Terry Schiavo was just stupid, but the public at large did not have the slightest idea of what was actually going on, and no one (Or, rather, no voter) was negatively impacted. Same with the black helicopters. Those were both giant kabuki theatre to please parts of the base, and other people who _paid attention_ thought made the Republican look dumb, but really had no impact on anything.
The Lilly Ledbetter Act, OTOH, was taking an issue which the American public could easily understand, and in fact _already_ understood because that actual court case was well reported before all that. Every single person understood the case very well, it was not complicated in the least. And everyone thought it was an idiotic travesty of justice. The only people who thought it was a good decision were some legal wonky people who actually care about status of limitations and thought it was technically correct, and misogynists.
And the only people who didn't want that fixed _fixed_ were misogynists. Period.(1)
And Republicans looked at those misogynists, winked, and blasted their own foot off. I think it was one of the first time the Republicans look at an issue with a vast majority of the population on one side, and actual tiny amount of _assholes_ in their base on the other side, and picked the assholes choice for a _policy decision_, as opposed to talking points or idiotic running around for a brain dead woman.
Looking back at it _now_, from Obamaland where Republicans are raging kooks, it seems downright trivial. We'd be surprised if they _didn't_ do that now.
But back then it was rather astonishing. I still don't think it was _the_ first stupidity of that sort, though.
1) I especially found the Republicans arguments against this law hilarious. 'What if a manager comes in later and has nothing to do with the original underpayment? He shouldn't be blamed!' well, it's a good thing she would be suing the _company_ instead of the manager then, isn't it? Remember, folks, according to Republicans, we don't need laws about corporate behavior, people can solve their problems with lawsuits...except when they actually start solving their problems with lawsuits, at which point we need to make sure they can't do that.
They _ARE_ required to list Every. Other. Damn Thing. THAT WE TELL THEM TO LIST.
If we required them to list fertilizer types, they _would_ be required to list it.
There is no requirement for those things to be dangerous. The idea that there is suddenly some magical 1st amendment reason is complete nonsense. The courts have never had an issue with factual 'compelled speech' on sold goods. (Except for goods that are themselves subject to the the first amendment...they can't make people label books and stuff like that.)
If you accept the state can make them say that Cheez-Its contain 'paprika' (Another thing which no one has ever suggested is in any way harmful) then we can make them state whether or not it contains GMO wheat. There is literally no difference at all.
If you _don't_ think we can make them state that on some nonsensical 1st amendment reason, well, at this point opposing food labeling is sounding exactly like 'The government should get out of marriage' cry of libertarians. The sort of bullshit freeeeeeeeeedom principles that are found when the government tries to do something, and it's suddenly revealed that for decades the government the government has been doing something that Libertarians have opposed, and they've suddenly started talking about it.
But not, they hasten to add, because of random current issue. They've _always_ opposed mandatory food labeling, and never bothered to mention it, because shut up, that's why. (Despite the fact that, as I pointed out, a large part of the repeated complaints about 'nanny state' is that people should have the right to harm themselves, and that a well informed public will make good choices.)
Next up: The government starts issuing driver's licenses to people the right doesn't like, and libertarians mysteriously find principles stating that the government should not be licensing drivers in the first place. Which they've ALWAYS BELIEVED.
You know, food producers _already_ have to know the contents of of what they're buying. So they can put it on the goddamn label like they're _already_ required to do?
'Herp derp, I'll just buy this sack of grain without bothering to figure out what sort of grain it is. I'm sure the FDA won't mind if I just put "Ingredients: Some brownish grain I bought" on the label of the bread I sell.'
Jesus Christ, what sort of lunacy is this that I actually have to explain that, _yes_, people selling other people food products do in fact have to know what they are selling. And hence they have to know what it is when they _buy_ it.
Problems with communicating up 'The entire supply chain' is complete nonsense, because, and here's a really fucking crazy fact, the _things in question already traveled the entire supply chain_. Insane thought, I know. And hence to get information up the supply chain, all you have to do is require it travels _with the goods_. You know, like some sort of _label_ or something.
Rather like, oh, the exact thing we're talking about.
There's never demonstrable harm _at first_. That said, there probably is no harm in GMO at all, at least not on the consumer.
But as I pointed out, there's not actually any demonstrable harm for, for example, carbonated water.(1) Or gum arabic. Yet oddly enough a can of Mountain Dew is required to have those listed on the label.
The question isn't 'Why should we require them to put this piece of information on the label?', it's 'Why are they able to _leave this off_ when they're required to list Every. Other. Damn. Thing?'.
Seriously, it's like we've started worry about politicians being bribed online, so we're debating whether or not Senators have to disclose how much gold they have in their WoW account, and everyone's running around yammering about 'How dare we make them say things they might not want to say' and 'Can't we just have those who want to disclose, disclose, and if voters care, they'll only elect those guys...'
...uh, guys? They're already required to disclose an assload of information about exactly this sort of thing. They have to list _all_ their money in _all_ their banks. It's just that WoW gold is not covered under existing law.
Likewise, we already have a right to know, and we already demand that manufacturers tell us, _exactly_ what we are putting in your body. We demand a list of _everything_ that goes in the produce, and we demand that they dissect (at their own expense) their food to tell us what amount of sugar and protein and whatnot it contains.
Adding one single bit of information 'And did you put any GMO food in this?' is not some sort of massive change, nor does it require or even imply any sort of 'harm' from GMO. And it is not reasonable to _oppose_ on some sort of crazy 'free market will save us' or 'They shouldn't be forced to tell us that!' grounds that while accepting _current_ labeling laws.
1) Yes, I know that, technically, you can OD on water. That's not the point.
And why exactly would flour, Pam, and vanilla that contain GMO-containing _not_ be labelled as containing GMO?
What exactly is the premise here? That people shouldn't be expected to be literate? That it's too much work for people who are selling food to the public (and hence have to comply with all sorts of safety regulations) to _read the labels_ of their food ingredients?
I get confused about the timeline, though. I _think_ one of the real first wack-a-do moments was opposing the first Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2007. That was such an absurdly anti-woman position to take. 'As long as corporations managed to keep gender-based pay differences secret for 180 days, no one can sue over them!' Yeah, that issue is rather easily understood by the public, and more specifically by _women_. A really dumb position. I'm not sure if that was idiotic base-appeasing, or idiotic Chamber-of-Commerce-appeasing, though.
Someone needs to make a timeline of the GOP's craziness, though. Did it _really_ change as fast as it appeared to in 2008?
Yes, and regulation would require verifying that the stuff they purchased is actually from the people they said they purchased from.
Keeping track of produce sources is _already_ required in many places in the food industry, in cases of things like disease outbreaks.
