SteveF mentioned in comments. I googled EPA Scotus, and this was the first link.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/06/29/supreme-court-rules-against-epa-on-power-plant-rules/
In a major win for the energy industry, the Supreme Court ruled Monday against the Environmental Protection Agency’s effort to limit certain power plant emissions — saying the agency “unreasonably” failed to consider the cost of the regulations.
It’s 5:4. So we can start arguing about 5:4 SCOTUS decisions here now. 🙂
Update: Immediate update.
- They also rule on lethal injections.Wall Street Journal Link: http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2015/06/29/scotus-recap-epa-defeat-execution-drug-upheld-google-setback/
yeah, well, Roberts is just trying to make up and the founding fathers are still not impressed.
Will the President care?
His practice has been to cheer for the rulings he likes and ignore those he does not like.
He is now in (f)ucket list mode, and even when he was in “nice guy” mode he was not exactly reasonable or constrained.
Just like it was too expensive to get lead out of fuel, and every other change the EPA has advocated.
Bugs,
The ruling says that the EPA must weigh costs and benefits when it considers the need for regulations. Do you disagree with this? Do you think people/companies which must comply with EPA rules should have legal standing to challenge EPA on the facts of costs and benefits? I am trying to understand what you are objecting to in the ruling.
hunter,
Whether he cares or not, no one will be able to impose these particular fines.
The EPA may try to wiggle around. Some do try to. We’re seeing “Fisher” return to SCOTUS after being kicked back the the 5th circuit who, possibly, didn’t follow SCOTUS’s instructions about the degree of scrutiny to apply in an affirmative action case. (Of course we can’t know SCOTUS’s full thinking until after SCOTUS hears and rules next summer. But it’s unusual for them to rule, kick back and then have the new ruling appealed and then the accept hearing again.)
If you save $6 million by spending $10 billion, it’s a stupid regulation. Amazingly, the EPA was claiming they don’t even have to consider the economic ramification of their decisions.
They were sent home to do their homework.
Interestingly, no liberal judges broke ranks with the administration on this one, even though it’s a complete no-brainer.
SteveF, I’m replying to your comment here.
You said:
The problem with seeing this bill in absolutist terms is that there is always a tension between different rights. It does encroach on “individual freedoms”, but simply encroaching on them doesn’t make the bill unconstitutional.
Anyway the trouble with throwing everything into repealing the law is that it’s become a burnt earth strategy. The Supreme Court has clearly indicated that it’s unlikely to over turn this legislation, for good or for bad. So while the burnt earth strategy certainly plays well to the extremists within the RNC, I don’t think it’s being
Sadly, they could have probably fixed many of the issues that concerned them already, had they not been intent in just outright destroying the bill. Had the Democrats not been simultaneously self-immolating, I think the last election would have gone very differently.
Brandon:
So I have to paraphrase Justice Robert’s comments before you’d address what he actually said in his decision. Huh. That’s a new one.
Later.
Hunter,
You’re not wrong. IMO the IRS has shown the way. Did we do something we weren’t supposed to do? Oh. It was just a mistake, sorry. No, we have no pertinent records to share. Why not? Oh, we deleted them. Sorry, that was just another mistake.
It’s hard to fight that, because bureaucracies really genuinely do house a lot of incompetence.
bugs,
Do you see leaded gasoline for sale? I don’t understand why you think that example is relevant. The EPA ruling on mercury is a back door attempt to ban the use of coal to generate electricity. Removing lead did not make gasoline too expensive to burn.
DeWitt,
I think leaded gasoline is still used for prop planes… maybe single engine plane crashes due to knock damage is at least part of the reason why.
Meh.
.
It does seem to be an attempt to regulate coal on grounds other than CO2. And zero is not a reasonable limit for pretty much anything. Last 1% of a problem is 99% of the cost?
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But cheaper Nat Gas is killing coal anyway.
In New Mexico, coal plant is under siege not for CO2, and not even for lead, mercury, or SO2. They’re going after it for ‘haze’.
The White House and EPA have no intention of complying with the SCOTUS decision because as Josh Earnest said yesterday:
“Obviously, we’re disappointed with the outcome,” he said. “I will say, based on what we have read so far, there is no reason that this court ruling should have an impact on the ability of the administration to develop and implement the clean power plant [ruling].”
“These are two separate rulemaking processes that we have pursued here, and there is nothing contained in this ruling that should in any way impact our ability to successfully complete the clean power plant” regulation, he said.
Since Congress is gutless, week and compliant, this ruling will change nothing and is a Pyrrhic victory, if even a victory, at all.
