Sometimes there are ways of doing that without actually breaking the rules. A few years back, there was a mini-scandal at Yale when they found out that a student had falsified his transcript to gain admission. The story that came from him and worked its way into the standard media line was that despite the lies, he was doing perfectly well at Yale, and it generated a bunch of discussion about high school credentials, how much they matter, grade inflation, etc.
Somewhere in the middle of this, the president (? or maybe the provost) wrote a short, arid letter to the NYT, saying that of course Yale wasn't at liberty to reveal this student's grades, but perhaps the media could ask the student to volunteer the evidence for his claims.
Yeah, I understand why it's this way historically, but I don't think it makes much sense anymore. And it's odd in a way to see some atheists implicitly endorsing the special protections for religious belief (or unbelief), since that privileges the very domain that they reject.
Burt, I'm afraid I didn't make my point clear. I understand the current state of the law well enough, and I'm certainly not asking (retroactively) for any special consideration for vegetarians. The message I get from your writing on this topic is that you're not only describing current law but also endorsing it. My challenge to you is to defend it, not from the standpoint of what's in the Constitution or how we got to where we are, but from the perspective of one who's saying that what *is* is basically what *should be* when it comes to this sort of rights-balancing.
In other words, pretend you're starting from scratch to write a new Constitution. Do you keep things as they are? If so, why would you have religion treated differently from other matters of values, morality, ethics, etc.? Why shouldn't non-Christians in a Bible Belt town have to suck it up the same way vegetarians have to in a cattle-raising town?
Straying just a bit from the topic at hand: I've noticed that the discussions around this cross thing have mostly concentrated on the legal considerations, although I get the sense from some that what's legal is also what's desirable. My question is, leaving aside current law, does it make sense to protect the minority in the case of religion but not in other matters of deeply-felt belief?
For example, my wife and I used to be ethical vegetarians (we're still sympathetic but we don't have the energy anymore). When my kids were in grade school, we had no protection from teachers and school officials reinforcing the prevailing cultural consensus on eating animals ("the cow gives us beef", wishes for a "Happy Turkey Day", and many other examples). While we would've been happy if some consideration had been shown for our beliefs, we understood that we were in the minority and that it was up to us to deal with the prevailing culture as best we could.
Or here's a hypothetical example: suppose at that time we were living in a ranch town that wanted to celebrate its dedication to quality beef, and a big billboard of a juicy steak was put up on public property, maybe even with a tagline along the lines of "horrifying vegetarians since 1823". That would certainly make us feel unwelcome. Why allow that and not the (much less overtly unwelcoming) cross?
But that's not really a good analogy to how the boycotters in this case are feeling. What if the show were, say, All-American Skinheads, presenting a non-racist skinhead family, and some anti-hate group was leading the boycott? Would you have the same reaction?
Here is the post with the "re-written" (Seuss-ified) comments -- 428 comments altogether but luckily the incident is very early on. Unsurprisingly, the editing was done due to bad language and rudeness, nothing to do with content.
Reminds me of a bit from The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga:
It is an ancient and venerated custom of people in my country to start a story by praying to a Higher Power.
I guess, Your Excellency, that I too should start off by kissing some god's arse. Which god's arse, though? There are so many choices.
See, the Muslims have one god.
The Christians have three gods.
And we Hindus have 36,000,000 gods.
Making a grand total of 36,000,004 divine arses for me to choose from.
I think true dogwhistles are vanishingly rare, but choosing words that have more resonance for one group than another is a common-enough rhetorical tactic.
Well, an actual dogwhistle is a signal that's intended to be heard by dogs, is heard by dogs, but is not heard by humans. So the metaphor really ought to refer to politicians using a certain vocabulary that sends a particular message to the target group while sounding innocuous to those outside the group.
Per this definition, what Obama said wouldn't be a dogwhistle because it certainly did not sound innocuous to the out group.
Cool, thanks for the response. These bring up some other questions, but I've no doubt quizzed you enough. FWIW, the Griswold result appeals to me as a matter of policy, but over the years I've found myself becoming more and more sympathetic to the argument advanced by Trub that the judiciary should aim for predictability and stability, which interest is not helped by always reading constitutional or statutory language in the most modern context.
