Actually, there was a pretty good case for striking down segregation on equal protection grounds. It's just that earlier courts had chosen to ignore the Constitution.
Much as modern courts choose to ignore constitutional limitations on federal power.
Fun fact: The "dormant commerce clause" is actually the primary intended purpose of the commerce clause. Under the Articles of Confederation, the shipment of goods between states not directly adjacent to one another was being taxed and otherwise hindered by the states through which the goods passed en route. The purpose of the commerce clause was to prevent states from doing this, not to grant Congress broad powers to meddle in anything which could conceivably.have some effect on anything which might cross state lines.
Madison discusses the commerce clause in Federalist 42. Note that there's nothing whatsoever in there to support the ridiculous "Congress can do whatever the hell it wants because everything's connected so everything kind of affects interstate commerce and the power to regulate X obviously entails the power to regulate all manner of things which are not X but might conceivably affect X" theory of the commerce clause--it's all about keeping the states from interfering with interstate commerce.
They're judges, not kings. Their job is to rule on cases arising under federal law and the Constitution as they are written, not as they would like them to be. Once we abandon that principle, the Constitution is worthless. It might as well just say, "Congress shall do whatever the hell it wants, unless the Supreme Court says it can't." If they can disregard the ninth and tenth amendments, and the second as far as it applies to really scary guns, and the first as far as it applies to corporations, then they can throw them all out.
Remember Gonzales v. Raich, when the "liberal" justices threw chronic pain patients under the bus because to do otherwise might jeopardize the federal government's ability to regulate the frequency at which butterflies in Nebraska may flap their wings? Another great moment in Progressive history.
But the problem with this is that it essentially gives members of that out-group a blank check to assert aggrievement and demand recompense. There's a certain percentage of people who, given that kind of power, will milk the hell out of it.
Granted, that usually doesn't get them very far, but that's because we don't actually take your advice. If we don't get to call BS, how do we prevent milking?
I suspect that coming out as an atheist from a family environment of evangelical Christians is somewhat comparable to certain types of coming out as gay to certain types of environments.
Either way you're going to Hell, right?
Hmm...Atheism's mostly a guy thing. This doesn't bode well for my sex afterlife.
The butterfly effect interpretation of the necessary and proper clause is a hand-wavy rationalization for the Court ruling to uphold laws they like for personal ideological reasons.
Oh, are they only supposed to show up in the "Off the Cuff" section, and not on the main part of the front page? If not, it's probably just an overselective where clause.
There are things which are plainly unconstitutional, things which are plainly constitutional, and grey areas not fully specified. Only things which fall into the latter category are really up for legitimate debate.
The Constitution specifically enumerates the powers of Congress for a reason. If they had wanted Congress to be able to pass whatever laws it felt like, and for the Court to decide which ones they liked and throw out the rest based on personal ideology, they would have just written that instead of specifying a detailed list of Congress's powers. There's a specific, very difficult process for amending the Constitution for a reason. If they had wanted the Supreme Court just to be able to decide for reasons of personal ideology that when the Constitution says up it really means down, they would have written that instead of specifying the actual amendment process we have.
The butterfly effect interpretation of the commerce clause is just a hand-wavy rationalization for the Court ruling to uphold laws they like for personal ideological reasons.
Really, the whole thing is unconstitutional. It's just that most parts of the law are unconstitutional in ways that have come to be regarded as constitutional as a result of inertia, ideology, and, in case of Roosevelt's court-packing scheme, straight-up blackmail. What's unique about the mandate is that it's unconstitutional in a novel way.
The federal courts decide all cases arising under the US Constitution. When there's a dispute regarding federal election law, who else is going to decide it?
Actually, that may not be entirely fair to the State Attorney's office. It's possible that they did the best they could under the circumstances. The "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard for criminal convictions has its benefits, but one of the drawbacks is that it sometimes results in failure to get a conviction for people who are guilty. If you don't have the evidence for a reasonable chance at a conviction, there's not much point in pressing charges, and that may have been the case here.
Still, the fact that the police wanted to press charges casts this in a very different light.
Hispanic people can be of any race including black (e.g., Dominicans) and Asian (mostly via 19th- and early 20th-century Chinese and Japanese immigration to South America), but racially, most Hispanics are white, Amerindian, or some combination thereof..
In the US Census, people are asked to self-identify both by race(s) and by whether they have Hispanic ancestry (i.e., ancestors of any race who immigrated from Spanish-speaking countries). This leads to classifications like non-Hispanic white, Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black, etc.