“there is no reason that this court ruling should have an impact”
I guess they don’t understand the law.
Andrew
Andrew_KY,
Their attitude is much in the vein of Andrew Jackson’s possibly apocryphal comment:
SteveF,
You can also buy leaded fuel for race cars, but it costs two to three times as much as unleaded. Wideband exhaust gas oxygen sensors fitted on modern cars would be destroyed by leaded gas, not to mention poisoning the catalytic converters.
Removing lead from gasoline has other benefits besides drastically reducing lead contamination. No lead means no ethylene dibromide either. No bromine in the exhaust gas means lower corrosion of the exhaust system and the option to use stainless steel, which lasts nearly forever. Modern fuel injection, including direct gasoline injection, relies on oxygen sensors in the exhaust stream to close the control loop. That has been a major factor in the increase in fuel efficiency of modern cars.
What we really need to do is remove corn based ethanol from gasoline. But instead we may have to deal with E15.
DeWitt,
“What we really need to do is remove corn based ethanol from gasoline. ”
.
Yes, and to eliminate sugar protection laws…. neither of which seems likely in my lifetime (or yours). Concentrated benefits with diffuse costs invites bad government and corruption. Our elected representatives seem sometimes to specialize in bad government.
SteveF,
Sugar price protection laws aren’t a diffuse cost to the candy making industry, much of which has since moved offshore. I’m not sure how a relatively few sugar beet growers managed this feat. Maybe it was to try to punish Cuba. I don’t think that worked out so well either.
Carrick:
That’s not a new one. That’s how discussions work. Just like I can’t just quote Scalia while offering nothing of my own and expect people to bother responding, you can’t just quote Roberts while offering nothing of your own and expect people to bother responding.
Though I should note I’m trying to be generous here by not criticize you for misrepresenting what I said. Paraphrasing and summarizing are not the same thing. When you offer a multi-paragraph quote, it is perfectly natural for people to expect you to provide a summary of that quote to explain what you think it means. The distinction between a summary and a paraphrase is a summary could be as short as a single sentence whereas a paraphrase would need to be about two paragraphs long. Regardless of that, your entire position hinges on the idea four words can be interpreted in multiple ways. You can’t argue that then claim it is unreasonable for people to expect you to provide an interpretation for what two paragraphs mean.
Though now that I’ve mentioned it, I should point out your mischaracterization of this issue. Namely, you’ve repeatedly mischaracterized the issue by saying things like:
Which ignores the fact the debate is not over the interpretation of the four words “established by the State.” The debate is over the interpretation of the words “established by the State under [42 U. S. C. §18031].” By specifying a section under which the Exchanges being referred to are established, the line gives a very precise reference. That means you cannot justly claim this is a debate “over the interpretation of four words.” This is clearly a debate over the interpretation of a sentence including a reference to a specific section.
You are free to claim that reference to a specific section is faulty, and thus, we should fold in a reference to another section which was not mentioned, but it is disingenuous to pretend this is just a debate “over the interpretation of four words.”
I did exactly that earlier myself, nobody appeared to mind. Nobody objected, anyways. 🙂
Mark:
Yes you did. Sometimes showing which part of a text that you think is relevant is all the baby-food feeding you need to give people. (Never mind that I actually did have more substantive comments upstream in addition to quoting the material.)
I’m not sure the point of responding to say you’re not bothering to respond either. I do find that concept a bit amusing, so maybe that is the point.
Mark Bofill, you actually said you didn’t know how anyone could read that quote and think Scalia was legislating from the bench. That’s not the same as offering a quote as proof of some position you hold.
Carrick, please don’t pretend I said I wouldn’t respond to anything. My first comment to you explicitly asked you to clarify your position. You chose not to. That I might have been able to tease out your views by reading quotes and comments spread out across a page in no way justifies your portrayal of me refusing to respond to anything.
😉
Before I have to worry about any “Gotcha!” games, I admit I let myself get suckered into saying I was refusing to respond to Roberts’s quotes earlier. What I really meant was I was refusing to respond to it beyond asking for clarification as I had done in my initial comment regarding it.
The reason for that is, as I indicated in that initial comment, is I am curious how one could have written the clause in question any more clearly than it was written. Not only did it explicitly refer to which exchanges it was referring to, it also explicitly referred to the section of the law those exchanges were defined in (which Carrick has conveninetly ignored in his comments by claiming this is just a debate over the meaning of “four words”).
So I’m genuinely curious, how could the section have been written any more clearly?
