them asserting anyone in particular is immoral. (For example, if we were experiencing a plummeting population that threatened extinction, it might be a moral issue that people were in gay marriages, although it would be saner to make the plummeting population itself the moral issue, because that makes solving it much easier.)
I've often noticed that conservatives often seem to have 'moral issues' with societal change that they aren't very good at explaining the bad results of. And so, unable to explain why the results are bad, they then start asserting that the people doing them are Bad(TM), full stop. This isn't to say all conservatives do that, but it's enough of a pattern to be a pattern. (And there are a few places liberals do the same thing, but nowhere near as often.)
The Al Gore thing is confusing me. I have *never* heard Al Gore demand I use less energy. (Telling me *how* to use less energy is not the same thing.) Al Gore instead appears to run around telling *governments* they should figure out how to use less energy.
And reducing home electricity use for *existing* homes, while a good idea, is pretty damn far down the list of useful energy saving things(1). So if Al Gore is a success, we will end up with a government that takes climate change seriously and makes various laws determined to reduce it. These laws almost certainly will not harm Al Gore's 'lifestyle', and probably not affect his house at all. At best, there will subsidies for repairs to make it more efficient, or add solar panels, which he can ignore if he wants. (I'm pretending that Al Gore *wants* an inefficient house.)
That's not really the same thing as the anti-gay politicians who are really gay, who seem to start with the promise that gay-ness is morally wrong, and here are some laws forbidding it, or making it harder. These laws, hell, the rhetoric itself, do certainly harm the gay politician, and all other gays.
1) Actually, home energy use in total is pretty far down the climate change problems. Residential use in total is only 11.4% of total energy use. To stop climate change, the best place to start is the massive 27% of energy used for transportation (And more than two thirds of that is just wasted to start with) and 23% used for industry.
It amazes me that people try to have rules that make the game longer, like the free parking thing or ignoring the auction thing.
Monopoly is _already_ much too long. The _entire point_ of the game is for people to buy up all the property and all but one person to run out of money.
Of course, this is a game that no one understands the best move (Except very very early in the game) is to stay in jail for as long as possible, so you don't lose money on rent.
I visited New York a few years ago, and compared to what everyone else seems to experience there, I had no problems with it. Why? Because I knew that that very trivial rule.
If you do not know where you're going, there are plenty of places to stop that are not the middle of the sidewalk.
I think, at this point, a goodly section of Americans have been trained, by religious chatter, that certain things are not 'morally acceptable'...while _they don't having any problem with them_.
In 2006, a study came out. _97%_ of Americans, who have had sex by age 44, first had sex outside marriage. If Republicans want a study to look at, perhaps they should look at _that_ study. American adults have sex, period. If they are not married, they still have sex, period. There is not actually any debate here.
This study, I suspect, is less 'That is wrong and I won't do it', it's 'Those yammering religious people say it's morally wrong, so whatever. I guess it is. But I, and the entire rest of the country, are still going to to it and not have the slightest problem with it.'
I think we're looking at the Overton window here, except instead of it moving, it has refused to move.(1) So, just like the the right movement of that has stupidly managed to classify most of the populations's belief as 'flaming liberal' (Which has, indeed, blown up in their face.), the religious idiots who get interviewed on TV have stupidly managed to classify the entire adult population as immoral. Which will, of course, blow up in their face when young people start leaving an increasingly irrelevant church. *hold hand to ear* Oh, nevermind, that already happened.
Please note the difference between those idiots and actual religious leaders who have realized that the Christianity actually has very little to say about sex outside marriage. Of course, actual religious leaders don't get airtime on the 'news' channels.
1) Although not really. Everyone likes to _pretend_ that no one had sex outside of marriage previously. Which is about as wrong as humanly possible. It's just, back then, everyone was married, so people just had _affairs_. Or, if they were unmarried, they got married in a hurry if they got pregnant.
Is Ross saying he agrees with this? It seems to me that he is simply pointing out an observation he has made (hence, why he calls it a ‘theory’).
It's an observation he has made _about himself_. It's not like he went out and asked people who had daughters, he extrapolated this from how he thinks.
Granted, I guess it would have been possible for him to stated this theory, and then said:
'But I realized that I, myself, was making assumptions about what my daughters would want out of life. Perhaps they instead will not wish to have children, or if they do, perhaps I will have been able to teach them to judge the character of people and find men who will not string them along, or perhaps they'll be lesbians and none of this will be relevant. And, even worse, perhaps my gender-based assumptions about what my daughters will want as adults that I am projecting onto them are _themselves_ part of the reason that adult women are 'unhappy' because they feel they are not fulfilling the roles society has set out for them, and they would be happier if I'd just let them live their own life as fully competent adults who will have their own life goals. And perhaps other parents of daughters should learn the same lessons, and make choices of what political party they support based on other things.'
But, uh...it _didn't_ end that way.
I have a feelimg much of that inclination is subconcious, so it doesn’t necessarily qualify as misogyny.
