I see Gordon as someone who legitimately has nowhere to go. That's the entire point of his speech to Blake.
His lie turned Dent into a hero, which wasn't his intent. Remember, Dent tried to kill his son, so is hardly someone he'd purposefully make a hero. But there was just Dent and Batman, and one had to be the hero and one the villain, and making Dent the villain would let the Joker win.
This lie was used to make a law, but that almost certainly wasn't his intent, and the guilt of that eventually lead him to the point that he was ready to reveal the lie.
Gordon seem to have no actual problem with the Dent Act itself, and does not want it repealed. As police commissoner, he certainly could stand up and say 'We no longer need the Dent Act' without exposing the lie. According to the mayor at the state of the movie, other people are saying it's not needed anymore, so Gordon could join them. He hasn't done that, so he's fine with the law.
I.e., he's not planning on tearing down Dent to take down the (in his mind bad) law, he's stopping himself from tearing down Dent _because_ that might also take down the (in his mind good) law.
Incidentally, I see some people here have apparently taken Bane's word that the Dent Act is some sort of unfair fascist law. I should remind people that Bane is a lunatic and we have no real evidence of how the Dent Act works. When I was watching, I assume it is akin to a local version of RICO, not some sort of Gitmo where people are locked up without a trial.
Bane actually says they didn't have _hearings_, which, even if it's not a lie, doesn't mean they don't have trials. Maybe the judges at the preliminary hearings were corrupt, so the Dent Act basically just constantly keeps grand juries on hand to indict people instead. A strange and unwieldy system, but entirely constitutional. Or maybe he meant they didn't have parole hearings. Or maybe they also use that prison to hold people before trial. (That's what they do with Selina.)
Or maybe, as I pointed out, he was just crazy and making things up.
For another example, expressing the tax burden of the rich as a % of total tax receipts is a somewhat questionable metric, as this number will increase if the government taxes a larger share of their income, but it will also increase if their income increases relative to the rest of the country, as it has done for the past 30 years. So when somebody points out that the top 1% pay 36% of all income taxes, that says to me that the top 1% have a tremendous amount of pre-tax income, not that their tax burden is high.
No, that's not 'questionable'. It's _dishonest_.
If some specific thing is taxed, it is inherently dishonest to compare that tax against the _population_, regardless of how much of that thing they have or use.
Did you know that 15% of people pay _100%_ of the cigarette tax? Clearly, we need fairer cigarette taxes.
Did you know that people over three feet tall pay 99.99% of sales tax? What sort of absurd discriminatory tax laws do we have in this country?!?!
It's not 'questionable', it's not 'dubious', it's not whatever words we want to use for politely calling it into question. It's just a flat out lie to make statements like that, comparing apples to oranges.
It is not valid to just pull the number 1% out of 'people', and 36% out of 'income tax'. The comparison is not 'percent of people' to 'percent of income tax'. It's 'percent of income' to 'percent of income tax'.
Now, it would be valid to point out that the people at the top pay range about 2% into income taxes for every 1% of income, compared to others. I.e, their income tax rate is, on average, twice as high than an average persons. That would be a non-lying place to start the debate. (At which point the response would be 'Hey, wait a minute, what do we mean by 'income' and don't the super-rich have it structured so that their income isn't actually income? So while they're paying twice as much on the stuff they haven't rigged that way, what are they paying on the rest, and what is their average if we include that?'.)
This. We're helping 'the company'. We're helping 'the economy'.
And people are like 'Hey, I work for that company!' and 'Hey, I live in that economy!'. Sounds good.
Except what is almost always meant is 'We're going to help the people who own the company and who own the economy'.
Economies are not real. Companies are not real. The GDP is not real. Profit is not real. They are made-up ways of looking at money and the movement of thereof.
The people who _are part of them_ are real.
And about half the time, 'the problem' that is being solved is that the fictional entity is not doing _good enough_. They're making money, they're producing stuff that people want and pay for, workers in them are living okay, everything really seems fine...but somehow it's not quite enough for the owners.
So...tinkering is required. Tinkering that hurts the vast majority of people who are part of that entity, and in fact often causes it to fail, but makes the people on top come out better.
Bain just throw it into even sharper relief because the tinkerers weren't even the actual owners of the place. They just leapt it, took it over, and 'tinkered' in ways to obviously benefit themselves like paying themselves huge mounds of cash, and then half the time they immediately exited stage left, making off like bandits.
Dammit, how do you expect to be prosperous without having your pay cut or losing your job?
Ah, yes. This is the strangely surreal idea that we should all get behind increasing the _sum total_ of productivity, which basically has been the stated policy for decades. The problem is, the sum total of productivity has almost nothing to do with how we actually live.
We, as a country, would be vastly better off if we'd enact policies that kept the GDP steady or dropping, but increase the median income by 1%+inflation or something. I'm not saying redistribute the wealth, I'm saying aim policies intended to cause the wealth creation at the people without wealth, instead of the economy as a whole. Because 'helping the economy as a whole' actually means 'helping the people who own almost everything'.
It would, instead, be better if sometime companies were encouraged to just _stay there making things and providing jobs_, instead of trying to suck even bit of profit out of things, or having to put on a song and dance for the asshole 'investor class' because their perfectly slow and steady money-making is not fast enough. Companies should die due to competition or failure to keep up, not because some investor demanded they start taking risks, and they did, and it failed. That is the _opposite_ of being a 'job creator'.
I don't think the American people quite realize that yet, they still iodolize the 'innovation' concept without quite realizing that 99% of the stuff that needs to be done is not innovative at all. But they're now looking long and hard at practices, like Bain, that don't seem to produce anything _at all_ while they harm random people.
In fact, the reason they _are_ going away is that the internet is doing about 90% of their job. The internet has replaced notifying people of local events and things (webpages, Facebook), editorials/letters to the editor (blogs), classified ads (craigslist/ebay), etc.
About the only thing it hasn't replaced is actual reporting...but, in a very poorly timed cost-saving measure, newspapers stopped that in the mid-90s, replacing that with stenography. Which it turns out the internet can also do.
And to get back on topic of a 'newspaper' or 'internet' mandate: The point of the insurance mandate isn't (supposedly) to make sure health insurance companies survive. The point is to make sure that people _have health insurance_.
In this analogy, if we needed to make sure that people had access to newspaper, or the internet, the way to do it would be the way we already do...by putting it in a library open to the public. (And I would not be opposed to the government doing more with internet access. For example, by providing free, time-limited dialup, and by collecting and loaning old computers with modems for that.)
But a bunch of people in the late 1700s already went through this discussion, and came up with some pretty good ideas on who to make it work, IMO.
Indeed. There are a few rights that need to exist simply because we cannot have any sort of democratic society without them, and they were all pointed out hundreds of years ago.
They basically boil down to 'Freedom of thought and discussion' (1st amendment) and 'Disallowing the government from singling people and groups without due process' (Habeas corpus, 4th-8th, 13th-15th, 19th).
And there's one other that _isn't_ in the constitution: The right to actually know what the hell the government is doing. (This was sorta assumed hundred of years ago.)
Once you have those things, plus basic voting rights, people can fix any problems the government develops. But all of those rights are legal fictions. (In fact, the _government_ is a legal fiction.)
'Rights' are like ''free will'. A useful fiction when speaking, but not actually anything that anyone can point at, and if you actually start dissecting the concept, you'll just end up at some random tautology.
Frankly, I think we'd be a lot better off if we removed about 75% of the talk of 'rights' in political discussions, as about 3/4ths of what people think are 'rights' shouldn't be. I say 'should be' because it's useless to talk about what 'is' a right. Rights are not actually real.
Talking like that is harmless, except that as politics becomes increasingly polarized, people start thinking in terms of 'rights', which is, in terms of absolutes. Even many of the rights laid out at the formation of this country are not intended to be _complete_ absolutes. (Freedom of association is limited via imprisonment. Speech can be punished with libel or copyright laws. Habeas corpus can be suspended in times of insurrection or invasion. Etc.)
And it's even worse when people just start _inventing_ rights, like some sort of right to not be taxed. (1) And the rather odd abortion thing. I actually can see a 'right to total body anatomy', and in fact I'm in favor of it...and where's my right to take LSD in private? Oh, for some reason, we've only decided to apply this right to 'privacy' (Which is a bad name.) in one specific example. Seriously?
I have to wonder how much better off we'd be if _people_ would talk about rights basically the way that courts talk about laws the discriminate based on gender: Is there a compelling reason for this law that we can't do any other way?
And also if people would stop just pulling 'rights' out of thin air, like a right to not see gay people being all gayish and whatnot.