Sorry Brandon, I wasn’t messing with you. I was just screwing around in general, mostly because I have nothing interesting to say at the moment. :/
Deawitt,
Yes, to the candy industry, the sugar price support costs are concentrated, which has motivated sustantive retirements off-shore, where historical prices have been half of the regulated USA price. I was referring more to the diffuse costs of all foodstuffs which include sugar…. which ultimately
Mark Bofill, no problem. I’m just genuinely baffled. Leaving aside the fact I find the quote from Roberts unhelpful on its own, I find Carrick’s responses completely baffling. When someone asks you about a quote you provide, the normal thing to do is to explain the quote you provided. I don’t know why anyone would act like it’s unreasonable for people to want you to explain what the quote you provide means.
It’s especially baffling since Carrick has portrayed people who disagree with him as disagreeing as doing so due to bias and not understanding what ambiguity means in a legal sense, yet he hasn’t actually done anything (as far as I can see) to actually show there was any ambiguity in that text. The one thing he has done is to repeated talk about how we shouldn’t rest interpretations on “four words” absent context, ignoring the the fact the section has an explicit reference telling us which type of exchanges it is referring to.
Neither Carrick nor the quote he provided even acknowledged that reference exists, so I’m at a loss as to why anyone should believe the quote somehow proves the text was ambiguous. And as I pointed out before, nobody seems to be trying to prove it was. All I’ve seen so far is empty posturing and a refusal to even attempt to have an actual discussion.
Ugh. I just want to say I hate typing on my phone, and I apologize for the typos in my comments. That last comment of mine makes me cringe.
As far as I can tell Chief Justice Roberts asserted that the sentence was ambiguous with justification that amounted to hand waving about intent along the lines of ‘They couldn’t possibly have actually meant that’. I second the call for a defender of the decision to provide a version that isn’t ambiguous other than an additional sentence that specifically forbids subsidies to any other form of exchange. One normally doesn’t have to spell that sort of thing out.
DeWitt, The BS ambiguity story has various subplots, but the kicker is the contention that the Congress (Democrats) wouldn’t design a bill to fail. They are too smart for that. And as it turned out the law would fail without the federal exchange subsidies, therefore they must have meant that federal exchanges would also hand out subsidies.
That cover story works fine, if you are the shameless liberal Democrat Justices determined to save the Democrat law, no matter what. It also works if you are a wishy-washy semi-strict constructionist, who doesn’t want to be responsible for putting the kibosh on a law he sees as too big to fail. Taking subsidies away from all those deserving folks would be very messy and would be portrayed in our wonderful mainstream media as a very mean thing to do. Supreme Court Out of Control! Obama would be foaming at the mouth.
The fact the majority of Justices and their ambiguity-context fans here are studiously ignoring is that the Congress clearly planned to force the States to set up exchanges. It wasn’t “Hey, if you guys want to go to all the trouble and expense of setting up your own State exchanges your welcome to it, but if you don’t the federal government will take care of it.” If all, or most of the States had been dutifully intimidated, there would have been no problem. But the Democrat plan to bully the States FAILED. They were too clever.
Here is a portion of a back and forth that pretty much sums it up. Throw in a couple of Gruber videos and you have plenty of context on this bizarre charade:
“Bagenstos thinks the threat of withholding tax credits was unnecessary because the PPACA provides for a federal fallback exchange for noncompliant states, and this was enough to give the states a meaningful choice. But the PPACA’s authors did not want states to have such a choice, as indicated by the language of the bill, repeated statements that all states would (or would be required to) create their own exchanges, and the lack of any money in the bill to pay for creating federal fallback exchanges. The requirement that HHS create federal fallback exchanges in noncompliant states is hardly much inducement for state cooperation – and everyone knows it. Even when Congress puts a big pot of money on the table, as it did with the Medicaid expansion, states are reluctant to play along at their own expense. Conditional preemption is common in cooperative federalism statutes, but it is rarely sufficient to get states to toe the line. That’s why Congress sought to condition other funds on state participation on Medicaid’s expansion and why it would have been hopelessly naïve to believe that every state would create an Exchange – as PPACA advocates repeatedly claimed – without something else on the table. That something else is the availability of tax credits. The PPACA’s authors’ mistake was not in how they drafted the statute, but in believing they had done enough to get every state to create an exchange.”
I don’t have to worry about Brandon complaining about me putting up a quote without summarizing it to his liking. He pretends he doesn’t read my comments. You run into some real characters on these climate blogs.
I forgot the link:
http://volokh.com/2012/12/12/the-illegal-irs-rule-on-health-insurance-exchanges-a-reply-to-bagenstos/
I’ll get 50 lashes for that.
Maybe I’m missing something but the Obama (2008?) statement:
“When I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, uhhh, y’all know, under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket”, seems to put it in plain English.