Women are just as diverse in their opinions as men, and it does not require misogyny, deep-seated, internalized or otherwise to prefer a conservative approach to sex.
Except the reason there's _misogyny_ there is that Russ seems to be okay with the idea it's only _daughters_ who shouldn't have sex.
If there's some aspect of society that gets upset that 'their' women are having sex, but _not_ upset that 'their' men are, that aspect is, ispo facto, misogynistic. They want to protect 'their' daughters from making her own choices. That is basically the explicit premise of this article, and the concept as utterly misogynistic as humanly possible, it is literally the basic _foundation_ of misogyny, that women must be kept under control.
Or, in this more liberal age where excising literally control is no longer possible thanks to feminist, the idea is that women should be taught to control _themselves_, as if they're trained dogs or something and can't decide these things on their own. They're like shopkeepers, and all those concerned men are walking around talking about how all of them need to raise the price of their vagina as a whole, because cheap vagina is destroying society. Don't women see that?!
It's a mode of thought with literally no respect for women and the fact that they might actually deserve to enjoy their relationships however they see fit. That women actually might enjoy having sex, or having whatever relationship they're actually in. And it assumes they're all too stupid to actually find someone who wants the same choices out of their relationship as they do, that if they actually want someone to have children with, they can't find it.
And, incidentally, I response in this manner _literally having read no other criticism of the article_. Seriously, this is like Feminism 101.
Some polls taking about how some minority of people wish we'd go back to more traditional relationships is rather irrelevant. Those polls are about whether or not unmarried couples should have sex, not whether or not 'women should be protected', aka, 'women do not get to make their own choices'. (Although laughing at the idea that women can't be misogynistic is a bit idiotic. Of course they can.)
And now that some people have pointed out that this only include perinatal deaths and not neonatal, I went back and read some of the comments on it.
It included a grand total of exactly 7 deaths.
And it included deaths that happen well in advance of actually arriving at the hospital! Read the comment 'Why include stillbirths before 28 weeks?'
Apparently, if you've chosen to have a home birth, your baby is less likely to die before it. (Or, as I pointed out, you're more likely to be wealthy, and have better health care overall.)
@dragonfrog
As I pointed out, that doesn't mean that births happening at home are safer _because_ they are happening at home. It could, just as easily, mean that births that are known in advance to be more difficult are choosing a hospital to happen in.
And, yes, I realize that the study only included hospital births that met eligibility requirement for home births, but just because the birth _could_ have happened at home doesn't mean, at some point, it was not mentioned that the birth could be problematic due to some specific thing, but not enough to disallow home birth, but they choose the hospital anyway, and, tada, it was indeed problematic.
Nor does there appear to be any way to measure the self-selection I mentioned...someone whose female relatives had medical problems during birth is probably more likely to select a hospital birth, _and_ is more likely to have medical problems herself.
And there's no indication they dealt with income levels. Infant survival is associated with prenatal care and nutrition levels, and that, obviously, is better the higher income the mother is. And while I am unsure about Canada, in the US home birth is associated with higher income levels.
It's a cliche, but correlation does not equal causation.
That may seem nitpicking, but that study is talking about a mortality rate difference of 30 out of 100,000...in a country where the mortality rate is actually 478 out of 100,000. So, yeah, some _very small_ bias directing safe births towards home and problematic births towards hospitals could be explaining that rather small difference.
And, looking at that, it's rather ignoring the other rather large elephant in the room that pro-home birth people need to cope with...if births that could have happened at home, but did not, have a 64 out of 100,000 mortality rate, and the _average_ mortality rate is 478 out of 100,000, that means there are a hell of a lot of births that could not happen at home to get that average up that high!
@dragonfrog
Except that, as I said, home births with a qualified midwife, at least in Canada, seem to be safer than hospital births.
'Safer' in the sense of success? Or safer in the sense of not needing medical attention? Those aren't really the same things.
In addition that question, I feel I must defend hospital births by pointing out three things:
Firstly, there are whole classes of births that basically can't allowed to be home births. Aka, pregnancies with known complications. Which, obviously, are more likely to have medical problems.
Likewise, I'd be interested to know if a home birth that was going okay, but went wrong and required the women being rushed to the hospital, counted as a 'home birth' or a 'hospital birth'.
Hospitals handle all births that are known in advance to be problematic, plus all births that become sufficiently problematic during the birth. Of course those births are 'less safe', statistically.
It's like pointing out that hospitals have incredibly high mortality rates per capita compared to any other location on the planet. Well, yeah, because that's where they put the people likely to die. Likewise, they put all births there that are going to be problematic, so of course births there are more problematic on average.
And that's ignoring any sort of selection skew by women. Certain genetic makeup allow easier birth than others, and people whose families (or they previously) had easier births might be self-selecting home births more often. Whereas people whose families (or they previously) had problems during childbirth might be more comfortable in a hospital. Correlation and causality might, in fact, be the other way around for at least some portion of the population...they're selecting home births because, normally, childbirth is easy for them.