Requiring that companies be able to say 'We buy our produce from sources X, Y, and Z', and doing spot checks of that they are not lying about those sources, is not the same as requiring expensive genetic testing.
If people want to debate 'The law proposed doesn't provide any sort of excuse for people who do not know they are growing GMO food.', then that's a valid discussion to have. There clearly _should_ be some sort of exception for unintentionally failing to label GMO.
That's...not the discussion that is going on here, which appears more about the horrible 'violation of rights' of...having to tell people things about the stuff you're selling them.
In fact, I suspect that there actually _is_ such a provision in any proposed bill, and this is an idiotic red herring. Almost all violations of law have to prove 'intent'.
Right! And if people _do_ what to know what is in the food they're eating, we should just wait for someone in the market to list ingredients. And if people want to know the amount of sugar in what they're buying, well, surely someone in the market will provide that, also.
And if people want to know what sort of fees exist at their bank, surely some banks will just start _providing_ that information out of the kindness of their heart.
And wouldn't it make sense to just voluntarily label everything that does _not_ contain lead?
Except, of course, that does not actually happen except in crazy Libertarian land, because those things are _oligopolies_, and having voluntary labeling like that requires the support of people who have no incentive.
Here's a fun question for you hypocritical free market types out there. Let us say that I drank 22 Mountain Dews a day, for approximately 1000 grams of sugar, for a long period of time. And consequently got very ill, thus costing me, oh, $50,000 in medical expenses. And let's assume this illness is entirely traceable to drinking that absurd amount of Mountain Dew.
Why _exactly_ would I not be able to sue Pepsico?
Let us assume you've given the correct answer of 'Because the label said that Mountain Dew had 46g of sugar, and said that 15% of the recommended daily carbs, and obviously drinking 330% of the recommended amount of total carbs, entirely in sugar, is going to eventually cause medical problems'.
Now it is the point where you say 'But sugar is dangerous'. Actually, 46g of sugar really aren't. That is not a 'warning label'. Neither is the ingredient list.
This requires no compulsion.
Yes, because it is huge amount of compulsion to required them to print 'Contains GMO' _right under the other stuff they are required to print on the label of food_. (Stuff that they're actually required to run a lab and test for, unlike GMO, which they can determine solely by who they buy raw material from.)
HOW DARE THE IRS COMPEL ME TO STAND IN LINE TO BUY A STAMP! THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!
HOW DARE THE POLICE REQUIRE ME TO TAKE OFF MY PONYTAIL SCRUNCHY WHEN ARRESTING ME! THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!
HOW DARE THE FDA REQUIRE ME TO PRINT A FACT I ALREADY KNOW ON THIS LABEL I HAD TO PRINT ON MY FOOD LISTING ALL THE INFORMATION I HAD TO TEST FOR AT MY OWN EXPENSE! THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!
WTF is 'testing' for GMO? Why does this insanity keep popping up?
People who are growing GMO crops _know_ they're doing that. They had to buy the seeds.
They should be required to _tell_ companies who are buying their produce that, who should then be required to _label_ the food they make from that produce as GMO.
Where the fuck does 'testing' come into this process?
The idea that we're suddenly at the 'limit' for labeling is nonsense, anyway. There's absolutely no reason that we couldn't add another line to the required 'Nutritional Facts' section, right above 'Serving Size' or whatever.
A lot of people seem to think this would be required as some big label on the front. Perhaps there is some actual bill or something that I don't know of requiring that, but I think that unlikely...the only thing _required_ on the front of a food package is the amount of the food in the package. (I thought there were some extra rules about different things like soft drinks having their black 'calories' badge, but it turns out that's a private initiative of the American Beverage Institute that Coke and Pepsi and others are participating in.)
Indeed. This entire discussion (not just here, but everywhere) has shown an absurd level of hypocrisy from the 'small government' crowd, usually run around asserting 'Free market! The market will take care of it! Just let the market decide!'.
Until, uh, the market wants some information to make a decision on. At which point suddenly there's a 'free speech' issue.
Here's an interesting fact: When society has decided that there is a danger (Not whether or not there actually is one, when we decide there is one.) we've always required providers of that danger inform the nearby public. We require construction sites to post 'Hard Hat Area' signs, we require labels on tobacco, we require people to notify others they are a convicted sex offender, hell, we require all sorts of things on a food label that _aren't_ dangers, such as the amount of Vitamin C.
This is not actually a first amendment issue, as long as the information the government requires them to provide is _truthful_. And here, we're talking about a label that is not, in any way, a warning message. The GMO label is a simple statement of fact. And it's a _lot_ less work than the nutritional labeling we _already_ require on all foods!
It's been clear to me for years that a lot of 'free market/small government' people are simply 'parrot whatever corporations want' people. And every so often I run across a perfect example of this issue, where suddenly the Most Important Rule Ever that 'the market should decide' _instantly_ flips to worries that the market may make the 'wrong' decision and decide against GMO foods, so we can't tell people which those are.
Erm, what Maddow did is in no way comparable with the behavior of the Daily Caller here. Sparkman's death _was_ apparently murder. It was a suicide staged to look like a murder, as far as we can tell. It was perfectly reasonable to report on it _as if_ it was a murder before we knew that.
When people became suspicious that it was not murder, Rachael Maddow reported that there were such suspicions (Which, I must point out, you seemed to have missed in your blog, although the article you link to talks about it, if by using rather biased language.), and then _stopped reporting or talking about it as a murder_.
Then later, The Rachael Maddow Show ran an _actual correction_ in November when the police determined it _was_ suicide. (It was a guest host that night, so I guess saying that 'Rachael Maddow' never mentioned it again is technically true, if obviously deliberately misleading.)
Do you think that she should have, at that point, continued to cover a single suicide? What the hell would be the point of that? Or do you think it was wrong for her to start to cover something _very clearly looked like a lynching of a Federal official_, even though it was not? (That would be an _amazing_ standard to ask the news to take. 'Please never report on any sort of crime at all until after every single fact is in.')
Or do you think she have lead off her show each night for a week saying 'That thing we thought was murder last week was possibly just a deranged man committing suicide?' You think she didn't run _enough_ corrections?
What exactly is your complaint there?
Do you want to know what people's complaint is about the Daily Caller? It's that they ran a story with really really shitty 'confirmation', and then, after it became clear the story was false, doubled down on it.
And there is nothing arbitrary about maximizing the chances that children will know the love of their biological parents in a committed and exclusive bond.
And banning gay marriage does this how, exactly? (As opposed to, for example, banning divorce?)