It's not entirely clear to me why the media has settled on that term when it's rarely used colloquially. I have a few cynical theories, but I'll keep them to myself.
He had also had suspensions related to graffiti and an incident in which he was found with a dozen pieces of women's jewelry, strongly suggesting theft.
Whoa. I was only aware of a few of those comments. Sandra Fluke is richly deserving of criticism for asking the government to violate the rights of others on her behalf, but the vast majority of those comments are way out of line and don't directly relate to Fluke's mooching. And I find it troubling that Limbaugh managed to reach his advanced age without acquiring even a basic understanding of how oral contraceptives work. Or that promicuous women presumably use condoms due to the fact that the pill doesn't protect against disease.
I apologize for the comments I made in my ignorance of the full extent of Limbaugh's remarks. I could give a qualified defense of the ones I knew about before, but I'm cutting my losses now.
Limbaugh’s slut-shaming of a woman (it had an important message, it just wasn’t really very funny!) for days because she talked about birth control
Tom's right. That simply isn't an accurate description of what he did. Do you really think that Limbaugh, who has been married four times and has no children, is against birth control? His criticism of Fluke was based on the fact that she was asking the government to force someone else to give her contraceptives for free.
I'm not sure whether you genuinely don't see the distinction, or have simply decided that since Rush Limbaugh is a Very Bad Person you needn't let bothersome things like facts get in the way of the Truth.
You don't have a radio show because you haven't demonstrated that there's a market for it. That's not the same as not having a show because people pressured your sponsors into dropping you in an effort to get you taken off the air.
Mike:
Rush Limbaugh did not "[call] a young woman a slut and a prostitute for the sin of disagreeing with [him]." First, it was a metaphor. No reasonable person could have listened to his show and come away with the impression that he was serious alleging that she had ever engaged in prostitution. Moreover, it was a metaphor in service of a legitimate point about externalizing the costs of private benefits.
Admittedly, it was not a terribly classy metaphor, nor particularly apt--Limbaugh spent a minute trying to work out the particulars and then backpedaled on it--but your description is misleading to the point of dishonesty (much like your description upthread of libertarians as people who believe that liberty begins and ends with property rights--I guess that's kind of your thing). The metaphor was a response to the specifics of what Fluke was advocating, not just a random insult he decided to throw at her for disagreeing with him.
I was three--my father used to let me have a sip when I brought him one. I can't decide whether that was really bad parenting or really good parenting, since to this day I don't like alcohol and have never actually had enough to get drunk.
It matters in a Bayesian sense. That Martin had a record of deliquency makes Zimmerman's claim that he was the one who initiated violence more plausible. Likewise, Zimmerman's prior run-in with the law makes his claim somewhat less credible. If we knew the facts of the case, none of this would matter. But since we don't, information about the parties' character should cause you to update your priors. It doesn't prove anything, but sometimes proof isn't an option.
I think there's something to this. If a bunch of people choose not to listen to Limbaugh, and as a result his ratings decline and he loses ad revenue--maybe even to the point where his show is no longer profitable and gets taken off the air--that's fine. If the market for his show isn't there, it isn't there.
But when people use what would otherwise be apolitical spending decisions to pressure Limbaugh's sponsors into dropping him in an effort to drive him off the air even in the presence of a market for his show...that kind of is anti-free-speech. When you're actively trying to shut someone up, that's anti-free-speech.
Which is not to say that they don't have a right to do this. They do, certainly. But there's a huge intersection between the set of things that you have a right to do and the set of things that are kind of sleazy.
I took a look at the questionnaire Haidt used for his research, and it seems plausible to me that the differences he found are largely if not entirely due to bias arising from questions that appeal to ideologically specific manifestations of his moral foundations. For example, on the harm/care axis, there was a question about harming an animal (animal rights is a leftish issue), but not a question about harming a fetus.
While most of the questions are abstract, all of the axes have one or two questions (out of six) tuned to a specific ideology. Given that the difference between extreme liberals and extreme conservatives was not greater than one on a scale of one to six on any of the five axes, this could account for most or all of the differences.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Obamacare at the Supreme Court”
Actually, there was a pretty good case for striking down segregation on equal protection grounds. It's just that earlier courts had chosen to ignore the Constitution.
Much as modern courts choose to ignore constitutional limitations on federal power.
"
Fun fact: The "dormant commerce clause" is actually the primary intended purpose of the commerce clause. Under the Articles of Confederation, the shipment of goods between states not directly adjacent to one another was being taxed and otherwise hindered by the states through which the goods passed en route. The purpose of the commerce clause was to prevent states from doing this, not to grant Congress broad powers to meddle in anything which could conceivably.have some effect on anything which might cross state lines.