There's all sorts of possible explanations of what is going on. Having a midwife coach a woman through childbirth in a relaxing environment might, or might not, be part of it. Where this happens might, or might not, be relevant.
OTOH, there's no reason _not_ to mimic home birth as much as possible, especially if it can be done without creating the specific risks that home birth has. The traditional way to get babies out of women, letting them come out naturally in their own time, as practiced for millions of years, can't be _that_ wrong.
So, in as many cases as possible, you get the benefit of not being in the building where all the sick people congregate and cough their germs all over the place, while at the same time having the facilities for treating sick people quickly accessible for the tiny percentage of cases where they’re needed…
Yeah, having babies in _hospitals_ seems epicly stupid. (Putting _anyone_ in a hospital who does not have a disease is rather stupid if avoidable.) As does trying to schedule busy doctors to do it.
The obvious solution seems to be to have some sort of live-in childbirth clinic staffed by midwives right next to a hospital. Where there can be 'home birth', or at least 'home-like birth' (Like I said, women and their spouse should _move in_, like it's a motel room, well in advance.), without all the problems of hospitals, but with all the benefits of emergency care if needed. As @wagon pointed out, the lack of quick medical care in case something goes wrong is the deal breaker for quite a lot of people.
@north
You run into the same dilemma though Kazzy, herd immunity so pervasive now that no restaurant or business would be willing to impose such a requirement on their own. The cost/benefit ratio is enormously skewed against such civic mindedness.
What we actually need is a pro-vax movement that demands a specific type of business (I think restaurant is a good choice), _require_ such a requirement, or the _pro-vax_ people will not patronize it.
Actually, you know what might work well? Considering how screwy the labor market it, how much it's a buyer's market, perhaps this hypothetical pro-vox movement should put pressure on businesses to _refuse to hire non-vaccinated people_. Especially for any sort of position that interacts with the public.
Granted, this wouldn't entirely solve the problem, as the problem is really parents not vaccinating kids, but _any_ pushback from the non-stupidity community would be a start.
The medical industry seems a bit biased towards medical intervention, _especially_ when it comes to births. There's really no reason to give as many c-sections as we do. Other countries have much less c-sections and just as few, or even fewer, problems.
However, the whole problem behind home births is the risk of complications. I find it rather baffling that we haven't managed a sane compromise to that yet, where women could give birth in a nice, reasonably environment of their own choosing, at their own pace...located within the walls of a hospital if something goes wrong.
Or something like hospice care, except the end result is supposed to be birth, and moving out, instead of death. Women move in when eight and a half weeks pregnant, it's sorta like a motel with outside doors and no restricted visiting hours (In fact, the spouse may be expected to move in also), but there is always a doctor there, multiple places for the actual birth, including things like water births, etc...
I honestly don't understand why women don't demand this. Instead, activists in the field tend to push for home births and whatnot. Which may be safe 95% of the time, but that last 5% makes people hesitate. If the way it worked was that the 5% could just be wheeled down the hall into an operating room, pretty much everyone would love the setup.
It probably doesn't exist because of soaring medical costs, actually, and the fact that hospitals seem to exist in some sort of alternate universe where every single thing (Including regular household items.) costs 100 times more than they should.
@shazbot9 It seems to me if these internships were busing tables at restaurants and working on retail store floors, they’d be called illegal labor practices, but when they’re getting coffee and filing stuff, they’re legal. Isn’t that a pretty shaky legal distinction?
They're NOT legal. Almost all unpaid internships in this country are illegal, period.
Internships are only allowed for unique educational experiences. Some sort of job training that people couldn't get in school.
And that problem is that we have convinced lots of young people to spend lots and lots of money amassing credentials even as the value of those credentials is being consistently eroded.
A term I use, but I've never seen anyone else use, is 'credential inflation'.
It's a little confusing (People think I'm talking about making up credentials), but I like it because it is caused by exactly the same thing as real inflation...too much supply chasing too little demand for too long.
The problem is, of course, unlike monetary inflation, which levels out with no real problems...here, the lack of demand is seriously hurting people.
Or, to put it another way, this isn't like the normal 'money supply is too big' inflation. This is essentially the 'We do not have enough food to feed people' inflation...the problem isn't really the inflation, but the inflation is a sign there is something seriously wrong. Trying to solve the _inflation_ is completely pointless. The problem is that people do not have enough food, or, rather, jobs.
I think most people have gotten the right end of this, but I'd like to point out something people missed:
Lunch breaks usually have a length required by law. 30 minutes, or an hour, depending.
By making them do security breaks during lunch, we've exited the dispute over whether or not that they should be paid for that time, and now we're in a universe where Amazon is actually going to have to let them leave _earlier_.
Amazon is not just stealing wages, they are not giving the required time for lunch breaks.