I'm really tired of people just _asserting_ this. There is not any logical way 'No gay marriage' leads to 'children staying with their biological parents'.(1)
There are three possible ways that children can end up being the child of someone in a gay marriage: 1) they are adopted, 2) they are the biological child of the parents created while that parent is in the homosexual relation, using a sperm or egg donor, 3) they are the biological child of one of the parents from a previous heterosexual relationship,
#1 obviously has nothing to do with anything. Children who are adopted at _already_ missing 'the love of their biological parents in a committed and exclusive bond'. Gay people do not run around magically adopting children out from under the arms of their existing family. So this is not what they're actually talking about.
#2 is so obviously stupid it's hard to explain. Is the argument honestly that children are better off _not existing_ than not having 'the love of their biological parents in a committed and exclusive bond'? This leads to some rather...interesting conclusions, and I doubt it is that the discussion that the people who are _also_ running around banning contraceptives and abortion really want to have. ('Sure, you should have to bear your rapist's baby, how dare you think otherwise! And how dare _you_ two lesbians decide to bring someone into this world into a gay family, he'd be better off not existing! And no adopting the rape victim's baby either!') So this is not what they're actually talking about either.
#3 is, of course, what they're actually talking about. They want gay people to _stay in straight relationships_. They see children as a reward for _pretending to be straight_. (Which historically has been completely true for gay people.)
But maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps someone can correct me. Seriously, those are the _three_ situations where children can be raised by gay people. #1 _already_ have had their biological family 'fail' them and #2 literally do not exist without the gay relationship existing, so cannot possibly be 'worse off' with the relationship existing.
It _must_ be #3 they're talking about, and for those children to have 'their biological parents in a committed and exclusive bond' must mean they think _gay people should remain married to a straight partner_. Which they then describe as 'committed and exclusive' relationship...but you will note they don't use the word 'loving' or 'honest'.
That is the _only_ possibly way for their premise to make sense.
1) And there's an addition side issue that just _assumes_ that 'biological mom and biological dad' are the best people to raise a child, and moreover must be in a relationship with each other, which also has very little evidence. Actual evidence is that children do best when their family makes enough to support them and yet has enough family members left over to interact with them, and that the makeup of this family change as little as possible while they are children. It has nothing to do with the gender, biological relationship, or even familial relationship of the members, as plenty of children raised by elder siblings or aunts and uncles can attest to. Gay parents where one works and the other does not is produces _vastly_ better outcomes than straight parents where both work. (Which is why, currently, gay couples are better parents...not because they are better, but because they very rarely have children without being able to support them.) But for the purpose of this post, let's just accept the premise that 'biological mom and dad' are best, because the idea that banning gay marriage somehow _leads_ to that is stupid enough,
The unemployment paragraph was carefully written to avoid sweeping allegations of laziness.
Yes, we are aware of that. The problem is we are not complete idiots, and you can't make a statement about how poor people aren't working enough, and as a single aside talk about unemployment and expect us to put up with the rest of your bullshit.
Jesus Christ, you _just said_ that poor people only work an average of 14 hours a week. You _yourself_ brought this fact in. Because I'm _sure_ they were offered full time work, but said 'No, I only need to work 14 hours a week because I wish to remain poor.'.
You honestly think people are _choosing_ to work 14 hours a week. You have the actual belief in your actual brain that people are _choosing_ to work less than two full days a week and thus _choosing_ to remain poor.
I can't even conceive of how to answer such nonsense.
For the non-morons out there confused about that '14 hours', I will point out that a very large segment of the poor are actually elderly and disabled, and hence _can't_ work any time at all. And others are probably working 27 hours a week because that's the limit of what their boss can give them without them being considered 'full time'. (And a lot of those are working _two_ 27 hour a week jobs.)
AND THE REST ARE UNEMPLOYED. Which in Roger's world means 'Choosing not to work', ignoring the fact we have an _official_ rate of 7.7%. Which mean of that 20%, the 'bottom quintile', 38.5% are _officially_ looking for work and cannot find any. (And the official rate is completely wrong. Actual unemployment and underemployment in this country has always been underreported.)
I didn't reply to you. I replied to Roger and his idiotic comments about 'In general though, jobs are out there to be found for those really interested.' and 'Work 50 to 60 hours a week.'
Which, of course, ignore the fact that the poor often _do_ work 50-60 hours a week...when they can actually find jobs.
Step one is to get and hold full time work, preferably for two adults.
Step one for the poor: Magically find jobs that they currently can't find. Got it.
The key is to begin saving in an institutional situation which takes the savings in an automatic way and which slowly raises the amount saved each month.
Step two for the poor: Save small amounts of money constantly until they retire. Or save small amounts of money constantly for eight months and then use it plus a payday loan to replace the transmission in their car. Whichever comes first.
The stupid! It burns!
I said it earlier and I will repeat, and then I am done with morons: Poor people almost always have more _expenses_ than _income_. I want you to actually sit and think about that. In your words 'Do the math...' How do they survive? Loans, eating very shitty but cheap food, avoiding healthcare, and doing without stuff that is actually needed.
Trying to somehow argue that there's a savings plan out of poverty for people with _negative_ cash flow is completely fucking stupid. As is arguing there's some magical way for them to get well-paying full time work that they just haven't _bothered_ to get for some reason.
And not knowing that poor people almost always are _losing_ ground (Or, at least, doing without some necessity or another), and that poor people _would love to have better jobs but cannot find them_ rather disqualify you and Noah Smith from talking about them.
And is anyone else amazed that homeless shelters are perfectly balanced with the amount of homeless people. They're exactly full every night! And all the food is exactly consumed!
Most poor people's _needed_ expenses are larger than their income. By a large percentage. But because they don't have that money, they simply do without those things.
Of course the money they _actually spend_ is balanced. How the fuck could the poor spend more than they have? (Well, they can borrow, and do. But they can't _keep_ doing that.)
But by all means, let's go find people who would need 200% more income to buy health insurance, and 30% more income to buy better food, and 50% more income to make car payments so they could get to the bank and Costco and stuff...
...and let's stand there and comment how it's certainly suspicious that they use 5% of their income to buy cigarettes or see a movie, or whichever the hell the current 'Poor people are actually rich' nonsense is popular. That 5% could have, with careful savings, bought a week of health insurance every three years! Or something.
And, in a totally unrelated fact: The savings rate that poor people can get is _under_ 1%. Inflation is _over_ 1%. Why the fuck would they want to save? Why would anyone want them to save except for the banks? What would savings accomplish them?
The thing this rich assholes don't understand is that the poor are not poor because they don't have money. They are poor because they don't have _income_, and yet have expenses.
Jesus Christ, you could give every poor person $10,000 , and they'd either use it responsible or not, but in a year, even the _most_ responsible poor person _is still going to be poor_ because they're working a minimum wage job that barely pays the rent. A financial-savant poor person might have managed to parlay that $10,000 into saving them $11,000 that year, but they wouldn't have done it via 'investment', they would have done it via one-time purchases of a working refrigerator and paying off credit card bills.