1) Which is why I personally find Robert's logic with the mandate rather hilarious. (Also I find it funny because I was arguing _of course_ it was a tax.) Hey, look, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court says the government has the power to tax.
Yes, but Fox does something that is problematic that other networks don't. Basically I have three problems with Fox, two of which are problems with all cable news channels, and one of just of Fox:
1) First, for all new shows: Opinions of other people are not generally news, and do not belong on the 'news' shows. If it's the opinion of Romney or Obama, sure, report on it. If it's the opinion of some random guy, no. If it's the opinion of someone at your own station, you must never mention it, simply because that's just a blatantly obvious trick to slip the station's opinions into news. And in _all_ cases, when reporting on an opinion, should you point out if said opinion is 'true' to whatever extent that can be determined.
2) Second, for all opinion shows: Opinions about opinions, or opinions on crazy theories, or opinions about known falsehoods...have no place even on the _opinion_ shows. The opinion shows are to have opinions on actual facts. Stand there, on the opinion shows only, and tell me what you think, politically, the Wisconsin recall results indicate to for November. Bring in guests to give their POV. And then disagree with the guest as to their opinion, but not the facts. Do not stand there and tell me what nonsensical opinions you've managed to pull in off the street, and then give your opinions on the opinions instead of the facts. Do not locate some conspiracy theory and tell me some opinion on that. In fact, do not produce or air conspiracies at all...there's a difference between 'conspiracy' and 'opinion'.
3) Thirdly, and this is the one just Fox: When giving your opinion, please make sure the thing they are based on is 'fact'. This is the major issue for me, much worse on Fox, and it is how falsehoods slip into news via #2 and then #1.
The process on Fox: Someone says a conspiracy theory based on a lie, and then other people on the opinion shows repeat it (While claiming they don't entirely believe it, but it's 'interesting' to tell lies like that, isn't it? I mean, 'interesting' to think about.) then the news finds a 'developing story' and starts explaining the conspiracy, over and over again, and never even has to issue a correction. (Because they never said it was true, just that people were saying it.)
The same thing happens on other networks, but without #3 happening anywhere near as much, at least falsehoods aren't making it to the news, just idiotic opinions.
I've made it my habit of, whenever I sit down somewhere and Fox News is on, usually when I'm eating somewhere, I watch it. (I don't have cable at my house anymore. Luckily, Maddow is also a podcast.) I watch until either some completely untrue fact shows up, and is not immediately pointed out to be false.
I don't think I've ever made it until the end of my meal. Now, I have absolutely no idea who anyone is on Fox except O'Reilly, and it's entirely possible that I've only seen the 'opinion' shows, especially considering when they air and when I eat. But falsehoods should not be on those either! Opinion shows aren't just 'Opinions about random stuff', they're 'Opinions about _news_!'. It's a _news_ channel.
Except it's not. I mean, that network gave a hour to _Glenn Beck_. Yes, they eventually revoked it, but, honest to God, they gave a platform to Glenn Beck, a total nutter, a guy who would create _acrostic_ conspiracy theories.
Incidentally, speaking of Fox News, I'd really like a justification for the four minute political ad they themselves produced and aired, and then reported on as if it was news. This is such a huge violation of #1 that they don't even seem aware such a conflict of interest exists. As I said, the mere 'reporting' on the opinions of other employees is bogus to start with. (Well, unless you're calling them out for lying.) Other people seemed to take at as evidence they were as political as they always appeared, but, I, frankly, have rather different issues with their amazing ability to turn 'opinion' into 'something we're going to pretend is news'.
There's a reason that the only cable news I watch at all is Maddow.
I have, on occassion, watched others on MSNBC for five minutes or so, until they started sprouting random imaginary theories about what's going on. Which is still better than Fox, which seems to be flagrantly lying every time I happen to watch them.
The only 'theories' on Maddow show are ones she can back up with actual documentation. When she stands there and says that Gov. Walker is trying to destroy unions, she'll back that up by a clip of him talking about exactly that. (Well, she also has funny theories, like her theory that 'John Boehner is bad at his job' because he appears unable to count votes needed for stuff.)
Look, there's a difference between news and opinion, I know that. But there's also a different between an _opinion_ about the news, which Maddow clearly has, and wild-ass conspiracy theories about the news, which everyone else at MSNBC and half the people at Fox do. (And by 'half', I mean the other half of Fox are doing wild-ass conspiracy theories about _falsehoods_ or other conspiracy theories.)
An opinion about the news is when Maddow (To use the example above) lays out what organizations donate to which politicians, and connects that with the anti-union things the right has done recent, and points out that reducing union membership will cripple fundraising on the left. That, although everyone else has forgotten it, is a hypothetical, it is not actually 'news', it is an opinion about news. I am not criticizing Maddow, the point of her shows is to give opinions about news.
Everyone else, however, seems to start with the opinion as a base, and then have opinions as if the base is true. Or invent conspiracy theories and then have opinions about them. Or have opinions about other people's opinions. And then treat _those_ opinions as if they are true, and have opinions about them. And then the 'news' half of the cable news starts reporting on opinions as if they're news, allowing yet more opinionating about imaginary stuff.
Nothing on cable besides Maddow appears to be 'events that actually happened, and my somewhat political thoughts on those actual real events'.
I wonder if this is helped much by Maddow's tendency to not have guests, or only have one at a time and just let them talk. The thing about multiple guests is that then you can give your opinion on their opinion, and vis versa, and the parts you agree on are now 'true' and you can talk about your opinion on that 'true thing that everyone agrees on'.
The theme of House is supposedly 'Everyone lies'. They lie about pretty much everything.
But the lying is only a problem in about 1/4th the cases, honestly, although there often will be completely irrelevant lying discovered, and is usually unrelated to the cause of the case. Often, it's the lie of someone beside the patient. And is usually not some sort of 'moral' lie, and is often more of an oversight than a 'lie'.
The actual premise, at least of House the person, is 'everyone is a selfish bastard', of which their lying is just a subset. It has been pointed out that House is _wrong_ on this, even about _himself_, especially his claim that he's only in it to solve medical mysteries and does not actually care about the outcome. (In fact, among his employees will always be someone whose job is to point this out, although they keep changing it up, and ended the series with employees who had different things to be idealist about.)
I'm not quite sure how any of that's a conservative premise. If House was right, if he lived in some sort of crapsack Ayn Rand world where everyone was out to get ahead, that would be a 'conservatism' premise for sufficiently silly versions of conservative, but he's really not. He's just a misanthrope.
So what distinguishes them? Isn’t it that the financiers don’t obviously create any wealth? And that their vast incomes are getting paid from somewhere? So its assumed they must be benefiting from some kind of power imbalance, right? In other words – aren’t we talking about exploitation here?
Basically, yes. Or at least, that's my issue, I have no idea of what the OWS movement thinks.
There are two kinds of jobs. There are the jobs that create wealth, and the jobs that don't.
The ones that create wealth in some manner, no one has a problem with, because they are not zero-sum jobs...I can come out wealthier, and you can come out wealthier. I make a widget that costs me $4 to make, you think it's worth $10, you pay me $6 for it, we're all winners.
And, of course, there are plenty of non-wealth-creating jobs that are merely doing the bookkeeping for the wealth creating ones, and things like UPS driver and cashier and whatnot, that are needed to actually get the wealth somewhere.
And then there are jobs that were originally claimed to be like this, like 'stockbroker' and 'investor', and at a certain point they rather stopped actually being helpful to the creation of wealth in any way, and almost everyone else involved would rather they stay the hell away. (Bain Capital, for example. Or millisecond-stock traders. Or oil speculators.)
That, actually, is a pretty good rule-of-thumb: If _no one_, not the businesses, not the other customers, not anyone but you yourself, appreciated your business's interaction in the market...i.e, if you caused higher prices for customers, and lower profits for existing corporations, and somehow everyone but you ended up worse off...you're probably a parasite and not creating any sort of wealth. (Like I said, this a rule of thumb, and rather hard to measure objectively.)
It's a tricky line there, which is why OWS focused not just on that, but on people like that who _also_ have so much money that they're able buy politicians and rig the laws so not only are they not actually doing anything other than siphoning money, they're not even bothering to pay taxes on it. I.e., 'Not only are these people not doing anything except taking our money, we've decided not to tax them for it'.
But then the wealth question is a bit of a distraction.
Yeah, but without vast wealth, such exploiting would be rather hard to get away with. I mean, _I_ can't leverage a buyout of my grocery store, borrow money which it then pays to 'hire me', run it into the ground, and walk away.