Also, in the case of required 15 minute breaks under the law, I believe you have to be allowed to leave the area, which means they have to go through security for _that_, also. (Which probably means, right now, they aren't even bothering to try.)
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Bringing Guns to Dinner”
The real question is whether this was a Stand Your Ground state or not.
If it was...well, the guy made Kazzy worried for his safety, didn't he? Kazzy could have just shot him, and finished his meal in peace.
On “This is… Oklahoma!”
Not providing a limited public forum based on the viewpoints represented in that forum is not a valid reason in my opinion; however, of your two examples, only the former triggers a First Amendment issue (viewpoint discrimination).
I can see why that is *more obviously* a first amendment violation, but I am actually arguing that, yes, removing a public space simply because the government does not like the message now being presented there *is* a first amendment violation and the Supreme Count needs to actually declare it as such.
I mean, the courts already do a similar thing with voting, and discrimination. They look at the *intended result*, it doesn't matter how 'neutrally' the law looks as text...did lawmakers forbid library patrons from wearing a hat because of some reasonable reason, or was it an attempt to bar Muslim women? Did a voting rule change about the number of people per precinct make any sense, or was it an attempt to make lines longer for black people?
And the nice thing is that Christianists literally have no censor on their mouth. When they remove the 'public display' area, shutting down the ten commandments and the satanic status, they will explain *exactly* that they're shutting that down to *stop a certain religious expression*, although they of course won't be able to conceptualize it as that. (They will call it 'stopping the evil of Satanism'.)
The Supreme Court should slap them upside the face for that behavior, and then override their clearly-non-religious-neutral law removing that public space, and make them keep up the damn statue.
"
Except that the decision will clearly *not* religion-neutral. It will be made, in fact, *specifically* to target a certain religion, to stop them from getting their message out.
Yes, that has not happened yet, but I can *psychically* predict the debate within the state government. 90% of it will be talking about how this specific statue must be stopped because Satan is evil. There will be no other justification for the law given. They are too dumb to *not* condemn themselves with their own words.
Just because a law the government passes is phrased in a neutral-sounding way does not mean that it is 'neutral'.
"
Hmmm. I am not sure that costly multi-year lawsuits that may be eventually lost, and thus the cost of removing the Decalogue, and thus (presumably) voters getting mad about the unnecessary expenses and throwing out those who put it there, is “literally no consequences”.
Except that voters *don't* get mad about that. Voters will decide that it was 'the fault' of the Satanists, and be happy about the fact the people they voted into office were able to delay things this long, even if they eventually lost and had to remove the ten commandments.
And it has *no* deterrent effect *at all*. Christianists in other locale are still perfectly willing to waste taxpayer's money with this bullshit.
IMO, these particular “Satanists” don’t *really* want a statue of Satan erected, at least not in any serious way. They want to point out the consequences of the way things are being handled. Which, mission accomplished. To simply have the Decalogue removed would be a “win” for them.
I think I have a fairly legitimate point that Christianists have had years to proselytize to passerbys, and Satanists (Satanistists?) have the *right* to 'proselytize' in exactly that way also. It's a basic matter of fairness. The government cannot just *stop* providing public space because 'the wrong people' start using them.
However, if the *Satanists* don't want to take this any further, that's another matter. We shall see.
"
I agree it seems unfair/unjust, but I’d rather they [stop doing unconstitutional activity X] rather than [hand off unconstitutional activity X to another group, in the name of 'fairness'].
Letting all people put up random statues is not *really* unconstitutional. I mean, it would be one thing if I was proposing something that actually harmed people (Like if the government only allowed Christians to hold office, I certainly wouldn't be proposing only allow non-Christians), but I'm not really seeing the harm here.
It's a 'government establishment of religion', but in the most trivial sense. Heck, I'm not really proposing they have to take down the ten commandments. I'm proposing they can't just *stop* providing a public space because someone tries to put up something they don't like.
The reason is that Christianists going to keep pulling this bullshit until they actually are faced with the consequences. But if everyone in the nation being able to point to the town in Oklahoma that was forced to keep a *Satanic statue* up for a decade because of their bullshit need to have the 'Thou shall have no other Gods before me' posed on *government land*, well, this will result in other idiotic proposals being rejected, and existing ones removed in a panic, immediately, before the courts can do the same thing to them.
Same with school prayer. Same with all other theocratic nonsense we have to put up with.
As it is now, there are literally no consequences....be theocratic as much as you want, because the worse case scenario is you have to eventually *stop*, after multi-year lawsuits.
No. That is not even slightly workable, or how the government is supposed to behave.
Basically, there needs to be a constitutional test when the government removes a public space, and that test should be 'Did that government remove that space *solely* because there was speech there it did not like? If so, no. Just no. The space remains open for a certain amount of time.'
On “A New Chapter in Empowering Girls”
Kim, its actually the new rich that are obsessed with letting everybody know home much money they have. The old rich tend to think thats all terribly boorish.