Hell, does this moron even understand that the poor have _debts_, and hence 'investment' would be a fucking stupid idea anyway? If the poor manage to scrimp and save an extra $100 a month, they really need to be putting it towards that credit card bill they racked up when their car broke last month.
The problem is, that _is_ how it works in this asshole's world, where all his money magically appears out of fucking nowhere. Oh, I'm sorry, it magically appears out of the bank. So clearly it must that way with the poor. Let's ignore the interest rate poor people get is actually less than inflation, and that poor people don't actually have _any extra money at all_ to invest. If they have 'extra money', it will be to replace the rotting floor in the bathroom and catch up on car payments.
Telling a poor person they need better money management skills and that will solve the problem of poverty is like telling women they need to learn more self defense and that will solve the problem of rape. It's not a _bad_ idea for people to learn those things, and in fact I'm all for it. But that is not the fucking 'solution' that society needs to be talking about. Poor people are not poor because they have failed at being rich, they are poor because _they do not have the ability to make enough money_.
Wait a minute. 25% of recreational boating accident deaths _aren't_ from drowning? What the hell were they from, then?
I mean, boats do occasionally run into things, and presumably people die in such collisions. Although that would seem to either require either a much large ship smashing through a smaller one, because people normally are not hanging out at the very bow of the boat, at least not 25% of them!
And boats can also run into or over people, but we usually manage to separate swimming areas from boating areas, so that seems odd also.
Seriously, what did those 250 people die of? Caught up in rigging? Killed by a a swinging sail? Crushed between a boat and dock? What exactly is the threat here? Are they counting non-boat related deaths like heart attacks? (That does not seem to be a 'recreational boating accident'.)
Indeed. The real joke here isn't the symbolic vote. Symbolic votes on constitutional amendments are fairly silly anyway, so who cares when anyone did it?
Either a state ratifies it when it's not yet passed, or it passes and the state forgets about it until someone brings it up. (Now, failing to ratify this amendment when someone bring it up _would_ be something to notice would be relevant, but isn't what we're talking about here.)
No, the real joke is that they're so fucked up in Mississippi it takes them almost two decades to file a piece of paperwork. That paperwork is _almost old enough to vote_.
Man, and I thought the US Congress was dysfunctional.
Why would anyone have _paid_ to do that when it would have been simpler and cheaper to just _say_ they were doing that, but actually just killed them?
Not even as any sort of public policy. They'd simply be faced with which of two ships to hire...the one that actually did the shipping, or the one that cost 1/100th as much, and mysteriously reappeared back in port two days after taking on a former-slave shipment. (I am assuming it's the state governments doing this, because former slaves would have no money to book passage.)
Does anyone now think anyone then would care?
There's not really any way, in the pre-intercontinental communication days, that former slaves would have made it en mass back to Africa. That benefited _no one_ to do correctly. (No one who was actually a 'person', at least.) I mean, look how many black people on slave ships died, and those deaths _directly cut into profit_.
About the only plausible way that things could have ended well would have been to give them a territory out west, one that they could get to themselves, and eventually making a state out of it. In fact, that probably would have been for the best in our _actual_ history. Having an actual power base where wealthy-ish black people could originate from, and where marginalized black people could retreat to, might have made the civil right's struggle shorter.
OTOH, I doubt it would have actually worked, no one would have allowed black people to end up in charge of a state in 1880 or whenever this would be. And such a place sorta already existed in New Orleans anyway.
Oh, I don't disagree with you. A lot of states constitutions have that and other rules about their militia.
Of course, state constitutions are _much_ easier to amend than the US constitution. If _state_ constitutions were what was standing in the way, we'd be fine. (Especially with the whole 'interstate commerce' thing obviously allowing regulation of sales.)
I was just pointing out is that the 2nd amendment was intended to just apply to the Federal government (Which everyone knows, if half the people forget.), and it really seems to me that it was intended to stop the Federal government from disarming the state militias, and is just conceptualized very poorly.
Now, what I'm not entirely sure of is what the writers of the 2nd thought about the Federal government disarming citizens which were _not_ in a state militia. I suspect the founders also would not approve of that, but for slightly different reasons. I suspect their objection would be more along the lines of 'The federal government should not be telling citizens of Virginia what they can and cannot own, period.'
This, incidentally, is sorta the reason I think it was supposed to work like I said. No one in 1789 would have _conceived_ of the US restricting citizens of the various states from owning things. No, the 2nd amendment was not for that...it was to stop the US from restricting the state militias. And least we forget, the US explicitly can seize control of militia of under the constitution, and _is in charge of arming_ them. The 2nd makes it even if the Federal government does something insane like refuses to arm them, _militias can still have weapons_.
If the 2nd amendment had not been incorporated under the 14th amendment, we'd be fine. If the 2nd amendment had been incorporated but had been correctly written to say 'The militias may not be disarmed', we'd also be fine. (As states could simply define who is in their own militia, and disarm others if they wanted...and change their constitution to allow that if it did not.) Instead, both stupid things happened and here we are.
I have no actual solution here, I was just trying to explain 'How we got here'.
Moreover, arguing that because militias ceased to be the preferred military option of the Feds, the Feds can simply disregard the 2A and disarm the militia- by disarming the people who fill it- is just goofy. The entire point of the 2A is to restrain the Feds from disarming the militia. Arguing that the militia can be disarmed becasue the Feds don’t want to use it anymore renders the whole Amendment useless.
The real problem is now the _states_ can't disarm _their own_ militia, which is rather absurd.
Subjecting the 2nd amendment (Which, regardless of how it is phrased, is intended to give states a _right_ to operate a militia, even if the Federal government wishes to disarm it) to incorporation under the 14th amendment (Thus subjecting states to restrictions on their own militia!) was completely idiotic.
Although it's still being interpreted wrong even if that's true. Logically, even if states cannot now disarm their own militia (!?), they can still determine who is _in_ it. (This is one of those things so well known back then that no one bothered to put in writing, like what habeus corpus is.) So a state could ban all guns simply by saying it _has_ no militia, or that militia is solely the National Guard plus the police plus people who have passed specific gun training, and, thus, logically, it is only required to allow those people to be armed.
The problem is the courts have idiotically decided that the entire first part of amendment doesn't matter. That the right to bear arms doesn't exist in the context of _state power to have a militia_, like the amendment is clearly trying to say, it just exists in general.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The GOP’s Self-inflicted Wound”
Terry Schiavo was just stupid, but the public at large did not have the slightest idea of what was actually going on, and no one (Or, rather, no voter) was negatively impacted. Same with the black helicopters. Those were both giant kabuki theatre to please parts of the base, and other people who _paid attention_ thought made the Republican look dumb, but really had no impact on anything.
