I think he's referencing the idea that if the popular vote was what counted, Trump would have campaigned differently so as to win that vote - that the reason he only won the electoral college is because that's the only vote that actually matters, so he targeted his campaigning to the places where it would make a difference, and didn't bother wasting resources on also winning the popular vote.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Made in the USA
But the Constitution does address religion. In particular, it says (in more archaic language) that Congress cannot make a law which gives any religion, or religious belief, more privileges than any other.
Thus, when Congress makes immigration laws, it cannot privilege one religion ahead of another one in those laws; if it tries, the resulting law will be unconstitutional.
One place where you might be partly right is that it's not immediately apparent that the constraints of the First Amendment apply to the powers inherent to the executive branch, rather than those which the executive has by way of authorization from the legislative branch; however, I seem to recall that there's jurisprudence establishing that Constitutional limitations on the powers of Congress (such as the ones in the First Amendment) limit the powers of executive branch as well.
About the only way Trump could make the claim that these executive orders are not (the first seeds of) his promised Muslim ban be plausible would be to come out with something else which is explicitly stated to be his promised Muslim ban, is plausible in that role, and clearly is not simply a refined or derived version of these same executive orders.
Of course, if he did that, it would die in the courts (and possibly even in the legislature, if it needed to go that route) so fast it would make what happened with these executive orders look pokey..
It would be one thing if the Trump administration had said "We don't think the vetting standards used during the Obama administration are good enough, so we're going to revamp those standards, and we want to put a hold on people coming in until we've managed to do that".
That would at least give the basics of a rationale, and would make it possible to focus the discussion on the proposed revised standards, on whether they make sense, on whether there's any need to revise those standards at all, and on whether there's sufficient difference in the standards being proposed for a halt to immigration in the meantime to be reasonable.
But the administration has not done any such thing. To the best of my awareness, they have provided no explanation for why they want to block people coming in from these countries except for a vague and general "because terrorism". That lack of specificity is part of the reason why this is a problem.
The closest the administration has come to saying any such thing, that I'm aware of, has been Trump's own oft-quoted statements about "we're going to have extreme vetting" - which, in the discussions I've encountered, have almost invariably been followed in short order by someone pointing out that the vetting we've had under the Obama administration already is fairly extreme. Without proposals for what kind of vetting they want to replace it with, we can't evaluate this in terms of vetting people coming in; we can only evaluate it in terms of what its effects and apparent intents are, and that has the results that you see.
90 days is not an "Unreasonable" burden to anyone.
It is when the narrow time window during which all of the authorizations which take years to acquire are valid all at once falls during those 90 days, meaning you have to start all over and spend years getting the same approvals you'd just finished getting.
Also, "reasonable" depends entirely on their being a "reason" for the action. If there is
a problem to be addressed,
a solution to that problem, and
a connection explaining how the solution addresses the problem,
that's one thing - but in this case, there has been
no clear presentation of exactly what problem permitting properly-vetted people from these countries to continue entering the US solves, and
no explanation of what connection this proposed solution has to the purported problem.
If you want to convince people that these executive orders are an appropriate solution, please explain what problem it is they solve, and how it is that they solve it, from first principles. If there are assumptions which you're making and your interlocutors are not making, you'll need to address those assumptions, and try to explain why you believe your assumptions are valid.
Re: Re: Re: Eventually everything will start being done under the table
Case in point: the Affordable Care Act. Which is the compromise of the compromise of the original Obama-administration health-care-reform proposal, except that "compromise" should be in quotes because the other side never really made any concessions at either of the two stages.
I think you misread him. In the part you quoted, he's not saying that the Pope making such a statement would be unconstitutional; he's saying it that "we" (the USA) reacting to it by (temporarily) barring Christians from entering the country would be unconstitutional.
Re: Re:Re: I gather Tim is okay with a 5 and a 7 year old seeing Debbie give a blowjob while getting anal sex
Distracted-driver laws are irrelevant if the people watching the problematic videos are not the driver.