Or to put it another way, the new rich are signaling about how rich they are.
The old rich are signaling that everyone already knows how rich they are. They're literally signaling they don't need to signal.
On “Crooked Cops, Judge Dredd, and Arkham Origins”
In a superhero movie, there's a simple rule on how hard the bad guys must be to beat: They must be *slightly* harder to beat than it seems plausible the good guy can manage.
If they're too easy, the whole thing is stupid. If they're too far, you require all sorts of ass-pulls to justify how they can be beaten.
They need to be slightly too hard until some point in mid-battle, at which point something is revealed (Not an ass-pull, a Chekhov's gun from earlier. Or a *very* small ass-pull.) that can beat them.
This should repeat over and over in every battle. At least, for important battles. You can show them giving out an asskicking at the start of the movie to establish the character, or to establish new toys, or whatever.
Often this Chekhov's gun isn't even an ability or anything, it's just some *other* guy from before showing up to help.
Constantly ramping up the bad guy in new movies is just idiotic when it's the same hero with the same abilities. In fact, doing that often causes major problems in comic books where the heros get new powers as the plot demands, so it's exceptionally stupid for that to start infecting movie superheros.
On “This is… Oklahoma!”
The exact same thing happened in the craze that swept the South a decade ago.
An LGBT group want to start a club at school? Ban them! Oh, that's not allowed? Well, just Ban all clubs from the school!
Fuck this idea and the horse it rode in on.
There are legitimate and illegitimate reasons for the government to provide, and stop providing, public spaces and public access to things. 'Only people we like tend to use it' is not a valid reason to provide such access, and 'People we don't like sued for access and now they can use it also' is not a valid reason to *stop* providing access.
I wish we had a Supreme Court that I believed would be willing to state that.
Hilariously, this it the Supreme Court that said it was invalid for the Federal government to remove a specific level of Medicaid funding to the states, for perfectly valid reason of providing health care to everyone. But we all know they'd have no problem with any level of government just randomly refusing to provide funding to something because 'the Satanists' managed to get near it.
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This is… Oklahoma!
Is it weird that I'm imagining that sentence starting out like 'This! is! SPARTA!', but then transitioning into the song Oklahoma?
This! Is! Ooooo-klahoma where the wind comes sweeping down the plain...
But, anyway, this is the sort of thing you can see coming from a mile away, that literally everyone *except* the Christianists saw coming from a mile away.
And I would argue it would actually be a constitutional violation for them to *now* change the rules, remove the ten commandments, and disallow any moments there. You can't just change the rules when a 'religion you don't like' decides to put something up.
I'm sick and tired of theocratic assholes giving Christianity special privileges for *decades*, eventually being forced to open then up to everyone in theory, operating for another decade or so, and then removing those privileges *the second* anyone else steps in to use those privileges. No. Just no. Government does not get to operate that way.
The ten commandments got X years, the Satanic statue gets X years. Period.
On “I digress…”
Heh, I deleted exactly my paragraph about 'moral issue' from my post because I thought it was getting off-topic. Let me recreate and expand:
'Moral issue' for society does not mean 'I am calling you immoral'. Saying a society-wide problem, like poverty or lack of health care or human trafficking, is a moral issue means it is immoral for humanity *as a whole* to not respond to it.
Just because there are people out there who are poor, and poverty is a 'moral issue', does not demand that you, personally, give them all your money. It demands that we, *as society*, do something about those people. It demands we push for societal change.
A moral issue for society is not the same as a moral issue for a person. There are plenty of things that it is *really* stupid for society to do (For example, gutting our manufacturing base) that is rather hard to pin on any individual person, and the problem isn't any individual instance of it...the problem is that it happens so much. (In this example we have ended up with an entire society supported by loans instead of actual production.)
Incidentally, both sides seem to misunderstand when the other side says 'moral issue'. For example, if the religious right says gay marriage is a 'moral issue', it does not incidentally follow that they are saying any individual gay person is immoral, or even that a married gay couple are immoral, and the left should nor assume that. Saying it's a moral issue just means they think there is some collective harm to society that we, as society, need to deal with.
Of course, that caveat is ruined by the fact the religious right often do immediately go on to say that individual gay people are immoral. ;) I'm just saying it could in theory be a moral issue without them asserting anyone in particular is immoral. (For example, if we were experiencing a plummeting population that threatened extinction, it might be a moral issue that people were in gay marriages, although it would be saner to make the plummeting population itself the moral issue, because that makes solving it much easier.)
I've often noticed that conservatives often seem to have 'moral issues' with societal change that they aren't very good at explaining the bad results of. And so, unable to explain why the results are bad, they then start asserting that the people doing them are Bad(TM), full stop. This isn't to say all conservatives do that, but it's enough of a pattern to be a pattern. (And there are a few places liberals do the same thing, but nowhere near as often.)