Madison discusses the commerce clause in Federalist 42. Note that there's nothing whatsoever in there to support the ridiculous "Congress can do whatever the hell it wants because everything's connected so everything kind of affects interstate commerce and the power to regulate X obviously entails the power to regulate all manner of things which are not X but might conceivably affect X" theory of the commerce clause--it's all about keeping the states from interfering with interstate commerce.
"
They're judges, not kings. Their job is to rule on cases arising under federal law and the Constitution as they are written, not as they would like them to be. Once we abandon that principle, the Constitution is worthless. It might as well just say, "Congress shall do whatever the hell it wants, unless the Supreme Court says it can't." If they can disregard the ninth and tenth amendments, and the second as far as it applies to really scary guns, and the first as far as it applies to corporations, then they can throw them all out.
Remember Gonzales v. Raich, when the "liberal" justices threw chronic pain patients under the bus because to do otherwise might jeopardize the federal government's ability to regulate the frequency at which butterflies in Nebraska may flap their wings? Another great moment in Progressive history.
On “Jay Nordlinger Doesn’t Care About Black People”
But the problem with this is that it essentially gives members of that out-group a blank check to assert aggrievement and demand recompense. There's a certain percentage of people who, given that kind of power, will milk the hell out of it.
Granted, that usually doesn't get them very far, but that's because we don't actually take your advice. If we don't get to call BS, how do we prevent milking?
"
Do people really use "sexy" as a euphemism for fat? I mean, besides for NAAFA types?
"
I suspect that coming out as an atheist from a family environment of evangelical Christians is somewhat comparable to certain types of coming out as gay to certain types of environments.
Either way you're going to Hell, right?
Hmm...Atheism's mostly a guy thing. This doesn't bode well for my sex afterlife.
"
"They happen to be gay" is something that homophobes say when they're trying to trick other people into thinking that they're not homophobic.
"
Is this some kind of game? Do I need to take a drink every time you say "The Real Racist?"
On “Obamacare at the Supreme Court”
The butterfly effect interpretation of the necessary and proper clause is a hand-wavy rationalization for the Court ruling to uphold laws they like for personal ideological reasons.
"
Oh, are they only supposed to show up in the "Off the Cuff" section, and not on the main part of the front page? If not, it's probably just an overselective where clause.
"
By the way, where is this post? The links imply that it should be on the front page between the Mad Men post and Planck's post, but it's not there.
"
There are things which are plainly unconstitutional, things which are plainly constitutional, and grey areas not fully specified. Only things which fall into the latter category are really up for legitimate debate.
The Constitution specifically enumerates the powers of Congress for a reason. If they had wanted Congress to be able to pass whatever laws it felt like, and for the Court to decide which ones they liked and throw out the rest based on personal ideology, they would have just written that instead of specifying a detailed list of Congress's powers. There's a specific, very difficult process for amending the Constitution for a reason. If they had wanted the Supreme Court just to be able to decide for reasons of personal ideology that when the Constitution says up it really means down, they would have written that instead of specifying the actual amendment process we have.
The butterfly effect interpretation of the commerce clause is just a hand-wavy rationalization for the Court ruling to uphold laws they like for personal ideological reasons.
"
Really, the whole thing is unconstitutional. It's just that most parts of the law are unconstitutional in ways that have come to be regarded as constitutional as a result of inertia, ideology, and, in case of Roosevelt's court-packing scheme, straight-up blackmail. What's unique about the mandate is that it's unconstitutional in a novel way.
"
The federal courts decide all cases arising under the US Constitution. When there's a dispute regarding federal election law, who else is going to decide it?
On “Near-Tragedies in Civillian Police Work”
Actually, that may not be entirely fair to the State Attorney's office. It's possible that they did the best they could under the circumstances. The "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard for criminal convictions has its benefits, but one of the drawbacks is that it sometimes results in failure to get a conviction for people who are guilty. If you don't have the evidence for a reasonable chance at a conviction, there's not much point in pressing charges, and that may have been the case here.
Still, the fact that the police wanted to press charges casts this in a very different light.
"
Hispanic people can be of any race including black (e.g., Dominicans) and Asian (mostly via 19th- and early 20th-century Chinese and Japanese immigration to South America), but racially, most Hispanics are white, Amerindian, or some combination thereof..