There is low-level exploitation that OWS would presumably be against, like payday-lending places, but OWS thinks they have bigger fish to fry.
I remain open on His Mittness in that his verbal twitchiness was about how much to slap down RickSant and Newt. I think that was the hardest part, not calling out the BHO presidency, but how to take away the guns and knives from the GOP’s 5-yr-olds without being too brutish about it and alienating the GOP base.
I was wondering that during the primary too. Not that I was going to vote for him regardless because of policy positions. But he always seemed to the Only Sane Man in a roomful of crazy. (So much so that I was sorta hoping that any of the others got it, so Obama would win easy.) So I kept thinking, like you, that his oddness was him having to stand there and hold his tongue when completely idiotic positions were required of him by the base.
But at this point, that's over. Sure, Ron Paul's probably going to make a disturbance at the convention, but those people aren't voting for Romney anyway.
...so, uh...when does he turn back into a human being instead of the weirdly puppetted entity he is now?
I mean, for example, this current thing doesn't have anything to do with policy positions. Newt's not standing there touting a pro-assaulting-people-in-your-youth platform.
And I hope the base of the Republican party would not take issue with an actual apology from Romney in this regard. Or is it a total inability to show any sort of weakness?
The weirdness, towards policy during the primary, I would understand, in theory. But he seems to be that way all the time, in all contexts. At times, he almost seems like a person emulating a politician, right down to his inappropriately-used chuckle.
Romney has been very poorly programmed. That is the response when polssay something wrong, it doesn't make any sense in the context of attacking someone.
I don't mean it 'isn't a good idea', I mean, literally, it makes no sense contextually. If 'anybody' was hurt or offended? No, Romneybot, a specific person was hurt, and the issues isn't who was 'offended'. This was not a statement where you insulted people which you then measly-mouth apologized for. This was you actually causing actual harm to an actual person.
Seriously, Romney is almost a caricature of a politician at times. Even a caricature of human being!
Now I'm imaging him driving down the road, and a tire blows and he skids off the road and through a mass of people...and he gets out and says 'If anybody was hurt by that or offended by my accident, I apologize for that.' while people bleed to death on the sidewalk.
For whoever is programming Romney: The correct response to newly revealed assaults the Romney bot has committed to emphasis how it was a prank, how you didn't intend it to be as harmful as it clearly was, how you got caught up in the mob, and how you deeply regret it. I can even diagnose where the error is. You put in:
if 'people offended at your behavior'
then 'apologize if anybody was hurt by that or offended',
But you forgot to program in some sort of sanity check on 'Wait, what if instead of just saying something dumb, he actually really did something he should apologize for?' (And you should probably disable the creepy chuckling for a while after that, also. That needs work, anyway.)
For some reason I can't reply below, so I will reply here:
Claiming that you weren’t using your video camera to record images of children for pornographic purposes is an affirmative defense.
I don't even know how to respond to this, it's so stupid. There is not any sort of 'affirmative defense' in there at all. Either you were breaking the law by recording child porn, and the courts have to prove that (And the police should not arrest you unless they have some sort of case), or you were not not doing so. Child porn is actually one of those few crimes it's difficult to think of an affirmative defense of.
Do you really not understand how this works or are you just playing stupid? I will attempt to re-explain in case you don't understand:
There are certain actions that are outlawed, called 'crimes'. Almost all of those crimes have exceptions, called 'affirmative defenses', that makes something that would otherwise be illegal be legal. Self defense for the crime of 'murder' is one, and there's a whole general exception in the law for 'preventing greater harm'.
Both those those must be proven by the person asserting them. Crimes, asserted by the state, must be proven by the state. Affirmative defenses, asserted by the defendant, must be proven by the defendant. People can't just say random things and expect the courts to accept them. (But these do not have to be proven to the same level. The crime has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, whereas the defense just has to raise reasonable doubt, IIRC.)
However, we are not actually talking about that. We are talking about the power of arrest.
If the police has reason to believe the courts can convict you of a 'crime', they will generally will arrest you. If they does not think it can convict you, they will not. This reasoning includes considering obvious possible affirmative defenses that might be raised. In their head, the police conduct a 'trial simulation' to see if they have enough evidence to convict.
The police, however, actually have the power to arrest anyone they think might be a criminal, on the thinnest shred of evidence. It is not the job of the police to give people a trial. It is the job of the police to detain people they think the DA will charge with a crime. (Arresting people that they immediately have to let go because the DA declines to charge them is a career-limiting move.)
...except in this case, where police apparently are specifically barred from arresting people who claim to have a specific affirmative defense. And the DA is apparently not allowed to press charges unless he somehow proves this is bogus.
In essence, Stand Your Ground laws set up a court system before the court system. With poorly defined procedure, without the legal balancing act that is our legal system, without the defense having to actually prove anything WRT their affirmative defense, for completely random reasons, stopping the police from holding people in custody who have caused the death of another. (And only those people, for some reason.)
I mean, it’s always incumbent on me to prove that I’m not committing any crimes and haven’t lately, right?
Uh, no.
But when you've committed something that would otherwise be a criminal action and you have an affirmative defense, it is incumbent on you to prove that defense.
Innocent until proven guilty is not how it works with affirmative defenses. If the police can prove you did X, which is normally a crime, it is now your job to prove that one of the affirmative defenses apply.That is, in fact, how 'affirmative defenses' are supposed to work.
It is not the job to the prosecutor to bring up all affirmative defenses and show how they don't apply, because pretty much every crime in the US, up to an including murder, has an infinite number of affirmative defense of the sort 'I did it to stop a greater crime'. (That is where the concept self-defense comes from, although that's now been explicitly codified.)
You can, for the classic example, drive under the influence if you have been drugged by your kidnapper-to-be and need to flee them. And if you are lost in a blizzard and freezing to death and come across an empty cabin, it is legal to break in and ride out the storm.
Those are affirmative defenses. You admit you committed the actions that were outlawed, but you assert, in court, a justification that makes them legal.You are innocent until the state proves you guilty of the act, but if you did the act, you have no affirmative defense unless you prove it. The state proves you broke into the cabin, you then prove you had to do it or freeze to death.
And, of course, the cops have leeway here, as they always do when making the case. If they can see the blizzard, they'll probably just nod at your explanation and let you go without arrest. But never in our stupidest fantasies would we make it illegal for cops to arrest people who just claim to have some justification, to make the police disprove the justification first.
Except, apparently, when it comes to causing death.
I just have to wonder in what universe we thought we needed a law that says 'Under some circumstances, we need to make sure that people standing over other people with a smoking gun cannot be arrested.'. I just find the entire concept of that baffling. If I shot someone in self defense, I'd sorta expect to be arrested if I didn't have any witnesses or whatever, and I wouldn't run around whining that I need a law saying I can't be.
I mean, are people wandering around shooting so many people in self-defense that the police locking them up until they post bail is interfering with their jobs? (Or even interfering with their 'shooting people in self-defense' hobby!)
What the hell is this law attempting to solve?
And why is it for the most dangerous crime, and only for that?
I mean, there are plenty of affirmative defenses to crimes. Perhaps I am speeding because I am having a medical emergency and must get to the hospital, which is an affirmative defense to speeding. And any delay could kill me. Shouldn't the police be barred from detaining me (via pulling me over) until they demonstrate that this is not true? It's a lesser crime, it's more harmful to detain me than it would be to detain someone after a shooting, etc, etc. By any objective standard, surely we should have those sorts of laws before Stand Your Ground.
Indeed, which is where this entire thing is stupid. There are two unrelated problems, neither of which need the constitutional amendment that's been proposed:
1) Corporations are spending stockholders money on political stuff. We no more need a constitutional amendment to make that illegal than we do to make it illegal for them to spend it on hookers and blow for CEOs. In fact, spending money on political pet projects arguable already _is_ illegal unless it furthers some corporate interest.
Solution: Laws asserting that all for-profit corporations are, unless otherwise stated, politically neutral, and cannot take political stances at all without the consent of all their owners. Or they can change their articles of corporation or whatever to be explicitly political.
Non-profits usually already have some sort of goal, and can obviously take political positions to attempt to reach that goal, and I have no problem with a for-profit company that also take political positions, as long as it's made clear well in advance that it does so so the owners know about it, or can sell their ownership in a company that has decided to take pet projects of the super-rich over actual profits for owners.
And under no circumstances should this been done secretly, without full disclosure. Not because corporations don't have a 'right to anonymous speech', from a first amendment direction, but because corporations have no right to do _anything_ in secret from their owners, anymore than your car has the right to keep things secret from you. (OTOH, privately owned corporations might manage to keep secret from the public what they are doing.)