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The Al Gore thing is confusing me. I have *never* heard Al Gore demand I use less energy. (Telling me *how* to use less energy is not the same thing.) Al Gore instead appears to run around telling *governments* they should figure out how to use less energy.
And reducing home electricity use for *existing* homes, while a good idea, is pretty damn far down the list of useful energy saving things(1). So if Al Gore is a success, we will end up with a government that takes climate change seriously and makes various laws determined to reduce it. These laws almost certainly will not harm Al Gore's 'lifestyle', and probably not affect his house at all. At best, there will subsidies for repairs to make it more efficient, or add solar panels, which he can ignore if he wants. (I'm pretending that Al Gore *wants* an inefficient house.)
That's not really the same thing as the anti-gay politicians who are really gay, who seem to start with the promise that gay-ness is morally wrong, and here are some laws forbidding it, or making it harder. These laws, hell, the rhetoric itself, do certainly harm the gay politician, and all other gays.
1) Actually, home energy use in total is pretty far down the climate change problems. Residential use in total is only 11.4% of total energy use. To stop climate change, the best place to start is the massive 27% of energy used for transportation (And more than two thirds of that is just wasted to start with) and 23% used for industry.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Consumption_by_sector
On “What You Need to Know About Klayman v. Obama”
Before anyone thinks that's just a joke, I have one word for you: Qwest
On “Stupid Tuesday questions, Erik Estrada edition”
It amazes me that people try to have rules that make the game longer, like the free parking thing or ignoring the auction thing.
Monopoly is _already_ much too long. The _entire point_ of the game is for people to buy up all the property and all but one person to run out of money.
Of course, this is a game that no one understands the best move (Except very very early in the game) is to stay in jail for as long as possible, so you don't lose money on rent.
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I visited New York a few years ago, and compared to what everyone else seems to experience there, I had no problems with it. Why? Because I knew that that very trivial rule.
If you do not know where you're going, there are plenty of places to stop that are not the middle of the sidewalk.
On “Toxic Relationships”
I think, at this point, a goodly section of Americans have been trained, by religious chatter, that certain things are not 'morally acceptable'...while _they don't having any problem with them_.
In 2006, a study came out. _97%_ of Americans, who have had sex by age 44, first had sex outside marriage. If Republicans want a study to look at, perhaps they should look at _that_ study. American adults have sex, period. If they are not married, they still have sex, period. There is not actually any debate here.
This study, I suspect, is less 'That is wrong and I won't do it', it's 'Those yammering religious people say it's morally wrong, so whatever. I guess it is. But I, and the entire rest of the country, are still going to to it and not have the slightest problem with it.'
I think we're looking at the Overton window here, except instead of it moving, it has refused to move.(1) So, just like the the right movement of that has stupidly managed to classify most of the populations's belief as 'flaming liberal' (Which has, indeed, blown up in their face.), the religious idiots who get interviewed on TV have stupidly managed to classify the entire adult population as immoral. Which will, of course, blow up in their face when young people start leaving an increasingly irrelevant church. *hold hand to ear* Oh, nevermind, that already happened.
Please note the difference between those idiots and actual religious leaders who have realized that the Christianity actually has very little to say about sex outside marriage. Of course, actual religious leaders don't get airtime on the 'news' channels.
1) Although not really. Everyone likes to _pretend_ that no one had sex outside of marriage previously. Which is about as wrong as humanly possible. It's just, back then, everyone was married, so people just had _affairs_. Or, if they were unmarried, they got married in a hurry if they got pregnant.
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Is Ross saying he agrees with this? It seems to me that he is simply pointing out an observation he has made (hence, why he calls it a ‘theory’).
It's an observation he has made _about himself_. It's not like he went out and asked people who had daughters, he extrapolated this from how he thinks.
Granted, I guess it would have been possible for him to stated this theory, and then said:
'But I realized that I, myself, was making assumptions about what my daughters would want out of life. Perhaps they instead will not wish to have children, or if they do, perhaps I will have been able to teach them to judge the character of people and find men who will not string them along, or perhaps they'll be lesbians and none of this will be relevant. And, even worse, perhaps my gender-based assumptions about what my daughters will want as adults that I am projecting onto them are _themselves_ part of the reason that adult women are 'unhappy' because they feel they are not fulfilling the roles society has set out for them, and they would be happier if I'd just let them live their own life as fully competent adults who will have their own life goals. And perhaps other parents of daughters should learn the same lessons, and make choices of what political party they support based on other things.'
But, uh...it _didn't_ end that way.
I have a feelimg much of that inclination is subconcious, so it doesn’t necessarily qualify as misogyny.
What a baffling statement.
"
Women are just as diverse in their opinions as men, and it does not require misogyny, deep-seated, internalized or otherwise to prefer a conservative approach to sex.
Except the reason there's _misogyny_ there is that Russ seems to be okay with the idea it's only _daughters_ who shouldn't have sex.