In the US Census, people are asked to self-identify both by race(s) and by whether they have Hispanic ancestry (i.e., ancestors of any race who immigrated from Spanish-speaking countries). This leads to classifications like non-Hispanic white, Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black, etc.
It's not entirely clear to me why the media has settled on that term when it's rarely used colloquially. I have a few cynical theories, but I'll keep them to myself.
"
He had also had suspensions related to graffiti and an incident in which he was found with a dozen pieces of women's jewelry, strongly suggesting theft.
"
Correction: If anyone failed Martin, it was the State Attorney's office.
On “Defining Liberalism: A deontological account”
Whoa. I was only aware of a few of those comments. Sandra Fluke is richly deserving of criticism for asking the government to violate the rights of others on her behalf, but the vast majority of those comments are way out of line and don't directly relate to Fluke's mooching. And I find it troubling that Limbaugh managed to reach his advanced age without acquiring even a basic understanding of how oral contraceptives work. Or that promicuous women presumably use condoms due to the fact that the pill doesn't protect against disease.
I apologize for the comments I made in my ignorance of the full extent of Limbaugh's remarks. I could give a qualified defense of the ones I knew about before, but I'm cutting my losses now.
"
Limbaugh’s slut-shaming of a woman (it had an important message, it just wasn’t really very funny!) for days because she talked about birth control
Tom's right. That simply isn't an accurate description of what he did. Do you really think that Limbaugh, who has been married four times and has no children, is against birth control? His criticism of Fluke was based on the fact that she was asking the government to force someone else to give her contraceptives for free.
I'm not sure whether you genuinely don't see the distinction, or have simply decided that since Rush Limbaugh is a Very Bad Person you needn't let bothersome things like facts get in the way of the Truth.
"
Chris:
You don't have a radio show because you haven't demonstrated that there's a market for it. That's not the same as not having a show because people pressured your sponsors into dropping you in an effort to get you taken off the air.
Mike:
Rush Limbaugh did not "[call] a young woman a slut and a prostitute for the sin of disagreeing with [him]." First, it was a metaphor. No reasonable person could have listened to his show and come away with the impression that he was serious alleging that she had ever engaged in prostitution. Moreover, it was a metaphor in service of a legitimate point about externalizing the costs of private benefits.
Admittedly, it was not a terribly classy metaphor, nor particularly apt--Limbaugh spent a minute trying to work out the particulars and then backpedaled on it--but your description is misleading to the point of dishonesty (much like your description upthread of libertarians as people who believe that liberty begins and ends with property rights--I guess that's kind of your thing). The metaphor was a response to the specifics of what Fluke was advocating, not just a random insult he decided to throw at her for disagreeing with him.
On “Near-Tragedies in Civillian Police Work”
I was in college before I tasted my first beer.
I was three--my father used to let me have a sip when I brought him one. I can't decide whether that was really bad parenting or really good parenting, since to this day I don't like alcohol and have never actually had enough to get drunk.
"
It matters in a Bayesian sense. That Martin had a record of deliquency makes Zimmerman's claim that he was the one who initiated violence more plausible. Likewise, Zimmerman's prior run-in with the law makes his claim somewhat less credible. If we knew the facts of the case, none of this would matter. But since we don't, information about the parties' character should cause you to update your priors. It doesn't prove anything, but sometimes proof isn't an option.
On “Defining Liberalism: A deontological account”
I think there's something to this. If a bunch of people choose not to listen to Limbaugh, and as a result his ratings decline and he loses ad revenue--maybe even to the point where his show is no longer profitable and gets taken off the air--that's fine. If the market for his show isn't there, it isn't there.
But when people use what would otherwise be apolitical spending decisions to pressure Limbaugh's sponsors into dropping him in an effort to drive him off the air even in the presence of a market for his show...that kind of is anti-free-speech. When you're actively trying to shut someone up, that's anti-free-speech.
Which is not to say that they don't have a right to do this. They do, certainly. But there's a huge intersection between the set of things that you have a right to do and the set of things that are kind of sleazy.
"
I took a look at the questionnaire Haidt used for his research, and it seems plausible to me that the differences he found are largely if not entirely due to bias arising from questions that appeal to ideologically specific manifestations of his moral foundations. For example, on the harm/care axis, there was a question about harming an animal (animal rights is a leftish issue), but not a question about harming a fetus.
While most of the questions are abstract, all of the axes have one or two questions (out of six) tuned to a specific ideology. Given that the difference between extreme liberals and extreme conservatives was not greater than one on a scale of one to six on any of the five axes, this could account for most or all of the differences.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.