2) Apparently no campaign spending limits are constitutional.
Solution: First off, restricting corporations here will result in just rich individuals having the ability to have unlimited spending, which is a rather ass-backwards 'solution'. Some rich guy can buy an ad on TV, but I can't make a non-profit, collect donations, and run an ad to counter it? Gee, thanks.
This is what needs a goddamn constitutional amendment. But it doesn't need the one proposed to solve 'this problem', which is about corporate personhood, which has nothing to do with anything.
This whole constitutional amendment thing is the greatest example of people going 'Full-on stupid' I've ever seen.
I think there's a rather large distinction between actual dangerous sex offenders, and the people who end up on the list.
The thing is, the actual real sex offenders we should be locking up, and doing it two times should mean we keep them locked up. (Although it is stuff like this that makes me wish we had some sort of all alternative to prison, where we just have repeat offenders live on an island somewhere and be monitored.)
The problem is that a lot of 'sex offenders' are no such thing. I mean, forget age differences in dating...sometimes even stuff like public nudity puts you on the list.
Other crimes, we specifically have punishments for in law. With 'sex offender', we've inexplicably made a big list of every crime that could be related to sex, and added the same amount of punishment to it, no matter what the actual punishment is in the law or the circumstances of the crime.
That is not how crimes are supposed to be punished. It's like if we decided that DUIs were horrible things, but instead of just increasing the punishment for violating laws about that, we decided to invent a class of people 'driving offenders' and demand that everyone who's ever had a moving violation get a car with a breathalyzer and giant flashing warning lights on the top.
If we want to set up something to control people at high risk for sex offenses, we need to set up such a think under the law, and then modify laws to _put people in that group_. As part of their trial. Likewise, if we want to specifically make offenses involving children have harsher punishment, well, you know where that law is.
We do not need to run around grouping every crime vaguely related to sex together....a lot of those crimes have a year in jail or whatever for a reason, because they are _lesser_ crimes.
Sadly, apparently robbing a bank for one dollar is not 'bank robbery' but just 'larceny', so he probably won't end up in jail for at least three years like he was hoping.
3.5) You will not solicit login information or access an account belonging to someone else.
4.8) You will not share your password, (or in the case of developers, your secret key), let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account.
I wonder how much someone would win in a lawsuit about the time they went to a job interview and were asked, or were already employed and asked by their employer, to help break the law by helping commit unauthorized computer access of a third party.
You know, actually having 'Employees must turn over Facebook passwords' as a policy would seem to pierce the corporate veil, considering it's a clear violation of the law.
Forget 2006 vs. 2012. All Obama needs to do is wait until his first debate against Romney in 2012, then take those answers and compare them to early 2012 Romney. (And then, for fun, compare them to 2006.)
Not having a position worked in the 1980s and before because who could keep track of all that. And it worked in the 1990s and early 2000s because the news networks were idiots who printed whatever people said and did not actually do reporting.
Then came along camera phones, then came along video on the internet, and then came along SuperPACs that would, you know, actually _air previous positions_.
And thus ends Schrodinger's politician, the standard politician who collapsed into a different political waveform depending on who opened the box he was hiding in. In fact, that probably ended in 2006,and at this point it has _retroactively_ ended because all this stuff has been available since 1990 but the news media sucked donkey balls, and continues to do so, but now people _besides_ the news media can put videos in front of people. (Not that I am a fan of SuperPACs, but it's pretty funny watching them eat the right alive.)
And at this point the box has no top or sides at all, and the politicians are attempting to change shape in _complete view of everyone_. It's like Superman was updated to use cell phones instead of phone booths:
*explosion happens outside the Daily Planet*
Clark Kent stands up at his desk and says, 'Excuse me, I have to make a phone call.', and pulls out his cell phone. Pretending he is on a phone call, he quickly removes his suit, places it under his desk, pulls out and attaches his cape, and says, "It's me, Superman! What seems to be the problem, Ms. Lane?"
Lois and Jimmy look at each other. Lois says, carefully, "Right. You're Superman. Because Clark left. To make a call."
Jimmy whispers. "He knows we know he's Superman, right? Because we can see him change clothes? Because he's in the same room as us and does it right in front of us?"
As someone on the left, I've always pointed out that the left came up with, basically, almost all good ideas in this country. Sadly, the left has also come up with almost all bad ideas, too. This is probably because the left tends to be made up of the disaffected, who actually want to fix things, where as the right, until recently, was not. (I have no idea what's going on with the right now. They're angry at completely random things, and none of the things they propose would actually solve any of the problems they claim to see, even pretending those problems made sense.)
Some of the stuff was even more closely tied together. Prohibition and women's suffrage, for example, were both 'women's rights' issues. Because the world was such that men (Who were the only allowed breadwinners), would go out drinking, spend all their family's money, get blind drunk, and beat their wife. And no divorce either. Sure, by then it was often _legal_, but it was unworkable...it meant the woman losing custody of the kids. And remember, no contraceptives, and no such thing as a man raping his wife...so there were always kids. (And after divorce...no making any money by the woman.)
So the solution was, apparently: Forbidding alcohol.
Now, from _our_ historic perspective, there were other obvious solutions, such as 'Making divorce possible' and 'Legalizing contraception' and 'Forbidding wife-beating' and 'Forbidding wife-raping' and 'Actually treat women as human beings deserving of dignity and respect'. However, at the time, those solutions were not possible. So the women's rights movement latched onto the idea of prohibition, which had been floating around forever, and managed to get it to happen. It's easy to look with hindsight and think it was just some moralizing busybodies, but it was moralizing busybodies who said 'It is unacceptable to spend all the family's money drinking, and then go home and beat a women who wasn't able to leave you', which I suspect we all agree with...we just disagree with the solution to that.
On of the interesting things about the modern right is watching it, as it has increasingly attempted to 'solve problems' that it says it sees, how it completely refuses to actually let go of bad policy positions. For example, standing there and arguing for DADT. Really? Gay marriage is still decisive enough that it _might_ be a reasonable idea to oppose it, but you're going to have to look far and wide to find people who think that gay people should be drummed out of the military.
Changing positions once the previous one has either failed or just become unworkable is an important lesson the left learned decades ago, although often the right fails to notice it does this. (It's always fun to watch the right rant about the left trying 'Gun control', an issue the actual left pretty much decided was pointless a decade ago and has attempted to do nothing with since.)
The right will, however, let go of policy positions the second the left looks at them and says 'Okay, we can do that'. 'Okay, I guess we can do cap and trade instead of just regulating amounts.' 'Okay, I guess we can make an insurance mandate instead of medicare for all.'
This is why I have often argued that the right policy makers are inherently dishonest, although I'm sure that's not a popular opinion here. A good deal of 'policy proposals' from the right are just things to use to argue that the left's solution is 'wrong' so the problem doesn't get solved...as demonstrated by the fact that when the right comes up with a solution the left doesn't find objectionable and is in danger of using, the right immediately flees from it like a bat out of hell. I've often wished for a honest opposition party that attempted to also solve problems, but in a different way...instead of just coming up with near-nonsensical alternatives to hide the fact they're standing atop history crying 'STOP!' and don't really want to solve the problem at all. (Although recently they seem to realize this looks stupid, and instead have dedicated themselves to attempting to solve problems only they can see, like how dare unions wages not have gone down as much as everyone else's!)
So I suspect it's this entire page, all comments includes, that is '51% male'. (Or rather, was at the time.) I don't see anyway to paste just one comment in and see the result.
And while we're talking about, I'm pretty certain that sticking a minor on an airplane and dumping them out in another country without an adult is also illegal. Even if you are allowed to deport someone, you can't deport children without some sort of adult who is going to take care of them at the other end.
On “The Symbolism of Batman and Where We Put Our Faith”
I see Gordon as someone who legitimately has nowhere to go. That's the entire point of his speech to Blake.
His lie turned Dent into a hero, which wasn't his intent. Remember, Dent tried to kill his son, so is hardly someone he'd purposefully make a hero. But there was just Dent and Batman, and one had to be the hero and one the villain, and making Dent the villain would let the Joker win.
This lie was used to make a law, but that almost certainly wasn't his intent, and the guilt of that eventually lead him to the point that he was ready to reveal the lie.
Gordon seem to have no actual problem with the Dent Act itself, and does not want it repealed. As police commissoner, he certainly could stand up and say 'We no longer need the Dent Act' without exposing the lie. According to the mayor at the state of the movie, other people are saying it's not needed anymore, so Gordon could join them. He hasn't done that, so he's fine with the law.
I.e., he's not planning on tearing down Dent to take down the (in his mind bad) law, he's stopping himself from tearing down Dent _because_ that might also take down the (in his mind good) law.