If there's some aspect of society that gets upset that 'their' women are having sex, but _not_ upset that 'their' men are, that aspect is, ispo facto, misogynistic. They want to protect 'their' daughters from making her own choices. That is basically the explicit premise of this article, and the concept as utterly misogynistic as humanly possible, it is literally the basic _foundation_ of misogyny, that women must be kept under control.
Or, in this more liberal age where excising literally control is no longer possible thanks to feminist, the idea is that women should be taught to control _themselves_, as if they're trained dogs or something and can't decide these things on their own. They're like shopkeepers, and all those concerned men are walking around talking about how all of them need to raise the price of their vagina as a whole, because cheap vagina is destroying society. Don't women see that?!
It's a mode of thought with literally no respect for women and the fact that they might actually deserve to enjoy their relationships however they see fit. That women actually might enjoy having sex, or having whatever relationship they're actually in. And it assumes they're all too stupid to actually find someone who wants the same choices out of their relationship as they do, that if they actually want someone to have children with, they can't find it.
And, incidentally, I response in this manner _literally having read no other criticism of the article_. Seriously, this is like Feminism 101.
Some polls taking about how some minority of people wish we'd go back to more traditional relationships is rather irrelevant. Those polls are about whether or not unmarried couples should have sex, not whether or not 'women should be protected', aka, 'women do not get to make their own choices'. (Although laughing at the idea that women can't be misogynistic is a bit idiotic. Of course they can.)
On “I presume decent sanitation will be the next thing they go after”
And now that some people have pointed out that this only include perinatal deaths and not neonatal, I went back and read some of the comments on it.
It included a grand total of exactly 7 deaths.
And it included deaths that happen well in advance of actually arriving at the hospital! Read the comment 'Why include stillbirths before 28 weeks?'
Apparently, if you've chosen to have a home birth, your baby is less likely to die before it. (Or, as I pointed out, you're more likely to be wealthy, and have better health care overall.)
This study is actually near complete nonsense.
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@dragonfrog
As I pointed out, that doesn't mean that births happening at home are safer _because_ they are happening at home. It could, just as easily, mean that births that are known in advance to be more difficult are choosing a hospital to happen in.
And, yes, I realize that the study only included hospital births that met eligibility requirement for home births, but just because the birth _could_ have happened at home doesn't mean, at some point, it was not mentioned that the birth could be problematic due to some specific thing, but not enough to disallow home birth, but they choose the hospital anyway, and, tada, it was indeed problematic.
Nor does there appear to be any way to measure the self-selection I mentioned...someone whose female relatives had medical problems during birth is probably more likely to select a hospital birth, _and_ is more likely to have medical problems herself.
And there's no indication they dealt with income levels. Infant survival is associated with prenatal care and nutrition levels, and that, obviously, is better the higher income the mother is. And while I am unsure about Canada, in the US home birth is associated with higher income levels.
It's a cliche, but correlation does not equal causation.
That may seem nitpicking, but that study is talking about a mortality rate difference of 30 out of 100,000...in a country where the mortality rate is actually 478 out of 100,000. So, yeah, some _very small_ bias directing safe births towards home and problematic births towards hospitals could be explaining that rather small difference.
And, looking at that, it's rather ignoring the other rather large elephant in the room that pro-home birth people need to cope with...if births that could have happened at home, but did not, have a 64 out of 100,000 mortality rate, and the _average_ mortality rate is 478 out of 100,000, that means there are a hell of a lot of births that could not happen at home to get that average up that high!
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@dragonfrog
Except that, as I said, home births with a qualified midwife, at least in Canada, seem to be safer than hospital births.
'Safer' in the sense of success? Or safer in the sense of not needing medical attention? Those aren't really the same things.
In addition that question, I feel I must defend hospital births by pointing out three things:
Firstly, there are whole classes of births that basically can't allowed to be home births. Aka, pregnancies with known complications. Which, obviously, are more likely to have medical problems.
Likewise, I'd be interested to know if a home birth that was going okay, but went wrong and required the women being rushed to the hospital, counted as a 'home birth' or a 'hospital birth'.
Hospitals handle all births that are known in advance to be problematic, plus all births that become sufficiently problematic during the birth. Of course those births are 'less safe', statistically.
It's like pointing out that hospitals have incredibly high mortality rates per capita compared to any other location on the planet. Well, yeah, because that's where they put the people likely to die. Likewise, they put all births there that are going to be problematic, so of course births there are more problematic on average.
And that's ignoring any sort of selection skew by women. Certain genetic makeup allow easier birth than others, and people whose families (or they previously) had easier births might be self-selecting home births more often. Whereas people whose families (or they previously) had problems during childbirth might be more comfortable in a hospital. Correlation and causality might, in fact, be the other way around for at least some portion of the population...they're selecting home births because, normally, childbirth is easy for them.
There's all sorts of possible explanations of what is going on. Having a midwife coach a woman through childbirth in a relaxing environment might, or might not, be part of it. Where this happens might, or might not, be relevant.