That should be obvious to an informed Supreme Court Judge, though I don’t know if they take such evidence into account.
It certainly doesn’t entirely surprise me that Obama’s appointed officials might, possibly, actually seek to carry out his orders. Especially if it resonates with existing political intentions within the agency. But I don’t see that anyone could believe they ignored the cost of the regulations. That was the point of the regulations: To impose costs sufficiently unreasonable to achieve the desired ends.
In his defense, Obama said it quite openly, and was subsequently elected. But he also talked of mobilizing citizenry for the political goal, when it actually required that the citizenry remain largely ignorant, or at least complacent.
Don
Reading sections 1311 to 1321 it’s clear the states were expected to create exchanges. They even could get federal money to do so if they did not drag their feet and instead started work in the first 12 months after passage.
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Michael Cannon of CATA, the primary lawyer to initiate King v Burwell, pointed out that if the states did not get the subsidies then that would undermine the language in the individual mandate part of the bill because there would not technically be “affordable coverage” available. Of course, without the individual mandate the law collapses. Attorneys in states opposed to the law likely found this logical flaw early and were going to block the law by calling the fed’s bluff by not setting up a state exchanges.
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There was no error in drafting. The law had a logical dilemma. It needed to give the states flexibility not to violate the 10th Amendment. But on the other hand it needed the exchanges (with subsidies) to make the law function. If the law just said for efficiency we will set up a federal exchange it would have been struck down for overstepping.
Ron,
The USSC is not immaculate. Legal justice is a very maculate process. From at least Dred Scott the Courts have not abided by what many see as clear legal process or justice. Lincoln’s response to the Dred Scott case was clear: he apparently chose to treat it as if it did not exist. We are in perilous times and I hope we can reach a resolution of the peril(s) without the need for a dramatic catharsis.
I’ve read lots of BS (like that cited by Don above) saying that Congress intended to force states to set up their own exchanges by restricting tax credits to exchanges set up by the States. However, I’ve seen little EVIDENCE that any justice found this argument compelling. The skimpy section of Scalia’s dissent dealing with this argument is quoted below. He makes assertions, but doesn’t cite any FACTUAL basis for his interpretation of Congressional intent developed when the case was tried in lower courts. If the case for intent was robust, Scalia would be citing facts (and Roberts probably would have joined the dissent).
If Congressional intent to withhold tax credits from Federal exchanges were clear, the states would have discussed this issue widely. Instead, this interpretation of the law wasn’t publicized until after the states made their decisions and this case was filed. IMO, it is ludicrous to assert that Congress made clear its intent to withhold tax credits from federal exchanges. Even the Republicans in Congress were desperately trying to come up with a plan to temporarily restore these tax credits if the Court had ruled against the administration.
The Supreme Court isn’t supposed to legislate. Congress should have resolved the mess they made. If they aren’t capable of doing so, maybe the voters will get rid of the obstructionists. Unfortunately, unclear intent gave the liberal justices the opportunity to rewrite the law say whatever they thought should have said. If insurance companies had set up a private exchange to compete with the public exchanges and the federal exchange had completely collapsed due to incompetence – as it nearly did – both the administration and the liberal justices would be saying Congress’s intent was to give everyone tax credits no matter what type of exchange they used! The Supreme Court has already changed an unconstitutional “penalty” into a “tax” and the administration has postponed an unambiguous mandate that businesses provide health insurance. Expediency, not principle, rules.
Scalia: “Most relevant here, the Affordable Care Act displays a congressional preference for state participation in the establishment of Exchanges: Each State gets the first opportunity to set up its Exchange, 42 U. S. C. §18031(b); States that take up the opportunity receive federal funding for “activities . . . related to establishing†an Exchange, §18031(a)(3); and the Secretary may establish an Exchange in a State only as a fallback, §18041(c). But setting up and running an
16 KING v. BURWELL SCALIA, J., dissenting
Exchange involve significant burdens—meeting strict deadlines, §18041(b), implementing requirements related to the offering of insurance plans, §18031(d)(4), setting up outreach programs, §18031(i), and ensuring that the Exchange is self-sustaining by 2015, §18031(d)(5)(A). A State would have much less reason to take on these burdens if its citizens could receive tax credits no matter who establishes its Exchange. (Now that the Internal Revenue Service has interpreted §36B to authorize tax credits everywhere, by the way, 34 States have failed to set up their own Exchanges. Ante, at 6.) So even if making credits available on all Exchanges advances the goal of improving healthcare markets, it frustrates the goal of encouraging state involvement in the implementation of the Act.