The Lilly Ledbetter Act, OTOH, was taking an issue which the American public could easily understand, and in fact _already_ understood because that actual court case was well reported before all that. Every single person understood the case very well, it was not complicated in the least. And everyone thought it was an idiotic travesty of justice. The only people who thought it was a good decision were some legal wonky people who actually care about status of limitations and thought it was technically correct, and misogynists.
And the only people who didn't want that fixed _fixed_ were misogynists. Period.(1)
And Republicans looked at those misogynists, winked, and blasted their own foot off. I think it was one of the first time the Republicans look at an issue with a vast majority of the population on one side, and actual tiny amount of _assholes_ in their base on the other side, and picked the assholes choice for a _policy decision_, as opposed to talking points or idiotic running around for a brain dead woman.
Looking back at it _now_, from Obamaland where Republicans are raging kooks, it seems downright trivial. We'd be surprised if they _didn't_ do that now.
But back then it was rather astonishing. I still don't think it was _the_ first stupidity of that sort, though.
1) I especially found the Republicans arguments against this law hilarious. 'What if a manager comes in later and has nothing to do with the original underpayment? He shouldn't be blamed!' well, it's a good thing she would be suing the _company_ instead of the manager then, isn't it? Remember, folks, according to Republicans, we don't need laws about corporate behavior, people can solve their problems with lawsuits...except when they actually start solving their problems with lawsuits, at which point we need to make sure they can't do that.
On “Why Not Demanding GMO Labeling is Udder Foolishness… (Get it? It’s a pun!) ”
They _ARE_ required to list Every. Other. Damn Thing. THAT WE TELL THEM TO LIST.
If we required them to list fertilizer types, they _would_ be required to list it.
There is no requirement for those things to be dangerous. The idea that there is suddenly some magical 1st amendment reason is complete nonsense. The courts have never had an issue with factual 'compelled speech' on sold goods. (Except for goods that are themselves subject to the the first amendment...they can't make people label books and stuff like that.)
If you accept the state can make them say that Cheez-Its contain 'paprika' (Another thing which no one has ever suggested is in any way harmful) then we can make them state whether or not it contains GMO wheat. There is literally no difference at all.
If you _don't_ think we can make them state that on some nonsensical 1st amendment reason, well, at this point opposing food labeling is sounding exactly like 'The government should get out of marriage' cry of libertarians. The sort of bullshit freeeeeeeeeedom principles that are found when the government tries to do something, and it's suddenly revealed that for decades the government the government has been doing something that Libertarians have opposed, and they've suddenly started talking about it.
But not, they hasten to add, because of random current issue. They've _always_ opposed mandatory food labeling, and never bothered to mention it, because shut up, that's why. (Despite the fact that, as I pointed out, a large part of the repeated complaints about 'nanny state' is that people should have the right to harm themselves, and that a well informed public will make good choices.)
Next up: The government starts issuing driver's licenses to people the right doesn't like, and libertarians mysteriously find principles stating that the government should not be licensing drivers in the first place. Which they've ALWAYS BELIEVED.
"
You know, food producers _already_ have to know the contents of of what they're buying. So they can put it on the goddamn label like they're _already_ required to do?
'Herp derp, I'll just buy this sack of grain without bothering to figure out what sort of grain it is. I'm sure the FDA won't mind if I just put "Ingredients: Some brownish grain I bought" on the label of the bread I sell.'
Jesus Christ, what sort of lunacy is this that I actually have to explain that, _yes_, people selling other people food products do in fact have to know what they are selling. And hence they have to know what it is when they _buy_ it.
Problems with communicating up 'The entire supply chain' is complete nonsense, because, and here's a really fucking crazy fact, the _things in question already traveled the entire supply chain_. Insane thought, I know. And hence to get information up the supply chain, all you have to do is require it travels _with the goods_. You know, like some sort of _label_ or something.
Rather like, oh, the exact thing we're talking about.
"
There's never demonstrable harm _at first_. That said, there probably is no harm in GMO at all, at least not on the consumer.
But as I pointed out, there's not actually any demonstrable harm for, for example, carbonated water.(1) Or gum arabic. Yet oddly enough a can of Mountain Dew is required to have those listed on the label.
The question isn't 'Why should we require them to put this piece of information on the label?', it's 'Why are they able to _leave this off_ when they're required to list Every. Other. Damn. Thing?'.
Seriously, it's like we've started worry about politicians being bribed online, so we're debating whether or not Senators have to disclose how much gold they have in their WoW account, and everyone's running around yammering about 'How dare we make them say things they might not want to say' and 'Can't we just have those who want to disclose, disclose, and if voters care, they'll only elect those guys...'
...uh, guys? They're already required to disclose an assload of information about exactly this sort of thing. They have to list _all_ their money in _all_ their banks. It's just that WoW gold is not covered under existing law.
Likewise, we already have a right to know, and we already demand that manufacturers tell us, _exactly_ what we are putting in your body. We demand a list of _everything_ that goes in the produce, and we demand that they dissect (at their own expense) their food to tell us what amount of sugar and protein and whatnot it contains.
Adding one single bit of information 'And did you put any GMO food in this?' is not some sort of massive change, nor does it require or even imply any sort of 'harm' from GMO. And it is not reasonable to _oppose_ on some sort of crazy 'free market will save us' or 'They shouldn't be forced to tell us that!' grounds that while accepting _current_ labeling laws.
1) Yes, I know that, technically, you can OD on water. That's not the point.
"
And why exactly would flour, Pam, and vanilla that contain GMO-containing _not_ be labelled as containing GMO?
What exactly is the premise here? That people shouldn't be expected to be literate? That it's too much work for people who are selling food to the public (and hence have to comply with all sorts of safety regulations) to _read the labels_ of their food ingredients?
On “The GOP’s Self-inflicted Wound”
Indeed.
I get confused about the timeline, though. I _think_ one of the real first wack-a-do moments was opposing the first Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2007. That was such an absurdly anti-woman position to take. 'As long as corporations managed to keep gender-based pay differences secret for 180 days, no one can sue over them!' Yeah, that issue is rather easily understood by the public, and more specifically by _women_. A really dumb position. I'm not sure if that was idiotic base-appeasing, or idiotic Chamber-of-Commerce-appeasing, though.
Someone needs to make a timeline of the GOP's craziness, though. Did it _really_ change as fast as it appeared to in 2008?
On “Why Not Demanding GMO Labeling is Udder Foolishness… (Get it? It’s a pun!) ”
Yes, and regulation would require verifying that the stuff they purchased is actually from the people they said they purchased from.
Keeping track of produce sources is _already_ required in many places in the food industry, in cases of things like disease outbreaks.
Requiring that companies be able to say 'We buy our produce from sources X, Y, and Z', and doing spot checks of that they are not lying about those sources, is not the same as requiring expensive genetic testing.