OTOH, there's no reason _not_ to mimic home birth as much as possible, especially if it can be done without creating the specific risks that home birth has. The traditional way to get babies out of women, letting them come out naturally in their own time, as practiced for millions of years, can't be _that_ wrong.
So, in as many cases as possible, you get the benefit of not being in the building where all the sick people congregate and cough their germs all over the place, while at the same time having the facilities for treating sick people quickly accessible for the tiny percentage of cases where they’re needed…
Yeah, having babies in _hospitals_ seems epicly stupid. (Putting _anyone_ in a hospital who does not have a disease is rather stupid if avoidable.) As does trying to schedule busy doctors to do it.
The obvious solution seems to be to have some sort of live-in childbirth clinic staffed by midwives right next to a hospital. Where there can be 'home birth', or at least 'home-like birth' (Like I said, women and their spouse should _move in_, like it's a motel room, well in advance.), without all the problems of hospitals, but with all the benefits of emergency care if needed. As @wagon pointed out, the lack of quick medical care in case something goes wrong is the deal breaker for quite a lot of people.
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@north
You run into the same dilemma though Kazzy, herd immunity so pervasive now that no restaurant or business would be willing to impose such a requirement on their own. The cost/benefit ratio is enormously skewed against such civic mindedness.
What we actually need is a pro-vax movement that demands a specific type of business (I think restaurant is a good choice), _require_ such a requirement, or the _pro-vax_ people will not patronize it.
Actually, you know what might work well? Considering how screwy the labor market it, how much it's a buyer's market, perhaps this hypothetical pro-vox movement should put pressure on businesses to _refuse to hire non-vaccinated people_. Especially for any sort of position that interacts with the public.
Granted, this wouldn't entirely solve the problem, as the problem is really parents not vaccinating kids, but _any_ pushback from the non-stupidity community would be a start.
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The medical industry seems a bit biased towards medical intervention, _especially_ when it comes to births. There's really no reason to give as many c-sections as we do. Other countries have much less c-sections and just as few, or even fewer, problems.
However, the whole problem behind home births is the risk of complications. I find it rather baffling that we haven't managed a sane compromise to that yet, where women could give birth in a nice, reasonably environment of their own choosing, at their own pace...located within the walls of a hospital if something goes wrong.
Or something like hospice care, except the end result is supposed to be birth, and moving out, instead of death. Women move in when eight and a half weeks pregnant, it's sorta like a motel with outside doors and no restricted visiting hours (In fact, the spouse may be expected to move in also), but there is always a doctor there, multiple places for the actual birth, including things like water births, etc...
I honestly don't understand why women don't demand this. Instead, activists in the field tend to push for home births and whatnot. Which may be safe 95% of the time, but that last 5% makes people hesitate. If the way it worked was that the 5% could just be wheeled down the hall into an operating room, pretty much everyone would love the setup.
It probably doesn't exist because of soaring medical costs, actually, and the fact that hospitals seem to exist in some sort of alternate universe where every single thing (Including regular household items.) costs 100 times more than they should.
On “At Least Walmart Pays Minimum Wage”
@shazbot9
It seems to me if these internships were busing tables at restaurants and working on retail store floors, they’d be called illegal labor practices, but when they’re getting coffee and filing stuff, they’re legal. Isn’t that a pretty shaky legal distinction?
They're NOT legal. Almost all unpaid internships in this country are illegal, period.
Internships are only allowed for unique educational experiences. Some sort of job training that people couldn't get in school.
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And that problem is that we have convinced lots of young people to spend lots and lots of money amassing credentials even as the value of those credentials is being consistently eroded.
A term I use, but I've never seen anyone else use, is 'credential inflation'.
It's a little confusing (People think I'm talking about making up credentials), but I like it because it is caused by exactly the same thing as real inflation...too much supply chasing too little demand for too long.
The problem is, of course, unlike monetary inflation, which levels out with no real problems...here, the lack of demand is seriously hurting people.
Or, to put it another way, this isn't like the normal 'money supply is too big' inflation. This is essentially the 'We do not have enough food to feed people' inflation...the problem isn't really the inflation, but the inflation is a sign there is something seriously wrong. Trying to solve the _inflation_ is completely pointless. The problem is that people do not have enough food, or, rather, jobs.
On “Unpaid Leadtime”
I think most people have gotten the right end of this, but I'd like to point out something people missed:
Lunch breaks usually have a length required by law. 30 minutes, or an hour, depending.
By making them do security breaks during lunch, we've exited the dispute over whether or not that they should be paid for that time, and now we're in a universe where Amazon is actually going to have to let them leave _earlier_.
Amazon is not just stealing wages, they are not giving the required time for lunch breaks.
Also, in the case of required 15 minute breaks under the law, I believe you have to be allowed to leave the area, which means they have to go through security for _that_, also. (Which probably means, right now, they aren't even bothering to try.)
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.