I think there's just too little inter-conference information provided by the limited college football season to ever provide a satisfying result. I do like the fact that at least we're pretty much guaranteed to see #1 vs #2, even as subjective as the human and computer rankings are -- it's a bit more information than we had before. Although it was badly screwed up this year by matching two teams in conference -- we'd have learned a lot more about relative conference strength if we had gotten to see LSU vs Ok St and Alabama vs Stanford.
all of Luck’s receivers are big, slow, and get zero separation in man coverage.
OTOH, because they're tall (especially the tight ends), he can often get away with just throwing the ball sufficiently high that they're the only ones who can come up with it.
I'll take everyone's word for it that Luck is an amazing QB, but a lot of the ways that he is are not particularly obvious to a casual fan like me. I say this as a Stanford fan, btw.
Well, without diving into the details of what you've written here, it seems to me that you're using an idiosyncratic definition of these terms. Not that Wikipedia is necessarily a reliable authority, but check out this snippet from the page on textualism:
Textualism is often associated with originalism, and is advocated by Supreme Court Justices such as Hugo Black and Antonin Scalia, who staked out his claim in his 1997 Tanner Lecture: "[it] is the law that governs, not the intent of the lawgiver."
I think of textualism in the context of opposition to Roe v Wade or Griswold v Connecticut, where constitutional rights were found that certainly don't appear in the text. I'm curious to know what you think of these decisions, given that you (i.e. Burt, not Trub) self-identify as a textualist.
I'd also suggest (wearing my "trained linguist" hat, in case credentials are important) that opposing "the law is the words" vs. "the law is the ideas" isn't really helpful -- words are nothing if not a mechanism for communicating ideas. The disagreement is over how best to interpret them.
I'm confused by the terminology here -- I'm not a legal scholar, but I don't think that "original intent" and "originalism" are the same thing, nor is "originalism" opposed to "textualism". AFAIK Scalia would consider himself both a "textualist", because he believes that constitutional interpretation should be based on the text itself without reference to penumbras and emanations, and an "originalist", because he believes that the meaning of the text should be based on how the framers and their contemporaries would have understood the language. "Original intent" , as I understand it, doesn't refer to a strategy for interpreting the text but suggests that the intention of the legislature should trump the text if the two appear to be at odds -- that's not Scalia's position.
A banker will, when faced with the prospect of evicting a family from their home for late payment, do so readily
A doctor will not, at least consciously, look at a sick person and make a decision about which treatment would be more profitable to determine a course of action
These two aren't really commensurate -- either make the first one something like "A banker will, when presented with a family applying for a mortgage, push the one that offers himself or his institution the greatest profit regardless of what is in their best interests" (and this is hardly self-evident), or make the second "A doctor will not deny treatment to a patient who's likely unable to pay for the service". In the latter case, while there's a cultural and to some extent legal obligation to provide the service regardless of ability to pay, there's also an overall compensation structure that takes that obligation into account.
Yup, that's where I am. I get the sense that my first+last name is a globally unique identifier, so whatever you find on Google is likely referring to me. Do you have some familiarity with the area, or were you just fine-tuning the search?
Re anonymity, I'd prefer that a search on my name not lead here, but I don't care if people here know my name (I'm trusting in the absence of stalker tendencies among the commentariat). So the reversal would not have been a problem if it had been correct.
No problem. I'm assuming you glanced at my email addy a bit too quickly. (If you came up with that from nothing more than my handle, it was a helluva close guess!)
OK, I'm pretty close to agreement here, except that in case 2, I think *both parties* have a responsibility to smooth the interaction -- the speaker should accept that what s/he said has potential offensive overtones and be ready to apologize, *and* the listener should go with the most charitable understanding of the comment and not take offense where none was intended.
"We are Penn State" is the perfect analogue -- it implies a common identity uniting the "speaker" with an entire community organized around a particular common interest. It's a different message from just having a "Penn State" bumper sticker.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “For Doc Saunders”
Sometimes there are ways of doing that without actually breaking the rules. A few years back, there was a mini-scandal at Yale when they found out that a student had falsified his transcript to gain admission. The story that came from him and worked its way into the standard media line was that despite the lies, he was doing perfectly well at Yale, and it generated a bunch of discussion about high school credentials, how much they matter, grade inflation, etc.
Somewhere in the middle of this, the president (? or maybe the provost) wrote a short, arid letter to the NYT, saying that of course Yale wasn't at liberty to reveal this student's grades, but perhaps the media could ask the student to volunteer the evidence for his claims.