There are probably vehicles which are exceptions, and I don't claim to be an expert on this subject or to have conducted an exhaustive survey, but every single in-car display screen I've seen which had the ability to display real-time video playback was positioned above/behind/between the driver's and passenger's seats - so as to be visible to the people in the rear seat(s), but not the ones up front.
Re: I gather Tim is okay with a 5 and a 7 year old seeing Debbie give a blowjob while getting anal sex
That could be potentially justified under "obscene", which is a(n ill-defined) category given special treatment under the law for such purposes.
The quoted law doesn't limit itself to "obscene" movies, however; it also extends the same prohibition in regard to "patently offensive" ones.
If they dropped the "or patently offensive" from the statute, there would probably be considerably less room to challenge Constitutionality, given established Supreme Court precedent.
It was hidden by the community because subsequent comments with the same associated image made it apparent that this is the flood-of-offtopic-trolling-self-replying-posts guy.
In my case, I flagged it because while I couldn't see an obvious problem with it, the poster's past history makes it clear that there usually is one, and also because leaving it visible encourages people to reply - which only encourages continuation of the posting pattern.
Normally, when someone who usually makes flag-worthy posts makes one that's actually potentially positive, it's worth encouraging that behavior by leaving that one post alone - but this particular poster's behavior seems to me to lead to the conclusion that any encouragement for any of it will simply encourage the continuation of all of it, and IMO that's not something that is desirable.
No, they aren't less dead because you did it for a different reason.
But the different reason means you have differing levels of incentive to do it, and those differing levels of incentive need differing levels of counter-incentive.
Hate-crime laws are an attempt to provide increased counter-incentive, to oppose the increased incentive provided by hatred.
You can disagree that that's appropriate, but you should still recognize that that's what they're trying to do: reduce crime originating from extreme causes. Simply asserting that the argument doesn't exist or doesn't matter fails to counter the argument.
If the laws against murder, by themselves, are enough to keep you from murdering B and C, but are not enough to keep you from murdering A (because you hate left-handed people), how is increasing the penalties in an attempt to discourage you from murdering A a bad thing?
The only reason you could have to not want a recording when you pull out your gun is when you know you are not doing the right thing.
is not quite true. It's entirely possible to think both that you're doing the right thing, and also that other people will look at the same events and conclude that you were not doing the right thing.
While it's true that refusal to host your speech does not equal government censorship, it's also true that censorship does not consist only of government censorship.
The only type of censorship which is prohibited by the First Amendment is censorship by the government - but the only unqualified definition of "censorship" I've ever found which seems neither too broad nor too narrow boils down to "an attempt to prevent some particular audience from being exposed to some particular information", and it's certainly possible for non-government entities to do that; for example, it's entirely routine for parents to censor the material available to their children, and people often self-censor by refraining from saying something they think will get a negative reaction in their current company.
No - the people who want to go to see the movie will wait to see it in six weeks; the people who pirate the movie now just want to see the movie, they don't care about going to see it.
Or that's what I think he's saying, at least. Whether there's any water-holding to that rationale is another question.
Theoretically, that should be prevented by the "only hacking to identify the people responsible for hacking you" clause(s), which would make any given hack-back much less likely to be noticed than an "original" (and not-permitted-by-this-law) hacking attempt would be.
There's considerable difference between theory and practice, however.
Last time I checked, murdering someone by dragging them behind a truck is illegal, what does adding hate on to it do?
Well, that depends.
The thing is, hate crime laws are - or at least, when properly understood and implemented, should be - entirely about motivation and deterrence.
Say you have three people: A, B, and C.
A is left-handed; the other two are right-handed.
B hates left-handed people, and thinks they're subhuman mongrels; the other two don't feel that way. None of the three have any particular negative feelings about right-handed people.
Any of these people might decide that they hate one of the others for something specific, rather than over the question of handedness.
Now imagine a set of scales, representing the decision of whether or not to commit a crime against a particular person - for example, murder. The incentive from the specific hatred would be a weight on one side of these scales, tilting the decision towards committing the crime.