Frankie, have you seen any evidence that the Federal exchanges were mentioned in any context with the tax credits ANYWHERE in the ACTUAL 2000 page bill? Don’t give us any BS, Frankie. Show us the words “Federal exchanges” linked with “tax credits”. We’ll give you six weeks. It’s got to be in those 2000 pages, somewhere. It’s so important to the bill that they couldn’t possibly have completely FAILED TO MENTION IT. That would be REAL DUMB.
It’s comical that the old ambiguity ploy is still working, in the age of the internet. People are supposed to be smarter.
Clearly, everyone was waiting for the monstrosity to be read by someone else to tell them what it meant, including Pelosi, the other congressional supporters and most governor’s offices. Also everyone was waiting for HHS secretary Sebelius to flesh out the law before their own planning. Her staff likely realized the Gruber strategy error, especially after few were applying for the fed financial grants to set up state exchanges. So they knew there was going to be a large portion using the fed exchange. Sebelius simply made this extra change to the law in conflict with the drafting (as Obama did dozens of times afterward). The states did not have standing to sue since they were not the damaged party. Only after the 2014 rollout would there be parties with standing.
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This is why I believe the Constitution should provide congress with a challenge flag power to immediately send complaints to the SC of executive branch violations. Too much damage can be done in the years between breach an hearing. A future administration could exploit this even more than Obama’s to the point total seizure of US government.
Ron,
“could”?
Don,
I understand you are over the discussion I’m referring to, but I thought it was amusing to note, a polygamy issue has surfaced, according to the article inspired by the recent Supreme Court ruling.
Funny, neh?
Mark
Mark,
Don’t tell Lucia.
They should pretend they are gay. I don’t think excommunicated Mormons have much political clout.These days all you have to do is to declare that you identify with such and such and you are there. You wanna be a girl, call yourself Marsha, get a dress and some big ladies shoes and you are there. You wanna be a Martian? No problem. You’ll get your own reality show on cable.
I’ve sometimes wondered if I’m not really a lesbian trapped in a straight white man’s body. Don’t laugh! I could be. I guess…
Thanks Don! I’m a minority and I deserve … whatever compensations and considerations all those other minorities deserve. Say, I’m part of the progressive vanguard now! I can accuse people of hurting my feelings with micro-agressions and all that jazz and people will take me seriously! The Donald Trumps of the world will tremble! WooHoo!
Or not.
Hey, it occurs to me I’d better say this; I’m joking above. I got no problem with anybody’s sexual orientation. Honestly, don’t care whatsoever at all, in all seriousness.
Ronnie wrote: “Frankie, have you seen any evidence that the Federal exchanges were mentioned in any context with the tax credits ANYWHERE in the ACTUAL 2000 page bill? Don’t give us any BS, Frankie. Show us the words “Federal exchanges†linked with “tax creditsâ€. We’ll give you six weeks.”
You have set up a straw man. I read what the law said – tax credits through State exchanges. I SAID it was ludicrous to believe that language restricting tax credits to State exchanges was INTENDED to encourage states to set up their own exchanges. When states were deciding whether or not to set up their own exchanges, the non-availability of tax credits on the Federal exchange was never discussed. Legislators who deliberately inserted such restrictions would have been trumpeting this benefit of state exchanges. Instead, there was silence. Legislators from small states would have been screaming about how costly it would be for a small state to set up exchanges for a few tens of thousands of citizens so they could collect tax credits (possibly worth less than the cost of setting up an exchange). Based on this silence, I can only conclude that Congress had no idea what the law they passed actually said about various types of exchanges and tax credits. As Nancy Pelosi infamously said, you’ll have to pass the law to find out what is in it. (A recent story claimed committee staff drafting legislation were worried about competition from private exchanges. If private exchanges had supplanted a non-functional Federal exchange, the same arguments would have been made about tax credits through those exchanges.)
I personally suspect Congress intended to provide tax credits all Americans unable to afford insurance. If they wanted to use tax credits to force States to set up their own exchanges they would have explicitly stated that credits would NOT be available on Federal or private exchanges. Unfortunately, the law doesn’t say ANYTHING explicit about tax credits on Federal or private exchanges. That means Congress didn’t authorized such tax credits on anything but State exchanges. When the actual words of a law and its most likely intent are so different, I think it is pure hubris for the Supreme Court to take over Congress’s job – which was to straighten out this mess. And few – if any – Republicans want Americans in states without exchanges to be without tax credits as long as other American are entitled to them.
Ronnie, Frankie, Donny…
~sigh~
How come nobody ever calls me Marky Bofill?!?