On “Eating the Rich: By the Numbers”
It's not the money, it's the principle of the thing.
On “The Saga of the Whiteville Water Tower Continues”
Yeah, I understand why it's this way historically, but I don't think it makes much sense anymore. And it's odd in a way to see some atheists implicitly endorsing the special protections for religious belief (or unbelief), since that privileges the very domain that they reject.
"
Burt, I'm afraid I didn't make my point clear. I understand the current state of the law well enough, and I'm certainly not asking (retroactively) for any special consideration for vegetarians. The message I get from your writing on this topic is that you're not only describing current law but also endorsing it. My challenge to you is to defend it, not from the standpoint of what's in the Constitution or how we got to where we are, but from the perspective of one who's saying that what *is* is basically what *should be* when it comes to this sort of rights-balancing.
In other words, pretend you're starting from scratch to write a new Constitution. Do you keep things as they are? If so, why would you have religion treated differently from other matters of values, morality, ethics, etc.? Why shouldn't non-Christians in a Bible Belt town have to suck it up the same way vegetarians have to in a cattle-raising town?
"
Straying just a bit from the topic at hand: I've noticed that the discussions around this cross thing have mostly concentrated on the legal considerations, although I get the sense from some that what's legal is also what's desirable. My question is, leaving aside current law, does it make sense to protect the minority in the case of religion but not in other matters of deeply-felt belief?
For example, my wife and I used to be ethical vegetarians (we're still sympathetic but we don't have the energy anymore). When my kids were in grade school, we had no protection from teachers and school officials reinforcing the prevailing cultural consensus on eating animals ("the cow gives us beef", wishes for a "Happy Turkey Day", and many other examples). While we would've been happy if some consideration had been shown for our beliefs, we understood that we were in the minority and that it was up to us to deal with the prevailing culture as best we could.
Or here's a hypothetical example: suppose at that time we were living in a ranch town that wanted to celebrate its dedication to quality beef, and a big billboard of a juicy steak was put up on public property, maybe even with a tagline along the lines of "horrifying vegetarians since 1823". That would certainly make us feel unwelcome. Why allow that and not the (much less overtly unwelcoming) cross?
On “Boycotting the All-American Muslim”
But that's not really a good analogy to how the boycotters in this case are feeling. What if the show were, say, All-American Skinheads, presenting a non-racist skinhead family, and some anti-hate group was leading the boycott? Would you have the same reaction?
On “The Music of the Trolls”
Here is the post with the "re-written" (Seuss-ified) comments -- 428 comments altogether but luckily the incident is very early on. Unsurprisingly, the editing was done due to bad language and rudeness, nothing to do with content.
"
That's a nice effort, but it doesn't quite reach the lyrical heights of Tod's selections, IMHO.
On “Perry’s Complaint”
Reminds me of a bit from The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga:
It is an ancient and venerated custom of people in my country to start a story by praying to a Higher Power.
I guess, Your Excellency, that I too should start off by kissing some god's arse. Which god's arse, though? There are so many choices.
See, the Muslims have one god.
The Christians have three gods.
And we Hindus have 36,000,000 gods.
Making a grand total of 36,000,004 divine arses for me to choose from.
"
I think true dogwhistles are vanishingly rare, but choosing words that have more resonance for one group than another is a common-enough rhetorical tactic.
"
Well, an actual dogwhistle is a signal that's intended to be heard by dogs, is heard by dogs, but is not heard by humans. So the metaphor really ought to refer to politicians using a certain vocabulary that sends a particular message to the target group while sounding innocuous to those outside the group.
Per this definition, what Obama said wouldn't be a dogwhistle because it certainly did not sound innocuous to the out group.
On “True Faith To Democracy”
Drive-by? Well, it was off-hand, but not meant as an insult. Scalia's the one who said that Thomas doesn't believe in it.
"
The “originalist” also respects stare decisis, i.e., precedent
Tell that to Clarence Thomas. :)
"
Cool, thanks for the response. These bring up some other questions, but I've no doubt quizzed you enough. FWIW, the Griswold result appeals to me as a matter of policy, but over the years I've found myself becoming more and more sympathetic to the argument advanced by Trub that the judiciary should aim for predictability and stability, which interest is not helped by always reading constitutional or statutory language in the most modern context.