Incidentally, I see some people here have apparently taken Bane's word that the Dent Act is some sort of unfair fascist law. I should remind people that Bane is a lunatic and we have no real evidence of how the Dent Act works. When I was watching, I assume it is akin to a local version of RICO, not some sort of Gitmo where people are locked up without a trial.
Bane actually says they didn't have _hearings_, which, even if it's not a lie, doesn't mean they don't have trials. Maybe the judges at the preliminary hearings were corrupt, so the Dent Act basically just constantly keeps grand juries on hand to indict people instead. A strange and unwieldy system, but entirely constitutional. Or maybe he meant they didn't have parole hearings. Or maybe they also use that prison to hold people before trial. (That's what they do with Selina.)
Or maybe, as I pointed out, he was just crazy and making things up.
On “Somebody else made that happen—and he’s here to collect”
For another example, expressing the tax burden of the rich as a % of total tax receipts is a somewhat questionable metric, as this number will increase if the government taxes a larger share of their income, but it will also increase if their income increases relative to the rest of the country, as it has done for the past 30 years. So when somebody points out that the top 1% pay 36% of all income taxes, that says to me that the top 1% have a tremendous amount of pre-tax income, not that their tax burden is high.
No, that's not 'questionable'. It's _dishonest_.
If some specific thing is taxed, it is inherently dishonest to compare that tax against the _population_, regardless of how much of that thing they have or use.
Did you know that 15% of people pay _100%_ of the cigarette tax? Clearly, we need fairer cigarette taxes.
Did you know that people over three feet tall pay 99.99% of sales tax? What sort of absurd discriminatory tax laws do we have in this country?!?!
It's not 'questionable', it's not 'dubious', it's not whatever words we want to use for politely calling it into question. It's just a flat out lie to make statements like that, comparing apples to oranges.
It is not valid to just pull the number 1% out of 'people', and 36% out of 'income tax'. The comparison is not 'percent of people' to 'percent of income tax'. It's 'percent of income' to 'percent of income tax'.
Now, it would be valid to point out that the people at the top pay range about 2% into income taxes for every 1% of income, compared to others. I.e, their income tax rate is, on average, twice as high than an average persons. That would be a non-lying place to start the debate. (At which point the response would be 'Hey, wait a minute, what do we mean by 'income' and don't the super-rich have it structured so that their income isn't actually income? So while they're paying twice as much on the stuff they haven't rigged that way, what are they paying on the rest, and what is their average if we include that?'.)
On “The American People Have Lied To Mitt Romney”
This. We're helping 'the company'. We're helping 'the economy'.
And people are like 'Hey, I work for that company!' and 'Hey, I live in that economy!'. Sounds good.
Except what is almost always meant is 'We're going to help the people who own the company and who own the economy'.
Economies are not real. Companies are not real. The GDP is not real. Profit is not real. They are made-up ways of looking at money and the movement of thereof.
The people who _are part of them_ are real.
And about half the time, 'the problem' that is being solved is that the fictional entity is not doing _good enough_. They're making money, they're producing stuff that people want and pay for, workers in them are living okay, everything really seems fine...but somehow it's not quite enough for the owners.
So...tinkering is required. Tinkering that hurts the vast majority of people who are part of that entity, and in fact often causes it to fail, but makes the people on top come out better.
Bain just throw it into even sharper relief because the tinkerers weren't even the actual owners of the place. They just leapt it, took it over, and 'tinkered' in ways to obviously benefit themselves like paying themselves huge mounds of cash, and then half the time they immediately exited stage left, making off like bandits.
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Dammit, how do you expect to be prosperous without having your pay cut or losing your job?
Ah, yes. This is the strangely surreal idea that we should all get behind increasing the _sum total_ of productivity, which basically has been the stated policy for decades. The problem is, the sum total of productivity has almost nothing to do with how we actually live.
We, as a country, would be vastly better off if we'd enact policies that kept the GDP steady or dropping, but increase the median income by 1%+inflation or something. I'm not saying redistribute the wealth, I'm saying aim policies intended to cause the wealth creation at the people without wealth, instead of the economy as a whole. Because 'helping the economy as a whole' actually means 'helping the people who own almost everything'.
It would, instead, be better if sometime companies were encouraged to just _stay there making things and providing jobs_, instead of trying to suck even bit of profit out of things, or having to put on a song and dance for the asshole 'investor class' because their perfectly slow and steady money-making is not fast enough. Companies should die due to competition or failure to keep up, not because some investor demanded they start taking risks, and they did, and it failed. That is the _opposite_ of being a 'job creator'.
I don't think the American people quite realize that yet, they still iodolize the 'innovation' concept without quite realizing that 99% of the stuff that needs to be done is not innovative at all. But they're now looking long and hard at practices, like Bain, that don't seem to produce anything _at all_ while they harm random people.
On “Journalism: The Next Individual Mandate”
In fact, the reason they _are_ going away is that the internet is doing about 90% of their job. The internet has replaced notifying people of local events and things (webpages, Facebook), editorials/letters to the editor (blogs), classified ads (craigslist/ebay), etc.
About the only thing it hasn't replaced is actual reporting...but, in a very poorly timed cost-saving measure, newspapers stopped that in the mid-90s, replacing that with stenography. Which it turns out the internet can also do.
And to get back on topic of a 'newspaper' or 'internet' mandate: The point of the insurance mandate isn't (supposedly) to make sure health insurance companies survive. The point is to make sure that people _have health insurance_.
In this analogy, if we needed to make sure that people had access to newspaper, or the internet, the way to do it would be the way we already do...by putting it in a library open to the public. (And I would not be opposed to the government doing more with internet access. For example, by providing free, time-limited dialup, and by collecting and loaning old computers with modems for that.)
On “Open Thread: How do you discover a right?”
But a bunch of people in the late 1700s already went through this discussion, and came up with some pretty good ideas on who to make it work, IMO.
Indeed. There are a few rights that need to exist simply because we cannot have any sort of democratic society without them, and they were all pointed out hundreds of years ago.
They basically boil down to 'Freedom of thought and discussion' (1st amendment) and 'Disallowing the government from singling people and groups without due process' (Habeas corpus, 4th-8th, 13th-15th, 19th).
And there's one other that _isn't_ in the constitution: The right to actually know what the hell the government is doing. (This was sorta assumed hundred of years ago.)
Once you have those things, plus basic voting rights, people can fix any problems the government develops. But all of those rights are legal fictions. (In fact, the _government_ is a legal fiction.)
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'Rights' are like ''free will'. A useful fiction when speaking, but not actually anything that anyone can point at, and if you actually start dissecting the concept, you'll just end up at some random tautology.
Frankly, I think we'd be a lot better off if we removed about 75% of the talk of 'rights' in political discussions, as about 3/4ths of what people think are 'rights' shouldn't be. I say 'should be' because it's useless to talk about what 'is' a right. Rights are not actually real.
Talking like that is harmless, except that as politics becomes increasingly polarized, people start thinking in terms of 'rights', which is, in terms of absolutes. Even many of the rights laid out at the formation of this country are not intended to be _complete_ absolutes. (Freedom of association is limited via imprisonment. Speech can be punished with libel or copyright laws. Habeas corpus can be suspended in times of insurrection or invasion. Etc.)
And it's even worse when people just start _inventing_ rights, like some sort of right to not be taxed. (1) And the rather odd abortion thing. I actually can see a 'right to total body anatomy', and in fact I'm in favor of it...and where's my right to take LSD in private? Oh, for some reason, we've only decided to apply this right to 'privacy' (Which is a bad name.) in one specific example. Seriously?
I have to wonder how much better off we'd be if _people_ would talk about rights basically the way that courts talk about laws the discriminate based on gender: Is there a compelling reason for this law that we can't do any other way?
And also if people would stop just pulling 'rights' out of thin air, like a right to not see gay people being all gayish and whatnot.
1) Which is why I personally find Robert's logic with the mandate rather hilarious. (Also I find it funny because I was arguing _of course_ it was a tax.) Hey, look, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court says the government has the power to tax.
On “The FOX News – MSNBC Taste Test : Conclusions”
Yes, but Fox does something that is problematic that other networks don't. Basically I have three problems with Fox, two of which are problems with all cable news channels, and one of just of Fox:
1) First, for all new shows: Opinions of other people are not generally news, and do not belong on the 'news' shows. If it's the opinion of Romney or Obama, sure, report on it. If it's the opinion of some random guy, no. If it's the opinion of someone at your own station, you must never mention it, simply because that's just a blatantly obvious trick to slip the station's opinions into news. And in _all_ cases, when reporting on an opinion, should you point out if said opinion is 'true' to whatever extent that can be determined.