I’m offended. I think that’s a micro-aggression going on right there. I’m tucking my poor victimized self in for the evening. Night all.
Don,
Why not? That people filed for something and might file a suit doesn’t make legalizing polygamy a logical consequence of the ruling. Let me know when SCOTUS thinks it does.
Mark Bofill:
Obviously not if you’re going to use that sort of terminology. If you were a real lesbian, you would never refer to your fake man-shell as a “straight white man’s body” as though it was a real person.
Regarding the “4 words”. I would like for someone to show me where, in the entire set of laws passed by the U.S Congress, of the entire history of this country, they used the word “State” to refer to the Federal Government.
Happy hunting!
lucy, lucy
“That people filed for something and might file a suit doesn’t make legalizing polygamy a logical consequence of the ruling.”
I have never said that legalizing polygamy is a “logical consequence” of the court decision, or that legalizing polygamy has been “mandated” by the recent court decision. That is BS that you made up and you keep repeating, despite me pointing out numerous times that I have not said it and it is not my position.
What I have said from my initial comment is:
“Gay people have the same rights as anyone else. So far, so good. Does this not mean that everyone has the right to marry the person, or persons of their choice? It should. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach.
The logical extension of this decision is a future ruling that laws against polygamy violate the Due Process Clause.”
That does NOT mean that I am claiming that the SCOTUS has “mandated” polygamous marriage in this ruling, or that the “consequence” of this ruling is the SCOTUS extending Due Process protection to those who want to engage in polygamous marriage. It is MY OPINION that it logically follows that polygamist individuals have the same freaking fundamental rights as gay individuals. And if the SCOTUS follows the same logic it applied to gays’ rights, it will eventually give marriage rights to polygamists. That is the logical extension. Practically, it all depends on politics.
Do you rule out the possibility the SCOTUS could someday rule that individuals who want to marry more than one person have the same Due Process rights to marriage as gays? You apparently think that is a rhetorical question.
Anyway, I don’t really care what you think. I am not going to engage in a discussion with some lucy who continually misrepresents what I say. You get the last word.
To return to the mercury decision. This is concerning because it sets an economic price on a safety issue. That means you are wandering into the area of what is a life worth, and that gets you into the Pearce and Tol SAR quagmire.
For example, consider chemical wastes. If a company disposed of its wastes in say East St. Louis, (a very poor place) it could be justified by a cost-benefit analysis. In St. Louis (not so poor) not. BTW, the choice of location is not an accident here as exactly this issue is being dealt with over the last half century.
In OSHA terms, can a company pay people to take risks to avoid having to install safety equipment or does it have to meet best possible practices standards
Hi Lucia
James Annan asked me for a full transcript of Hunt’s speech *after* I asked him how he made up his mind based on what he called ‘reporting’, which it was not.
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JA: nigguraths, have you got a full transcript?
Me: No one seems to have it.
JA: So why do you claim I’ve been mislead?
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Annan did not just ask ‘if’ I had a transcript. He wanted a full transcript to dissuade him from his impression of Hunt from bits and pieces. He says so himself:
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“I have read all the accounts I can find from from people who were present, including Hunt himself. It seems clear that he did say that he had trouble working with women and would prefer segregated labs, and did not retract his comments but instead doubled down on them afterwards…”
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I chose to say he was ‘misled’ under the presumption that if he believed the -then current information to be complete and reliable, the people who spread such an impression carried the blame, and not Annan. In other words I was being charitable to him.
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We would all love to have a full transcript or recording. It was quite clear from the start none existed and the earliest emerging accounts were from people who accused Hunt of sexism. People who made up their minds assuming these accounts to be complete and true, like Annan, are faced with the task of unmaking their minds, which is difficult because it appears like favoring sexism to them.
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Plus your comments about me and sexism were misplaced. Though I have followed the Hunt story with interest I have posted little of my own thoughts. I find it hard to understand where you got those ideas from!
Eli,
Your example is not similar to the decision in this case. There is no individual for whom the risk is highly concentrated; if there is any risk at all, it is very diffuse. As a society, we make lots of risk-benefit choices, like the cost of mandated safety equipment in cars versus number of traffic fatalities, the cost of lost time (lower speed limits) versus severity of crashes, and the cost of highway crash barriers versus the number of lives saved. The idea that no activity should be allowed where there is known or potential risk, however small, is at the heart of the EPAs rule, and is contrary to normal life. It is motivated by the worst kind of infantile thinking, and represents a senseless waste of money. Life is fatal. The EPA is not going to impact that reality very much via inefficient allocation of assets. They can, however, diminish the quality of life by wasting other people’s money in the name of ‘safety’.