On “College Football Bowl Season Preview”
I think there's just too little inter-conference information provided by the limited college football season to ever provide a satisfying result. I do like the fact that at least we're pretty much guaranteed to see #1 vs #2, even as subjective as the human and computer rankings are -- it's a bit more information than we had before. Although it was badly screwed up this year by matching two teams in conference -- we'd have learned a lot more about relative conference strength if we had gotten to see LSU vs Ok St and Alabama vs Stanford.
"
all of Luck’s receivers are big, slow, and get zero separation in man coverage.
OTOH, because they're tall (especially the tight ends), he can often get away with just throwing the ball sufficiently high that they're the only ones who can come up with it.
I'll take everyone's word for it that Luck is an amazing QB, but a lot of the ways that he is are not particularly obvious to a casual fan like me. I say this as a Stanford fan, btw.
On “True Faith To Democracy”
Well, without diving into the details of what you've written here, it seems to me that you're using an idiosyncratic definition of these terms. Not that Wikipedia is necessarily a reliable authority, but check out this snippet from the page on textualism:
Textualism is often associated with originalism, and is advocated by Supreme Court Justices such as Hugo Black and Antonin Scalia, who staked out his claim in his 1997 Tanner Lecture: "[it] is the law that governs, not the intent of the lawgiver."
I think of textualism in the context of opposition to Roe v Wade or Griswold v Connecticut, where constitutional rights were found that certainly don't appear in the text. I'm curious to know what you think of these decisions, given that you (i.e. Burt, not Trub) self-identify as a textualist.
I'd also suggest (wearing my "trained linguist" hat, in case credentials are important) that opposing "the law is the words" vs. "the law is the ideas" isn't really helpful -- words are nothing if not a mechanism for communicating ideas. The disagreement is over how best to interpret them.
"
I'm confused by the terminology here -- I'm not a legal scholar, but I don't think that "original intent" and "originalism" are the same thing, nor is "originalism" opposed to "textualism". AFAIK Scalia would consider himself both a "textualist", because he believes that constitutional interpretation should be based on the text itself without reference to penumbras and emanations, and an "originalist", because he believes that the meaning of the text should be based on how the framers and their contemporaries would have understood the language. "Original intent" , as I understand it, doesn't refer to a strategy for interpreting the text but suggests that the intention of the legislature should trump the text if the two appear to be at odds -- that's not Scalia's position.
On “The Mission”
A banker will, when faced with the prospect of evicting a family from their home for late payment, do so readily
A doctor will not, at least consciously, look at a sick person and make a decision about which treatment would be more profitable to determine a course of action
These two aren't really commensurate -- either make the first one something like "A banker will, when presented with a family applying for a mortgage, push the one that offers himself or his institution the greatest profit regardless of what is in their best interests" (and this is hardly self-evident), or make the second "A doctor will not deny treatment to a patient who's likely unable to pay for the service". In the latter case, while there's a cultural and to some extent legal obligation to provide the service regardless of ability to pay, there's also an overall compensation structure that takes that obligation into account.
"
Yup, that's where I am. I get the sense that my first+last name is a globally unique identifier, so whatever you find on Google is likely referring to me. Do you have some familiarity with the area, or were you just fine-tuning the search?
Re anonymity, I'd prefer that a search on my name not lead here, but I don't care if people here know my name (I'm trusting in the absence of stalker tendencies among the commentariat). So the reversal would not have been a problem if it had been correct.
"
No problem. I'm assuming you glanced at my email addy a bit too quickly. (If you came up with that from nothing more than my handle, it was a helluva close guess!)
"
That would be my alter ego's name if I were my uncle's son...
"
3. Because your "opposite" alter ego's name would be substantially more difficult to pronounce.
On “The Costas Rant”
OK, I'm pretty close to agreement here, except that in case 2, I think *both parties* have a responsibility to smooth the interaction -- the speaker should accept that what s/he said has potential offensive overtones and be ready to apologize, *and* the listener should go with the most charitable understanding of the comment and not take offense where none was intended.
On “Democracy and the rhetoric of protests: A response to Will Wilkinson and Julian Sanchez”
"We are Penn State" is the perfect analogue -- it implies a common identity uniting the "speaker" with an entire community organized around a particular common interest. It's a different message from just having a "Penn State" bumper sticker.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.