2) Second, for all opinion shows: Opinions about opinions, or opinions on crazy theories, or opinions about known falsehoods...have no place even on the _opinion_ shows. The opinion shows are to have opinions on actual facts. Stand there, on the opinion shows only, and tell me what you think, politically, the Wisconsin recall results indicate to for November. Bring in guests to give their POV. And then disagree with the guest as to their opinion, but not the facts. Do not stand there and tell me what nonsensical opinions you've managed to pull in off the street, and then give your opinions on the opinions instead of the facts. Do not locate some conspiracy theory and tell me some opinion on that. In fact, do not produce or air conspiracies at all...there's a difference between 'conspiracy' and 'opinion'.
3) Thirdly, and this is the one just Fox: When giving your opinion, please make sure the thing they are based on is 'fact'. This is the major issue for me, much worse on Fox, and it is how falsehoods slip into news via #2 and then #1.
The process on Fox: Someone says a conspiracy theory based on a lie, and then other people on the opinion shows repeat it (While claiming they don't entirely believe it, but it's 'interesting' to tell lies like that, isn't it? I mean, 'interesting' to think about.) then the news finds a 'developing story' and starts explaining the conspiracy, over and over again, and never even has to issue a correction. (Because they never said it was true, just that people were saying it.)
The same thing happens on other networks, but without #3 happening anywhere near as much, at least falsehoods aren't making it to the news, just idiotic opinions.
I've made it my habit of, whenever I sit down somewhere and Fox News is on, usually when I'm eating somewhere, I watch it. (I don't have cable at my house anymore. Luckily, Maddow is also a podcast.) I watch until either some completely untrue fact shows up, and is not immediately pointed out to be false.
I don't think I've ever made it until the end of my meal. Now, I have absolutely no idea who anyone is on Fox except O'Reilly, and it's entirely possible that I've only seen the 'opinion' shows, especially considering when they air and when I eat. But falsehoods should not be on those either! Opinion shows aren't just 'Opinions about random stuff', they're 'Opinions about _news_!'. It's a _news_ channel.
Except it's not. I mean, that network gave a hour to _Glenn Beck_. Yes, they eventually revoked it, but, honest to God, they gave a platform to Glenn Beck, a total nutter, a guy who would create _acrostic_ conspiracy theories.
Incidentally, speaking of Fox News, I'd really like a justification for the four minute political ad they themselves produced and aired, and then reported on as if it was news. This is such a huge violation of #1 that they don't even seem aware such a conflict of interest exists. As I said, the mere 'reporting' on the opinions of other employees is bogus to start with. (Well, unless you're calling them out for lying.) Other people seemed to take at as evidence they were as political as they always appeared, but, I, frankly, have rather different issues with their amazing ability to turn 'opinion' into 'something we're going to pretend is news'.
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There's a reason that the only cable news I watch at all is Maddow.
I have, on occassion, watched others on MSNBC for five minutes or so, until they started sprouting random imaginary theories about what's going on. Which is still better than Fox, which seems to be flagrantly lying every time I happen to watch them.
The only 'theories' on Maddow show are ones she can back up with actual documentation. When she stands there and says that Gov. Walker is trying to destroy unions, she'll back that up by a clip of him talking about exactly that. (Well, she also has funny theories, like her theory that 'John Boehner is bad at his job' because he appears unable to count votes needed for stuff.)
Look, there's a difference between news and opinion, I know that. But there's also a different between an _opinion_ about the news, which Maddow clearly has, and wild-ass conspiracy theories about the news, which everyone else at MSNBC and half the people at Fox do. (And by 'half', I mean the other half of Fox are doing wild-ass conspiracy theories about _falsehoods_ or other conspiracy theories.)
An opinion about the news is when Maddow (To use the example above) lays out what organizations donate to which politicians, and connects that with the anti-union things the right has done recent, and points out that reducing union membership will cripple fundraising on the left. That, although everyone else has forgotten it, is a hypothetical, it is not actually 'news', it is an opinion about news. I am not criticizing Maddow, the point of her shows is to give opinions about news.
Everyone else, however, seems to start with the opinion as a base, and then have opinions as if the base is true. Or invent conspiracy theories and then have opinions about them. Or have opinions about other people's opinions. And then treat _those_ opinions as if they are true, and have opinions about them. And then the 'news' half of the cable news starts reporting on opinions as if they're news, allowing yet more opinionating about imaginary stuff.
Nothing on cable besides Maddow appears to be 'events that actually happened, and my somewhat political thoughts on those actual real events'.
I wonder if this is helped much by Maddow's tendency to not have guests, or only have one at a time and just let them talk. The thing about multiple guests is that then you can give your opinion on their opinion, and vis versa, and the parts you agree on are now 'true' and you can talk about your opinion on that 'true thing that everyone agrees on'.
On “Conservatives, pop culture, and the language of the right”
The theme of House is supposedly 'Everyone lies'. They lie about pretty much everything.
But the lying is only a problem in about 1/4th the cases, honestly, although there often will be completely irrelevant lying discovered, and is usually unrelated to the cause of the case. Often, it's the lie of someone beside the patient. And is usually not some sort of 'moral' lie, and is often more of an oversight than a 'lie'.
The actual premise, at least of House the person, is 'everyone is a selfish bastard', of which their lying is just a subset. It has been pointed out that House is _wrong_ on this, even about _himself_, especially his claim that he's only in it to solve medical mysteries and does not actually care about the outcome. (In fact, among his employees will always be someone whose job is to point this out, although they keep changing it up, and ended the series with employees who had different things to be idealist about.)
I'm not quite sure how any of that's a conservative premise. If House was right, if he lived in some sort of crapsack Ayn Rand world where everyone was out to get ahead, that would be a 'conservatism' premise for sufficiently silly versions of conservative, but he's really not. He's just a misanthrope.
On “Why Can’t the Leftists Teach Their Children How to Speak?”
So what distinguishes them? Isn’t it that the financiers don’t obviously create any wealth? And that their vast incomes are getting paid from somewhere? So its assumed they must be benefiting from some kind of power imbalance, right? In other words – aren’t we talking about exploitation here?
Basically, yes. Or at least, that's my issue, I have no idea of what the OWS movement thinks.
There are two kinds of jobs. There are the jobs that create wealth, and the jobs that don't.
The ones that create wealth in some manner, no one has a problem with, because they are not zero-sum jobs...I can come out wealthier, and you can come out wealthier. I make a widget that costs me $4 to make, you think it's worth $10, you pay me $6 for it, we're all winners.
And, of course, there are plenty of non-wealth-creating jobs that are merely doing the bookkeeping for the wealth creating ones, and things like UPS driver and cashier and whatnot, that are needed to actually get the wealth somewhere.
And then there are jobs that were originally claimed to be like this, like 'stockbroker' and 'investor', and at a certain point they rather stopped actually being helpful to the creation of wealth in any way, and almost everyone else involved would rather they stay the hell away. (Bain Capital, for example. Or millisecond-stock traders. Or oil speculators.)
That, actually, is a pretty good rule-of-thumb: If _no one_, not the businesses, not the other customers, not anyone but you yourself, appreciated your business's interaction in the market...i.e, if you caused higher prices for customers, and lower profits for existing corporations, and somehow everyone but you ended up worse off...you're probably a parasite and not creating any sort of wealth. (Like I said, this a rule of thumb, and rather hard to measure objectively.)
It's a tricky line there, which is why OWS focused not just on that, but on people like that who _also_ have so much money that they're able buy politicians and rig the laws so not only are they not actually doing anything other than siphoning money, they're not even bothering to pay taxes on it. I.e., 'Not only are these people not doing anything except taking our money, we've decided not to tax them for it'.
But then the wealth question is a bit of a distraction.
Yeah, but without vast wealth, such exploiting would be rather hard to get away with. I mean, _I_ can't leverage a buyout of my grocery store, borrow money which it then pays to 'hire me', run it into the ground, and walk away.
There is low-level exploitation that OWS would presumably be against, like payday-lending places, but OWS thinks they have bigger fish to fry.
On “Romney the prankster, Obama the politician”
I remain open on His Mittness in that his verbal twitchiness was about how much to slap down RickSant and Newt. I think that was the hardest part, not calling out the BHO presidency, but how to take away the guns and knives from the GOP’s 5-yr-olds without being too brutish about it and alienating the GOP base.