People living downwind of the plume from coal burning power plants. In any case the tension between best available technology and cost-benefit exists in both cases.
Eli,
There are always, in a rational world, costs and benefits.
I hope you can realize that someday.
Given that Hunt agreed that Hunt said what he was reported to have said Shub is trying it on.
Eli, wrong. As ever.
Don Monford
Oh. Geeh… that’s right, you said extension.
Not sure how a “logical extension” differs from a “logical consequence” in this context. And I still don’t know how “logical extension” doesn’t imply that you think this ruling will ultimately require the court to find for polygamy nor how it doesn’t mean you are implying it “mandates it”. But sorry for the misquote.
Perhaps you can clarify how the meaning of what you wrote differs from my interpretation. As in: What the heck do you think the phrase “logical extension” communicates to those reading your claim? Maybe nothing. At this point, I really have no idea.
Anyway, what I mean is there is no logic involved in thinking that gay marriage being legal will “be extended”, “lead to” or so on. And someone filing this case doesn’t suggest so.
Shub
Your tweet was
Sorry but the quotes you have don’t imply James wants the transcript. You are now writing:
The correct answer appears to be “no you don’t”.
Asking you whether or not you have a transcript after you’ve made strong claims about knowing James has been “mislead” doesn’t imply he “wants” the transcript. I’m pretty sure the reason he wants to know if you have one is your comments on his blog appear to be expressing pretty strong statements that ought to be based on evidence. Specifically you are telling Annan that he has been misled. But you present no evidence that he has been.
Annan wants to know if you actually have any information and asks you whether you have the specific piece. That doesn’t mean he wants the transcript. He wants to know whether you have one. These aren’t the same thing.
So: You misrepresented what he wrote. That’s what I said. And that’s what you did. You misrepresented what he wrote. (Possibly because you misunderstood him– but still, misrepresented).
Sorry I couldn’t be more clear in the 140 char on twitter.
“I’m pretty sure the reason he wants to know if you have one is your comments on his blog appear to be expressing pretty strong statements that ought to be based on evidence”
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The only person expressing strong statements that ought to be based on evidence is James Annan. What I did was to express, strongly, that he ought not to make up his mind given that full information is not available.
.
It was troubling to see someone who claimed to have ‘read all the accounts’ to have read only accounts that confirmed his initial conclusion. Note that even when Louise Mensch, alerted by my tweet, came and offered links to contradictory evidence Annan made no remarks about them.
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It is a reversal of the burden of proof to fully make up one’s mind based on half-facts and then demand those point this out to bring the remaining evidence to change one’s mind back.
Again, it is you who has misunderstood what Annan did.
Annan demanded a full transcript. I did not immediately run to Twitter to say he wants it. He said ” So [if you don’t have a transcript] why do you claim I’ve been mislead”. I posted my tweet following this. The implication of what he said is clear: No one can say he’s been mislead unless they bring full information proving this. That’s not how it works, or should work: Annan should not have made up his mind about Hunt without full information in the first place. He should have been able to, given that he is a scientist, see through the fact that initially available information about Hunt’s speech was selective, one-sided, unfairly incriminatory and slanted.
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Given the lack of definitive sexism charges he can bring against the Nobelist Annan falls back on Hunt being a ‘old’, ‘entitled’, ‘washed-up’, ‘white man’ right from the start. Well, Hunt was all those things even before he made a speech in Seoul so why was he simply not fired from UCL, on a whim?
Re: Eli Rabett (Comment #137398)
Eli has a point here. Some regions of the U.S. have, e.g., significantly worse water quality associated with regional coal power production.
Re: SteveF (Comment #137397)
SteveF, I think you made that one up.
” however small, is at the heart of the EPAs rule, and is contrary to normal life.”
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That is being nice. What is at the heart of the EPAs rule is shutting down Coal based electricity generating plants.
Shub
No. He didn’t. He doesn’t think he did what you claim. I don’t think he did what you claim. And the fuller quote below shows you really truly don’t understand what he did.
Nothing about what he wrote represents any sort of demand; the bits you quoted certainly don’t. He wanted to know if you had a transcript; he asked you if had one. More generally, based on other things, he wants to know if you are basing your conclusion that he is mislead on better knowledge of what was said. In fact: you don’t have a transcript. His enquiry was to elicit that information; it is not a demand for the transcript.
Your tweet misrepresented what he wrote. That’s what I said– and it’s correct. You misrepresented what James wrote, and what he asked for and so on.