The laws against any given crime will - at least in theory - be designed to balance the scales, by adding enough weight to the other side of the scales that the decision will tilt the other direction. That weight comes partly in the form of rules which affect the likelihood of being caught and convicted, and partly in the form of penalties - the punishments for those convicted of the crime.
Those penalties will - at least in theory - be set at the level necessary to deter most people from committing the crime. In this case, that will be the level needed to prevent B from murdering C, or prevent A or C from murdering anybody.
But B's hatred of left-handed people means that B has additional incentive to murder A; the weight on the "commit murder" side of the scales is heavier. That same level of deterrence will not necessarily be enough to prevent B from murdering A.
The idea of hate-crime laws is to add additional weight to the "don't commit the crime" side of the scales, by increasing the deterrence factor, to match the additional incentive which is provided by the hatred.
Re: This comment will be moderated for a while... Thanks TD!
Given that there's a reply to your comment timestamped barely 22 minutes later, it looks very much as if your comment was not held for moderation at all - or at the very least, not for any meaningful length of time.
Is it plausible that someone who knows about the McEwan's beer brand could, upon seeing a McEwan's whiskey brand, reasonably conclude that the company behind the former has expanded into additional types of alcoholic beverage?
To my eye, that seems like an entirely plausible scenario - and one which looks like a clear case of consumer confusion. The only question is one of whether it rises to the level of confusion which trademark law is intended to prevent.
Other details of the branding - such as the font, colors, and logo used - could make such confusion significantly less likely, such that having the name used by two different entities in that way would not be a problem - but the difference in product alone is not likely to be enough to avoid that confusion, IMO.
(Mind, I agree that shutting down someone's ability to use his own name in commerce is undesirable, and that there are a number of problems with trademarks as currently implemented. I'm just not convinced that the dividing lines of markets prevent consumer confusion as effectively as this article, and its predecessors on similar subjects, seem to believe - or that relying entirely on those lines wouldn't result in problems as bad as the ones the current situation creates.)
On the post: Tech Companies File Amicus Brief, Still Opposed To New Trump Immigration Order
Re: Re: Re: Re: Star Trek
On the post: Tech Companies File Amicus Brief, Still Opposed To New Trump Immigration Order
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Made in the USA
Thus, when Congress makes immigration laws, it cannot privilege one religion ahead of another one in those laws; if it tries, the resulting law will be unconstitutional.
One place where you might be partly right is that it's not immediately apparent that the constraints of the First Amendment apply to the powers inherent to the executive branch, rather than those which the executive has by way of authorization from the legislative branch; however, I seem to recall that there's jurisprudence establishing that Constitutional limitations on the powers of Congress (such as the ones in the First Amendment) limit the powers of executive branch as well.
On the post: Tech Companies File Amicus Brief, Still Opposed To New Trump Immigration Order
Re: Re: Re: Re: So let me get this right....
About the only way Trump could make the claim that these executive orders are not (the first seeds of) his promised Muslim ban be plausible would be to come out with something else which is explicitly stated to be his promised Muslim ban, is plausible in that role, and clearly is not simply a refined or derived version of these same executive orders.
Of course, if he did that, it would die in the courts (and possibly even in the legislature, if it needed to go that route) so fast it would make what happened with these executive orders look pokey..
On the post: Tech Companies File Amicus Brief, Still Opposed To New Trump Immigration Order
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Made in the USA
On the post: Tech Companies File Amicus Brief, Still Opposed To New Trump Immigration Order
Re: Re: Re: Re: Made in the USA
It would be one thing if the Trump administration had said "We don't think the vetting standards used during the Obama administration are good enough, so we're going to revamp those standards, and we want to put a hold on people coming in until we've managed to do that".
That would at least give the basics of a rationale, and would make it possible to focus the discussion on the proposed revised standards, on whether they make sense, on whether there's any need to revise those standards at all, and on whether there's sufficient difference in the standards being proposed for a halt to immigration in the meantime to be reasonable.
But the administration has not done any such thing. To the best of my awareness, they have provided no explanation for why they want to block people coming in from these countries except for a vague and general "because terrorism". That lack of specificity is part of the reason why this is a problem.