"
If people want to debate 'The law proposed doesn't provide any sort of excuse for people who do not know they are growing GMO food.', then that's a valid discussion to have. There clearly _should_ be some sort of exception for unintentionally failing to label GMO.
That's...not the discussion that is going on here, which appears more about the horrible 'violation of rights' of...having to tell people things about the stuff you're selling them.
In fact, I suspect that there actually _is_ such a provision in any proposed bill, and this is an idiotic red herring. Almost all violations of law have to prove 'intent'.
"
Right! And if people _do_ what to know what is in the food they're eating, we should just wait for someone in the market to list ingredients. And if people want to know the amount of sugar in what they're buying, well, surely someone in the market will provide that, also.
And if people want to know what sort of fees exist at their bank, surely some banks will just start _providing_ that information out of the kindness of their heart.
And wouldn't it make sense to just voluntarily label everything that does _not_ contain lead?
Except, of course, that does not actually happen except in crazy Libertarian land, because those things are _oligopolies_, and having voluntary labeling like that requires the support of people who have no incentive.
Here's a fun question for you hypocritical free market types out there. Let us say that I drank 22 Mountain Dews a day, for approximately 1000 grams of sugar, for a long period of time. And consequently got very ill, thus costing me, oh, $50,000 in medical expenses. And let's assume this illness is entirely traceable to drinking that absurd amount of Mountain Dew.
Why _exactly_ would I not be able to sue Pepsico?
Let us assume you've given the correct answer of 'Because the label said that Mountain Dew had 46g of sugar, and said that 15% of the recommended daily carbs, and obviously drinking 330% of the recommended amount of total carbs, entirely in sugar, is going to eventually cause medical problems'.
Now it is the point where you say 'But sugar is dangerous'. Actually, 46g of sugar really aren't. That is not a 'warning label'. Neither is the ingredient list.
This requires no compulsion.
Yes, because it is huge amount of compulsion to required them to print 'Contains GMO' _right under the other stuff they are required to print on the label of food_. (Stuff that they're actually required to run a lab and test for, unlike GMO, which they can determine solely by who they buy raw material from.)
HOW DARE THE IRS COMPEL ME TO STAND IN LINE TO BUY A STAMP! THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!
HOW DARE THE POLICE REQUIRE ME TO TAKE OFF MY PONYTAIL SCRUNCHY WHEN ARRESTING ME! THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!
HOW DARE THE FDA REQUIRE ME TO PRINT A FACT I ALREADY KNOW ON THIS LABEL I HAD TO PRINT ON MY FOOD LISTING ALL THE INFORMATION I HAD TO TEST FOR AT MY OWN EXPENSE! THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!
"
WTF is 'testing' for GMO? Why does this insanity keep popping up?
People who are growing GMO crops _know_ they're doing that. They had to buy the seeds.
They should be required to _tell_ companies who are buying their produce that, who should then be required to _label_ the food they make from that produce as GMO.
Where the fuck does 'testing' come into this process?
"
The idea that we're suddenly at the 'limit' for labeling is nonsense, anyway. There's absolutely no reason that we couldn't add another line to the required 'Nutritional Facts' section, right above 'Serving Size' or whatever.
A lot of people seem to think this would be required as some big label on the front. Perhaps there is some actual bill or something that I don't know of requiring that, but I think that unlikely...the only thing _required_ on the front of a food package is the amount of the food in the package. (I thought there were some extra rules about different things like soft drinks having their black 'calories' badge, but it turns out that's a private initiative of the American Beverage Institute that Coke and Pepsi and others are participating in.)
"
Indeed. This entire discussion (not just here, but everywhere) has shown an absurd level of hypocrisy from the 'small government' crowd, usually run around asserting 'Free market! The market will take care of it! Just let the market decide!'.
Until, uh, the market wants some information to make a decision on. At which point suddenly there's a 'free speech' issue.
Here's an interesting fact: When society has decided that there is a danger (Not whether or not there actually is one, when we decide there is one.) we've always required providers of that danger inform the nearby public. We require construction sites to post 'Hard Hat Area' signs, we require labels on tobacco, we require people to notify others they are a convicted sex offender, hell, we require all sorts of things on a food label that _aren't_ dangers, such as the amount of Vitamin C.
This is not actually a first amendment issue, as long as the information the government requires them to provide is _truthful_. And here, we're talking about a label that is not, in any way, a warning message. The GMO label is a simple statement of fact. And it's a _lot_ less work than the nutritional labeling we _already_ require on all foods!
It's been clear to me for years that a lot of 'free market/small government' people are simply 'parrot whatever corporations want' people. And every so often I run across a perfect example of this issue, where suddenly the Most Important Rule Ever that 'the market should decide' _instantly_ flips to worries that the market may make the 'wrong' decision and decide against GMO foods, so we can't tell people which those are.
On “In Which Tucker Carlson Hoists Himself By His Own Petard”
Erm, what Maddow did is in no way comparable with the behavior of the Daily Caller here. Sparkman's death _was_ apparently murder. It was a suicide staged to look like a murder, as far as we can tell. It was perfectly reasonable to report on it _as if_ it was a murder before we knew that.
When people became suspicious that it was not murder, Rachael Maddow reported that there were such suspicions (Which, I must point out, you seemed to have missed in your blog, although the article you link to talks about it, if by using rather biased language.), and then _stopped reporting or talking about it as a murder_.
Then later, The Rachael Maddow Show ran an _actual correction_ in November when the police determined it _was_ suicide. (It was a guest host that night, so I guess saying that 'Rachael Maddow' never mentioned it again is technically true, if obviously deliberately misleading.)
Do you think that she should have, at that point, continued to cover a single suicide? What the hell would be the point of that? Or do you think it was wrong for her to start to cover something _very clearly looked like a lynching of a Federal official_, even though it was not? (That would be an _amazing_ standard to ask the news to take. 'Please never report on any sort of crime at all until after every single fact is in.')
Or do you think she have lead off her show each night for a week saying 'That thing we thought was murder last week was possibly just a deranged man committing suicide?' You think she didn't run _enough_ corrections?
What exactly is your complaint there?
Do you want to know what people's complaint is about the Daily Caller? It's that they ran a story with really really shitty 'confirmation', and then, after it became clear the story was false, doubled down on it.
On “The Problem with Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage”
And there is nothing arbitrary about maximizing the chances that children will know the love of their biological parents in a committed and exclusive bond.
And banning gay marriage does this how, exactly? (As opposed to, for example, banning divorce?)