I was wondering that during the primary too. Not that I was going to vote for him regardless because of policy positions. But he always seemed to the Only Sane Man in a roomful of crazy. (So much so that I was sorta hoping that any of the others got it, so Obama would win easy.) So I kept thinking, like you, that his oddness was him having to stand there and hold his tongue when completely idiotic positions were required of him by the base.
But at this point, that's over. Sure, Ron Paul's probably going to make a disturbance at the convention, but those people aren't voting for Romney anyway.
...so, uh...when does he turn back into a human being instead of the weirdly puppetted entity he is now?
I mean, for example, this current thing doesn't have anything to do with policy positions. Newt's not standing there touting a pro-assaulting-people-in-your-youth platform.
And I hope the base of the Republican party would not take issue with an actual apology from Romney in this regard. Or is it a total inability to show any sort of weakness?
The weirdness, towards policy during the primary, I would understand, in theory. But he seems to be that way all the time, in all contexts. At times, he almost seems like a person emulating a politician, right down to his inappropriately-used chuckle.
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Romney has been very poorly programmed. That is the response when polssay something wrong, it doesn't make any sense in the context of attacking someone.
I don't mean it 'isn't a good idea', I mean, literally, it makes no sense contextually. If 'anybody' was hurt or offended? No, Romneybot, a specific person was hurt, and the issues isn't who was 'offended'. This was not a statement where you insulted people which you then measly-mouth apologized for. This was you actually causing actual harm to an actual person.
Seriously, Romney is almost a caricature of a politician at times. Even a caricature of human being!
Now I'm imaging him driving down the road, and a tire blows and he skids off the road and through a mass of people...and he gets out and says 'If anybody was hurt by that or offended by my accident, I apologize for that.' while people bleed to death on the sidewalk.
For whoever is programming Romney: The correct response to newly revealed assaults the Romney bot has committed to emphasis how it was a prank, how you didn't intend it to be as harmful as it clearly was, how you got caught up in the mob, and how you deeply regret it. I can even diagnose where the error is. You put in:
if 'people offended at your behavior'
then 'apologize if anybody was hurt by that or offended',
But you forgot to program in some sort of sanity check on 'Wait, what if instead of just saying something dumb, he actually really did something he should apologize for?' (And you should probably disable the creepy chuckling for a while after that, also. That needs work, anyway.)
On “Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law, Again”
For some reason I can't reply below, so I will reply here:
Claiming that you weren’t using your video camera to record images of children for pornographic purposes is an affirmative defense.
I don't even know how to respond to this, it's so stupid. There is not any sort of 'affirmative defense' in there at all. Either you were breaking the law by recording child porn, and the courts have to prove that (And the police should not arrest you unless they have some sort of case), or you were not not doing so. Child porn is actually one of those few crimes it's difficult to think of an affirmative defense of.
Do you really not understand how this works or are you just playing stupid? I will attempt to re-explain in case you don't understand:
There are certain actions that are outlawed, called 'crimes'. Almost all of those crimes have exceptions, called 'affirmative defenses', that makes something that would otherwise be illegal be legal. Self defense for the crime of 'murder' is one, and there's a whole general exception in the law for 'preventing greater harm'.
Both those those must be proven by the person asserting them. Crimes, asserted by the state, must be proven by the state. Affirmative defenses, asserted by the defendant, must be proven by the defendant. People can't just say random things and expect the courts to accept them. (But these do not have to be proven to the same level. The crime has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, whereas the defense just has to raise reasonable doubt, IIRC.)
However, we are not actually talking about that. We are talking about the power of arrest.
If the police has reason to believe the courts can convict you of a 'crime', they will generally will arrest you. If they does not think it can convict you, they will not. This reasoning includes considering obvious possible affirmative defenses that might be raised. In their head, the police conduct a 'trial simulation' to see if they have enough evidence to convict.
The police, however, actually have the power to arrest anyone they think might be a criminal, on the thinnest shred of evidence. It is not the job of the police to give people a trial. It is the job of the police to detain people they think the DA will charge with a crime. (Arresting people that they immediately have to let go because the DA declines to charge them is a career-limiting move.)
...except in this case, where police apparently are specifically barred from arresting people who claim to have a specific affirmative defense. And the DA is apparently not allowed to press charges unless he somehow proves this is bogus.
In essence, Stand Your Ground laws set up a court system before the court system. With poorly defined procedure, without the legal balancing act that is our legal system, without the defense having to actually prove anything WRT their affirmative defense, for completely random reasons, stopping the police from holding people in custody who have caused the death of another. (And only those people, for some reason.)
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I mean, it’s always incumbent on me to prove that I’m not committing any crimes and haven’t lately, right?
Uh, no.
But when you've committed something that would otherwise be a criminal action and you have an affirmative defense, it is incumbent on you to prove that defense.
Innocent until proven guilty is not how it works with affirmative defenses. If the police can prove you did X, which is normally a crime, it is now your job to prove that one of the affirmative defenses apply. That is, in fact, how 'affirmative defenses' are supposed to work.
It is not the job to the prosecutor to bring up all affirmative defenses and show how they don't apply, because pretty much every crime in the US, up to an including murder, has an infinite number of affirmative defense of the sort 'I did it to stop a greater crime'. (That is where the concept self-defense comes from, although that's now been explicitly codified.)
You can, for the classic example, drive under the influence if you have been drugged by your kidnapper-to-be and need to flee them. And if you are lost in a blizzard and freezing to death and come across an empty cabin, it is legal to break in and ride out the storm.
Those are affirmative defenses. You admit you committed the actions that were outlawed, but you assert, in court, a justification that makes them legal. You are innocent until the state proves you guilty of the act, but if you did the act, you have no affirmative defense unless you prove it. The state proves you broke into the cabin, you then prove you had to do it or freeze to death.
And, of course, the cops have leeway here, as they always do when making the case. If they can see the blizzard, they'll probably just nod at your explanation and let you go without arrest. But never in our stupidest fantasies would we make it illegal for cops to arrest people who just claim to have some justification, to make the police disprove the justification first.
Except, apparently, when it comes to causing death.
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I just have to wonder in what universe we thought we needed a law that says 'Under some circumstances, we need to make sure that people standing over other people with a smoking gun cannot be arrested.'. I just find the entire concept of that baffling. If I shot someone in self defense, I'd sorta expect to be arrested if I didn't have any witnesses or whatever, and I wouldn't run around whining that I need a law saying I can't be.
I mean, are people wandering around shooting so many people in self-defense that the police locking them up until they post bail is interfering with their jobs? (Or even interfering with their 'shooting people in self-defense' hobby!)
What the hell is this law attempting to solve?
And why is it for the most dangerous crime, and only for that?
I mean, there are plenty of affirmative defenses to crimes. Perhaps I am speeding because I am having a medical emergency and must get to the hospital, which is an affirmative defense to speeding. And any delay could kill me. Shouldn't the police be barred from detaining me (via pulling me over) until they demonstrate that this is not true? It's a lesser crime, it's more harmful to detain me than it would be to detain someone after a shooting, etc, etc. By any objective standard, surely we should have those sorts of laws before Stand Your Ground.
On “It Seems Appropriate…”
Indeed, which is where this entire thing is stupid. There are two unrelated problems, neither of which need the constitutional amendment that's been proposed:
1) Corporations are spending stockholders money on political stuff. We no more need a constitutional amendment to make that illegal than we do to make it illegal for them to spend it on hookers and blow for CEOs. In fact, spending money on political pet projects arguable already _is_ illegal unless it furthers some corporate interest.
Solution: Laws asserting that all for-profit corporations are, unless otherwise stated, politically neutral, and cannot take political stances at all without the consent of all their owners. Or they can change their articles of corporation or whatever to be explicitly political.
Non-profits usually already have some sort of goal, and can obviously take political positions to attempt to reach that goal, and I have no problem with a for-profit company that also take political positions, as long as it's made clear well in advance that it does so so the owners know about it, or can sell their ownership in a company that has decided to take pet projects of the super-rich over actual profits for owners.
And under no circumstances should this been done secretly, without full disclosure. Not because corporations don't have a 'right to anonymous speech', from a first amendment direction, but because corporations have no right to do _anything_ in secret from their owners, anymore than your car has the right to keep things secret from you. (OTOH, privately owned corporations might manage to keep secret from the public what they are doing.)
2) Apparently no campaign spending limits are constitutional.
Solution: First off, restricting corporations here will result in just rich individuals having the ability to have unlimited spending, which is a rather ass-backwards 'solution'. Some rich guy can buy an ad on TV, but I can't make a non-profit, collect donations, and run an ad to counter it? Gee, thanks.
This is what needs a goddamn constitutional amendment. But it doesn't need the one proposed to solve 'this problem', which is about corporate personhood, which has nothing to do with anything.