The closest the administration has come to saying any such thing, that I'm aware of, has been Trump's own oft-quoted statements about "we're going to have extreme vetting" - which, in the discussions I've encountered, have almost invariably been followed in short order by someone pointing out that the vetting we've had under the Obama administration already is fairly extreme. Without proposals for what kind of vetting they want to replace it with, we can't evaluate this in terms of vetting people coming in; we can only evaluate it in terms of what its effects and apparent intents are, and that has the results that you see.
On the post: Tech Companies File Amicus Brief, Still Opposed To New Trump Immigration Order
Re: Made in the USA
It is when the narrow time window during which all of the authorizations which take years to acquire are valid all at once falls during those 90 days, meaning you have to start all over and spend years getting the same approvals you'd just finished getting.
Also, "reasonable" depends entirely on their being a "reason" for the action. If there is
that's one thing - but in this case, there has been
If you want to convince people that these executive orders are an appropriate solution, please explain what problem it is they solve, and how it is that they solve it, from first principles. If there are assumptions which you're making and your interlocutors are not making, you'll need to address those assumptions, and try to explain why you believe your assumptions are valid.
On the post: Tech Companies File Amicus Brief, Still Opposed To New Trump Immigration Order
Re: Re: Re: Eventually everything will start being done under the table
On the post: Tech Companies File Amicus Brief, Still Opposed To New Trump Immigration Order
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
And as far as I can see, he's right.
On the post: Driver Sues State After Receiving Ticket For 'Obscene' Stick Figure Vehicle Decal
Re: Re:Re: I gather Tim is okay with a 5 and a 7 year old seeing Debbie give a blowjob while getting anal sex
There are probably vehicles which are exceptions, and I don't claim to be an expert on this subject or to have conducted an exhaustive survey, but every single in-car display screen I've seen which had the ability to display real-time video playback was positioned above/behind/between the driver's and passenger's seats - so as to be visible to the people in the rear seat(s), but not the ones up front.
On the post: Driver Sues State After Receiving Ticket For 'Obscene' Stick Figure Vehicle Decal
Re: I gather Tim is okay with a 5 and a 7 year old seeing Debbie give a blowjob while getting anal sex
The quoted law doesn't limit itself to "obscene" movies, however; it also extends the same prohibition in regard to "patently offensive" ones.
If they dropped the "or patently offensive" from the statute, there would probably be considerably less room to challenge Constitutionality, given established Supreme Court precedent.
On the post: Bad Libel Law Strikes Again: Silly UK Twitter Spat Results In Six Figure Payout
Re: Re: Re: New t-shirt slogan
In my case, I flagged it because while I couldn't see an obvious problem with it, the poster's past history makes it clear that there usually is one, and also because leaving it visible encourages people to reply - which only encourages continuation of the posting pattern.
Normally, when someone who usually makes flag-worthy posts makes one that's actually potentially positive, it's worth encouraging that behavior by leaving that one post alone - but this particular poster's behavior seems to me to lead to the conclusion that any encouragement for any of it will simply encourage the continuation of all of it, and IMO that's not something that is desirable.
On the post: Extra Digit Accidentally Typed By Officer Turns UK Man Into A Pedophile
Re: PLX
On the post: 'Blue Lives Matter' Laws Continue To Be Introduced Around The Nation
Re: Re: Re:
But the different reason means you have differing levels of incentive to do it, and those differing levels of incentive need differing levels of counter-incentive.
Hate-crime laws are an attempt to provide increased counter-incentive, to oppose the increased incentive provided by hatred.
You can disagree that that's appropriate, but you should still recognize that that's what they're trying to do: reduce crime originating from extreme causes. Simply asserting that the argument doesn't exist or doesn't matter fails to counter the argument.
If the laws against murder, by themselves, are enough to keep you from murdering B and C, but are not enough to keep you from murdering A (because you hate left-handed people), how is increasing the penalties in an attempt to discourage you from murdering A a bad thing?