I'm really tired of people just _asserting_ this. There is not any logical way 'No gay marriage' leads to 'children staying with their biological parents'.(1)
There are three possible ways that children can end up being the child of someone in a gay marriage: 1) they are adopted, 2) they are the biological child of the parents created while that parent is in the homosexual relation, using a sperm or egg donor, 3) they are the biological child of one of the parents from a previous heterosexual relationship,
#1 obviously has nothing to do with anything. Children who are adopted at _already_ missing 'the love of their biological parents in a committed and exclusive bond'. Gay people do not run around magically adopting children out from under the arms of their existing family. So this is not what they're actually talking about.
#2 is so obviously stupid it's hard to explain. Is the argument honestly that children are better off _not existing_ than not having 'the love of their biological parents in a committed and exclusive bond'? This leads to some rather...interesting conclusions, and I doubt it is that the discussion that the people who are _also_ running around banning contraceptives and abortion really want to have. ('Sure, you should have to bear your rapist's baby, how dare you think otherwise! And how dare _you_ two lesbians decide to bring someone into this world into a gay family, he'd be better off not existing! And no adopting the rape victim's baby either!') So this is not what they're actually talking about either.
#3 is, of course, what they're actually talking about. They want gay people to _stay in straight relationships_. They see children as a reward for _pretending to be straight_. (Which historically has been completely true for gay people.)
But maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps someone can correct me. Seriously, those are the _three_ situations where children can be raised by gay people. #1 _already_ have had their biological family 'fail' them and #2 literally do not exist without the gay relationship existing, so cannot possibly be 'worse off' with the relationship existing.
It _must_ be #3 they're talking about, and for those children to have 'their biological parents in a committed and exclusive bond' must mean they think _gay people should remain married to a straight partner_. Which they then describe as 'committed and exclusive' relationship...but you will note they don't use the word 'loving' or 'honest'.
That is the _only_ possibly way for their premise to make sense.
1) And there's an addition side issue that just _assumes_ that 'biological mom and biological dad' are the best people to raise a child, and moreover must be in a relationship with each other, which also has very little evidence. Actual evidence is that children do best when their family makes enough to support them and yet has enough family members left over to interact with them, and that the makeup of this family change as little as possible while they are children. It has nothing to do with the gender, biological relationship, or even familial relationship of the members, as plenty of children raised by elder siblings or aunts and uncles can attest to. Gay parents where one works and the other does not is produces _vastly_ better outcomes than straight parents where both work. (Which is why, currently, gay couples are better parents...not because they are better, but because they very rarely have children without being able to support them.) But for the purpose of this post, let's just accept the premise that 'biological mom and dad' are best, because the idea that banning gay marriage somehow _leads_ to that is stupid enough,
On “Noah Smith Trolls Working Class”
The unemployment paragraph was carefully written to avoid sweeping allegations of laziness.
Yes, we are aware of that. The problem is we are not complete idiots, and you can't make a statement about how poor people aren't working enough, and as a single aside talk about unemployment and expect us to put up with the rest of your bullshit.
Jesus Christ, you _just said_ that poor people only work an average of 14 hours a week. You _yourself_ brought this fact in. Because I'm _sure_ they were offered full time work, but said 'No, I only need to work 14 hours a week because I wish to remain poor.'.
You honestly think people are _choosing_ to work 14 hours a week. You have the actual belief in your actual brain that people are _choosing_ to work less than two full days a week and thus _choosing_ to remain poor.
I can't even conceive of how to answer such nonsense.
For the non-morons out there confused about that '14 hours', I will point out that a very large segment of the poor are actually elderly and disabled, and hence _can't_ work any time at all. And others are probably working 27 hours a week because that's the limit of what their boss can give them without them being considered 'full time'. (And a lot of those are working _two_ 27 hour a week jobs.)
AND THE REST ARE UNEMPLOYED. Which in Roger's world means 'Choosing not to work', ignoring the fact we have an _official_ rate of 7.7%. Which mean of that 20%, the 'bottom quintile', 38.5% are _officially_ looking for work and cannot find any. (And the official rate is completely wrong. Actual unemployment and underemployment in this country has always been underreported.)
"
I didn't reply to you. I replied to Roger and his idiotic comments about 'In general though, jobs are out there to be found for those really interested.' and 'Work 50 to 60 hours a week.'
Which, of course, ignore the fact that the poor often _do_ work 50-60 hours a week...when they can actually find jobs.
"
Step one is to get and hold full time work, preferably for two adults.
Step one for the poor: Magically find jobs that they currently can't find. Got it.
The key is to begin saving in an institutional situation which takes the savings in an automatic way and which slowly raises the amount saved each month.
Step two for the poor: Save small amounts of money constantly until they retire. Or save small amounts of money constantly for eight months and then use it plus a payday loan to replace the transmission in their car. Whichever comes first.
The stupid! It burns!
I said it earlier and I will repeat, and then I am done with morons: Poor people almost always have more _expenses_ than _income_. I want you to actually sit and think about that. In your words 'Do the math...' How do they survive? Loans, eating very shitty but cheap food, avoiding healthcare, and doing without stuff that is actually needed.
Trying to somehow argue that there's a savings plan out of poverty for people with _negative_ cash flow is completely fucking stupid. As is arguing there's some magical way for them to get well-paying full time work that they just haven't _bothered_ to get for some reason.
And not knowing that poor people almost always are _losing_ ground (Or, at least, doing without some necessity or another), and that poor people _would love to have better jobs but cannot find them_ rather disqualify you and Noah Smith from talking about them.
"
Are you serious? Are you goddamn serious? Or is that some sort of absurd attempt at humor?
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And is anyone else amazed that homeless shelters are perfectly balanced with the amount of homeless people. They're exactly full every night! And all the food is exactly consumed!
Most poor people's _needed_ expenses are larger than their income. By a large percentage. But because they don't have that money, they simply do without those things.
Of course the money they _actually spend_ is balanced. How the fuck could the poor spend more than they have? (Well, they can borrow, and do. But they can't _keep_ doing that.)
But by all means, let's go find people who would need 200% more income to buy health insurance, and 30% more income to buy better food, and 50% more income to make car payments so they could get to the bank and Costco and stuff...
...and let's stand there and comment how it's certainly suspicious that they use 5% of their income to buy cigarettes or see a movie, or whichever the hell the current 'Poor people are actually rich' nonsense is popular. That 5% could have, with careful savings, bought a week of health insurance every three years! Or something.
And, in a totally unrelated fact: The savings rate that poor people can get is _under_ 1%. Inflation is _over_ 1%. Why the fuck would they want to save? Why would anyone want them to save except for the banks? What would savings accomplish them?
"
The thing this rich assholes don't understand is that the poor are not poor because they don't have money. They are poor because they don't have _income_, and yet have expenses.