This whole constitutional amendment thing is the greatest example of people going 'Full-on stupid' I've ever seen.
On “This is something. Therefore this must be done.”
I think there's a rather large distinction between actual dangerous sex offenders, and the people who end up on the list.
The thing is, the actual real sex offenders we should be locking up, and doing it two times should mean we keep them locked up. (Although it is stuff like this that makes me wish we had some sort of all alternative to prison, where we just have repeat offenders live on an island somewhere and be monitored.)
The problem is that a lot of 'sex offenders' are no such thing. I mean, forget age differences in dating...sometimes even stuff like public nudity puts you on the list.
Other crimes, we specifically have punishments for in law. With 'sex offender', we've inexplicably made a big list of every crime that could be related to sex, and added the same amount of punishment to it, no matter what the actual punishment is in the law or the circumstances of the crime.
That is not how crimes are supposed to be punished. It's like if we decided that DUIs were horrible things, but instead of just increasing the punishment for violating laws about that, we decided to invent a class of people 'driving offenders' and demand that everyone who's ever had a moving violation get a car with a breathalyzer and giant flashing warning lights on the top.
If we want to set up something to control people at high risk for sex offenses, we need to set up such a think under the law, and then modify laws to _put people in that group_. As part of their trial. Likewise, if we want to specifically make offenses involving children have harsher punishment, well, you know where that law is.
We do not need to run around grouping every crime vaguely related to sex together....a lot of those crimes have a year in jail or whatever for a reason, because they are _lesser_ crimes.
On “Bible Verse and Commentary”
http://www.9news.com/news/sidetracks/204061/337/Man-robbed-bank-for-1-to-cover-jail-health-care
Sadly, apparently robbing a bank for one dollar is not 'bank robbery' but just 'larceny', so he probably won't end up in jail for at least three years like he was hoping.
On “More Facebook”
http://christopherburg.com/2011/11/16/department-of-justice-deems-violating-website-terms-of-service-illegal/
Facebook TOS:
3.5) You will not solicit login information or access an account belonging to someone else.
4.8) You will not share your password, (or in the case of developers, your secret key), let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account.
I wonder how much someone would win in a lawsuit about the time they went to a job interview and were asked, or were already employed and asked by their employer, to help break the law by helping commit unauthorized computer access of a third party.
You know, actually having 'Employees must turn over Facebook passwords' as a policy would seem to pierce the corporate veil, considering it's a clear violation of the law.
On “Like any truly great politician, the real Mitt Romney doesn’t exist”
Forget 2006 vs. 2012. All Obama needs to do is wait until his first debate against Romney in 2012, then take those answers and compare them to early 2012 Romney. (And then, for fun, compare them to 2006.)
Not having a position worked in the 1980s and before because who could keep track of all that. And it worked in the 1990s and early 2000s because the news networks were idiots who printed whatever people said and did not actually do reporting.
Then came along camera phones, then came along video on the internet, and then came along SuperPACs that would, you know, actually _air previous positions_.
And thus ends Schrodinger's politician, the standard politician who collapsed into a different political waveform depending on who opened the box he was hiding in. In fact, that probably ended in 2006,and at this point it has _retroactively_ ended because all this stuff has been available since 1990 but the news media sucked donkey balls, and continues to do so, but now people _besides_ the news media can put videos in front of people. (Not that I am a fan of SuperPACs, but it's pretty funny watching them eat the right alive.)
And at this point the box has no top or sides at all, and the politicians are attempting to change shape in _complete view of everyone_. It's like Superman was updated to use cell phones instead of phone booths:
*explosion happens outside the Daily Planet*
Clark Kent stands up at his desk and says, 'Excuse me, I have to make a phone call.', and pulls out his cell phone. Pretending he is on a phone call, he quickly removes his suit, places it under his desk, pulls out and attaches his cape, and says, "It's me, Superman! What seems to be the problem, Ms. Lane?"
Lois and Jimmy look at each other. Lois says, carefully, "Right. You're Superman. Because Clark left. To make a call."
Jimmy whispers. "He knows we know he's Superman, right? Because we can see him change clothes? Because he's in the same room as us and does it right in front of us?"
"Let's just humor him for now." replies Lois.
On “Plain Dumb Luck”
As someone on the left, I've always pointed out that the left came up with, basically, almost all good ideas in this country. Sadly, the left has also come up with almost all bad ideas, too. This is probably because the left tends to be made up of the disaffected, who actually want to fix things, where as the right, until recently, was not. (I have no idea what's going on with the right now. They're angry at completely random things, and none of the things they propose would actually solve any of the problems they claim to see, even pretending those problems made sense.)
Some of the stuff was even more closely tied together. Prohibition and women's suffrage, for example, were both 'women's rights' issues. Because the world was such that men (Who were the only allowed breadwinners), would go out drinking, spend all their family's money, get blind drunk, and beat their wife. And no divorce either. Sure, by then it was often _legal_, but it was unworkable...it meant the woman losing custody of the kids. And remember, no contraceptives, and no such thing as a man raping his wife...so there were always kids. (And after divorce...no making any money by the woman.)
So the solution was, apparently: Forbidding alcohol.
Now, from _our_ historic perspective, there were other obvious solutions, such as 'Making divorce possible' and 'Legalizing contraception' and 'Forbidding wife-beating' and 'Forbidding wife-raping' and 'Actually treat women as human beings deserving of dignity and respect'. However, at the time, those solutions were not possible. So the women's rights movement latched onto the idea of prohibition, which had been floating around forever, and managed to get it to happen. It's easy to look with hindsight and think it was just some moralizing busybodies, but it was moralizing busybodies who said 'It is unacceptable to spend all the family's money drinking, and then go home and beat a women who wasn't able to leave you', which I suspect we all agree with...we just disagree with the solution to that.
On of the interesting things about the modern right is watching it, as it has increasingly attempted to 'solve problems' that it says it sees, how it completely refuses to actually let go of bad policy positions. For example, standing there and arguing for DADT. Really? Gay marriage is still decisive enough that it _might_ be a reasonable idea to oppose it, but you're going to have to look far and wide to find people who think that gay people should be drummed out of the military.
Changing positions once the previous one has either failed or just become unworkable is an important lesson the left learned decades ago, although often the right fails to notice it does this. (It's always fun to watch the right rant about the left trying 'Gun control', an issue the actual left pretty much decided was pointless a decade ago and has attempted to do nothing with since.)
The right will, however, let go of policy positions the second the left looks at them and says 'Okay, we can do that'. 'Okay, I guess we can do cap and trade instead of just regulating amounts.' 'Okay, I guess we can make an insurance mandate instead of medicare for all.'
This is why I have often argued that the right policy makers are inherently dishonest, although I'm sure that's not a popular opinion here. A good deal of 'policy proposals' from the right are just things to use to argue that the left's solution is 'wrong' so the problem doesn't get solved...as demonstrated by the fact that when the right comes up with a solution the left doesn't find objectionable and is in danger of using, the right immediately flees from it like a bat out of hell. I've often wished for a honest opposition party that attempted to also solve problems, but in a different way...instead of just coming up with near-nonsensical alternatives to hide the fact they're standing atop history crying 'STOP!' and don't really want to solve the problem at all. (Although recently they seem to realize this looks stupid, and instead have dedicated themselves to attempting to solve problems only they can see, like how dare unions wages not have gone down as much as everyone else's!)
On “Diversity & The League of Ordinary Gentlemen”
I don't think that works like that. https://ordinary-times.com/blog/2012/01/16/diversity-the-league-of-ordinary-gentlemen/#comment-226993 and https://ordinary-times.com/blog/2012/01/16/diversity-the-league-of-ordinary-gentlemen/ are the same web page, the first just has a # that tells your web browser to scroll to a specific part of the page which has been marked in the HTML with that code. (It's called an anchor tag, for those who want to look it up.)
So I suspect it's this entire page, all comments includes, that is '51% male'. (Or rather, was at the time.) I don't see anyway to paste just one comment in and see the result.
On “She Was An American Girl Raised On Promises (Of Due Process)”
And while we're talking about, I'm pretty certain that sticking a minor on an airplane and dumping them out in another country without an adult is also illegal. Even if you are allowed to deport someone, you can't deport children without some sort of adult who is going to take care of them at the other end.
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<I>Ok so she lied to the Immigration Enforcement Officer who interviewed her in jail – that’s a federal felony.</I>
Of course, attempting to interview a minor without a guardian present is also illegal.
And I rather suspect that minors lying to police is not a felony, especially if they do so while illegally questioned.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.