On the post: New Accountability Add-On Triggers Cameras When Police Officers Unholster Their Guns
Re:
While I mostly agree with you, the statement
is not quite true. It's entirely possible to think both that you're doing the right thing, and also that other people will look at the same events and conclude that you were not doing the right thing.
On the post: How To Improve Online Comments: Test Whether People Have Read The Article Before Allowing Them To Respond
Re: Re: Whatever!
The only type of censorship which is prohibited by the First Amendment is censorship by the government - but the only unqualified definition of "censorship" I've ever found which seems neither too broad nor too narrow boils down to "an attempt to prevent some particular audience from being exposed to some particular information", and it's certainly possible for non-government entities to do that; for example, it's entirely routine for parents to censor the material available to their children, and people often self-censor by refraining from saying something they think will get a negative reaction in their current company.
On the post: Aussie Film Distributor That Pledged To End Movie Release Delays To Combat Piracy Delays Movies Anyway
Re: Come again?
No - the people who want to go to see the movie will wait to see it in six weeks; the people who pirate the movie now just want to see the movie, they don't care about going to see it.
Or that's what I think he's saying, at least. Whether there's any water-holding to that rationale is another question.
On the post: Congressman Introduces Bill That Would Allow People And Companies To 'Hack Back' After Attacks
Re: Re:
There's considerable difference between theory and practice, however.
On the post: 'Blue Lives Matter' Laws Continue To Be Introduced Around The Nation
Re:
Well, that depends.
The thing is, hate crime laws are - or at least, when properly understood and implemented, should be - entirely about motivation and deterrence.
Say you have three people: A, B, and C.
A is left-handed; the other two are right-handed.
B hates left-handed people, and thinks they're subhuman mongrels; the other two don't feel that way. None of the three have any particular negative feelings about right-handed people.
Any of these people might decide that they hate one of the others for something specific, rather than over the question of handedness.
Now imagine a set of scales, representing the decision of whether or not to commit a crime against a particular person - for example, murder. The incentive from the specific hatred would be a weight on one side of these scales, tilting the decision towards committing the crime.
The laws against any given crime will - at least in theory - be designed to balance the scales, by adding enough weight to the other side of the scales that the decision will tilt the other direction. That weight comes partly in the form of rules which affect the likelihood of being caught and convicted, and partly in the form of penalties - the punishments for those convicted of the crime.
Those penalties will - at least in theory - be set at the level necessary to deter most people from committing the crime. In this case, that will be the level needed to prevent B from murdering C, or prevent A or C from murdering anybody.
But B's hatred of left-handed people means that B has additional incentive to murder A; the weight on the "commit murder" side of the scales is heavier. That same level of deterrence will not necessarily be enough to prevent B from murdering A.
The idea of hate-crime laws is to add additional weight to the "don't commit the crime" side of the scales, by increasing the deterrence factor, to match the additional incentive which is provided by the hatred.
On the post: UK Local Government Confirms Surprising EU Position That Viewing Pirated Streams Probably Isn't Illegal
Re: This comment will be moderated for a while... Thanks TD!
On the post: UK Intellectual Property Office Refuses Beer Brewery's Request To Block Trademark Application For Whisky
Likelihood of confusion
Is it plausible that someone who knows about the McEwan's beer brand could, upon seeing a McEwan's whiskey brand, reasonably conclude that the company behind the former has expanded into additional types of alcoholic beverage?
To my eye, that seems like an entirely plausible scenario - and one which looks like a clear case of consumer confusion. The only question is one of whether it rises to the level of confusion which trademark law is intended to prevent.
Other details of the branding - such as the font, colors, and logo used - could make such confusion significantly less likely, such that having the name used by two different entities in that way would not be a problem - but the difference in product alone is not likely to be enough to avoid that confusion, IMO.
(Mind, I agree that shutting down someone's ability to use his own name in commerce is undesirable, and that there are a number of problems with trademarks as currently implemented. I'm just not convinced that the dividing lines of markets prevent consumer confusion as effectively as this article, and its predecessors on similar subjects, seem to believe - or that relying entirely on those lines wouldn't result in problems as bad as the ones the current situation creates.)
Next >>