Jesus Christ, you could give every poor person $10,000 , and they'd either use it responsible or not, but in a year, even the _most_ responsible poor person _is still going to be poor_ because they're working a minimum wage job that barely pays the rent. A financial-savant poor person might have managed to parlay that $10,000 into saving them $11,000 that year, but they wouldn't have done it via 'investment', they would have done it via one-time purchases of a working refrigerator and paying off credit card bills.
Hell, does this moron even understand that the poor have _debts_, and hence 'investment' would be a fucking stupid idea anyway? If the poor manage to scrimp and save an extra $100 a month, they really need to be putting it towards that credit card bill they racked up when their car broke last month.
The problem is, that _is_ how it works in this asshole's world, where all his money magically appears out of fucking nowhere. Oh, I'm sorry, it magically appears out of the bank. So clearly it must that way with the poor. Let's ignore the interest rate poor people get is actually less than inflation, and that poor people don't actually have _any extra money at all_ to invest. If they have 'extra money', it will be to replace the rotting floor in the bathroom and catch up on car payments.
Telling a poor person they need better money management skills and that will solve the problem of poverty is like telling women they need to learn more self defense and that will solve the problem of rape. It's not a _bad_ idea for people to learn those things, and in fact I'm all for it. But that is not the fucking 'solution' that society needs to be talking about. Poor people are not poor because they have failed at being rich, they are poor because _they do not have the ability to make enough money_.
On “How Much Liberty Is Too Much?”
Wait a minute. 25% of recreational boating accident deaths _aren't_ from drowning? What the hell were they from, then?
I mean, boats do occasionally run into things, and presumably people die in such collisions. Although that would seem to either require either a much large ship smashing through a smaller one, because people normally are not hanging out at the very bow of the boat, at least not 25% of them!
And boats can also run into or over people, but we usually manage to separate swimming areas from boating areas, so that seems odd also.
Seriously, what did those 250 people die of? Caught up in rigging? Killed by a a swinging sail? Crushed between a boat and dock? What exactly is the threat here? Are they counting non-boat related deaths like heart attacks? (That does not seem to be a 'recreational boating accident'.)
On “I’m having a hard time deciding which I find harder to believe…”
Indeed. The real joke here isn't the symbolic vote. Symbolic votes on constitutional amendments are fairly silly anyway, so who cares when anyone did it?
Either a state ratifies it when it's not yet passed, or it passes and the state forgets about it until someone brings it up. (Now, failing to ratify this amendment when someone bring it up _would_ be something to notice would be relevant, but isn't what we're talking about here.)
No, the real joke is that they're so fucked up in Mississippi it takes them almost two decades to file a piece of paperwork. That paperwork is _almost old enough to vote_.
Man, and I thought the US Congress was dysfunctional.
"
Why would anyone have _paid_ to do that when it would have been simpler and cheaper to just _say_ they were doing that, but actually just killed them?
Not even as any sort of public policy. They'd simply be faced with which of two ships to hire...the one that actually did the shipping, or the one that cost 1/100th as much, and mysteriously reappeared back in port two days after taking on a former-slave shipment. (I am assuming it's the state governments doing this, because former slaves would have no money to book passage.)
Does anyone now think anyone then would care?
There's not really any way, in the pre-intercontinental communication days, that former slaves would have made it en mass back to Africa. That benefited _no one_ to do correctly. (No one who was actually a 'person', at least.) I mean, look how many black people on slave ships died, and those deaths _directly cut into profit_.
About the only plausible way that things could have ended well would have been to give them a territory out west, one that they could get to themselves, and eventually making a state out of it. In fact, that probably would have been for the best in our _actual_ history. Having an actual power base where wealthy-ish black people could originate from, and where marginalized black people could retreat to, might have made the civil right's struggle shorter.
OTOH, I doubt it would have actually worked, no one would have allowed black people to end up in charge of a state in 1880 or whenever this would be. And such a place sorta already existed in New Orleans anyway.
On “A Well Regulated Militia”
Oh, I don't disagree with you. A lot of states constitutions have that and other rules about their militia.
Of course, state constitutions are _much_ easier to amend than the US constitution. If _state_ constitutions were what was standing in the way, we'd be fine. (Especially with the whole 'interstate commerce' thing obviously allowing regulation of sales.)
I was just pointing out is that the 2nd amendment was intended to just apply to the Federal government (Which everyone knows, if half the people forget.), and it really seems to me that it was intended to stop the Federal government from disarming the state militias, and is just conceptualized very poorly.
Now, what I'm not entirely sure of is what the writers of the 2nd thought about the Federal government disarming citizens which were _not_ in a state militia. I suspect the founders also would not approve of that, but for slightly different reasons. I suspect their objection would be more along the lines of 'The federal government should not be telling citizens of Virginia what they can and cannot own, period.'
This, incidentally, is sorta the reason I think it was supposed to work like I said. No one in 1789 would have _conceived_ of the US restricting citizens of the various states from owning things. No, the 2nd amendment was not for that...it was to stop the US from restricting the state militias. And least we forget, the US explicitly can seize control of militia of under the constitution, and _is in charge of arming_ them. The 2nd makes it even if the Federal government does something insane like refuses to arm them, _militias can still have weapons_.
If the 2nd amendment had not been incorporated under the 14th amendment, we'd be fine. If the 2nd amendment had been incorporated but had been correctly written to say 'The militias may not be disarmed', we'd also be fine. (As states could simply define who is in their own militia, and disarm others if they wanted...and change their constitution to allow that if it did not.) Instead, both stupid things happened and here we are.
I have no actual solution here, I was just trying to explain 'How we got here'.
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Moreover, arguing that because militias ceased to be the preferred military option of the Feds, the Feds can simply disregard the 2A and disarm the militia- by disarming the people who fill it- is just goofy. The entire point of the 2A is to restrain the Feds from disarming the militia. Arguing that the militia can be disarmed becasue the Feds don’t want to use it anymore renders the whole Amendment useless.
The real problem is now the _states_ can't disarm _their own_ militia, which is rather absurd.
Subjecting the 2nd amendment (Which, regardless of how it is phrased, is intended to give states a _right_ to operate a militia, even if the Federal government wishes to disarm it) to incorporation under the 14th amendment (Thus subjecting states to restrictions on their own militia!) was completely idiotic.
Although it's still being interpreted wrong even if that's true. Logically, even if states cannot now disarm their own militia (!?), they can still determine who is _in_ it. (This is one of those things so well known back then that no one bothered to put in writing, like what habeus corpus is.) So a state could ban all guns simply by saying it _has_ no militia, or that militia is solely the National Guard plus the police plus people who have passed specific gun training, and, thus, logically, it is only required to allow those people to be armed.
The problem is the courts have idiotically decided that the entire first part of amendment doesn't matter. That the right to bear arms doesn't exist in the context of _state power to have a militia_, like the amendment is clearly trying to say, it just exists in general.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.