Here you go, again:
“Not sure how a “logical extension†differs from a “logical consequence†in this consequence. And I still don’t know how “logical extension†doesn’t imply that you think this ruling will ultimately require the court to find for polygamy nor how it doesn’t mean you are implying it “mandates itâ€. But sorry for the misquote.â€
I will help you:
extension: an act or instance of extending, lengthening, stretching out, or enlarging the scope of something that by which something is extended or enlarged; an addition
consequence: something produced by a cause or necessarily following from a set of conditions
mandate: an official order or commission to do something.
I never said or implied anything like I “think this ruling will ultimately require the court to find for polygamy nor how it doesn’t mean you are implying it “mandates itâ€.†I never said or implied or gave any indication that I think that a ruling for polygamist marriage is even likely. Do you think I am stupid? I have been asking for someone to explain why polygamists are not entitled to the same Due Process rights as gays. And you have been making crap up. I have made it clear that polygamists very likely are not politically powerful enough to get marriage rights. But I said they will use this ruling to bolster their case and they will go for it. I was right.
I have to keep repeating myself, because you stubbornly refuse to see the meaning of what I have been saying. And I don’t know what accounts for your hostility. You must think I am a freaking polygamist spouting propaganda. What a tedious and unproductive farce this has been:
From my most recent comment, which you have largely ignored:
“It is MY OPINION that it logically follows that polygamist individuals have the same freaking fundamental rights as gay individuals. And if the SCOTUS follows the same logic it applied to gays’ rights, it will eventually give marriage rights to polygamists. That is the logical extension. Practically, it all depends on politics.
Do you rule out the possibility the SCOTUS could someday rule that individuals who want to marry more than one person have the same Due Process rights to marriage as gays? You apparently think that is a rhetorical question.â€
And you stubbornly refuse to answer my questions. Do you think the SCOTUS will NEVER “extend†marriage rights to polygamists based on the same Due Process rights they have recently invented for gays? I will predict your answer, if you surprise me and deign to give one:
“Marriage is between two peopleâ€. Freaking brilliant.
And last week marriage was between a man and a woman.
Shub
You are claiming he was misled. That is both a claim and a statement of fact. It ought to be based on evidence. I’m not going to quibble whether the claim is “strong” or “weak”: it ought to be based on evidence whether even if it is a “weak” statement.
You are also claimed James “wants full transcript of #TimHunt’s speech”. That is a claim and statement. As such, it ought to be based on evidence– and the evidence you point to indicate your claim is false. There is nothing about what he said that suggest he wants it. He wanted to know if you have one. There is nothing unclear in what he wrote and you misrepresented it.
I understand that your opinion about series of events, justice, unfairness and so on in the Tim Hunt episode differs from James’s.
But the fact is: You misrepresented what James wrote. And that’s what I said about your tweet when I commented at his blog.
By the time I wrote he was mislead I knew
[1] the links he provided supporting his argument contained incomplete and one-sided information
[2] other people had come forward and provided information that contradicted what linked to.
Eli,
I seriously doubt that there is a significant risk of mercury toxicity to people living downwind from a coal fired power plant. I’m not going to bother running the numbers, but I would bet there are a lot of other components in the plume that are more toxic than mercury. But the EPA is only going after CO2 and mercury.
The problem with mercury is that it eventually ends up in large bodies of water where it’s concentrated in large fish at the top of the food chain, tuna in particular. Gold miners in the Andes probably contribute more mercury to the atmosphere than all the coal fired power plants in the US combined. There are known cases of mercury toxicity from eating too much tuna.
Gosh Golly Don.
I actually agree with your idea to some extent, but I don’t see why you’re getting worked up at Lucia. IMO she’s trying to be precise, that’s what she does. I get that there’s been friction in the comment exchange, but:
Do you expect that to go anywhere useful? Why fight with Lucia when it’s so much more fun to talk with her, that’s all I’m saying.
You FAILED , Frankie.
The context for the ACA scam is fully detailed and analyzed in this journal paper written by credible legal scholar:
Taxation Without Representation: The Illegal IRS Rule to Expand Tax Credits Under the PPACA
Jonathan H. Adler
Case Western Reserve University School of Law; PERC – Property and Environment Research Center
Michael F. Cannon
Cato Institute
July 16, 2012
Health Matrix: Journal of Law-Medicine, Forthcoming
Case Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2012-27
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2106789##
They got the whole story. The whole process. The bills that morphed into the final law, the deliberations etc. blah.. blah.. blah. I know you won’t read it. So your case is closed. I have nothing further for you, Frankie.
That is the answer she has given, Mark. It’s lame. If she were just arguing against an actual assertion I made, or my expression of my opinion, no problem. She keeps making crap up and treats me as a fool. I ain’t down with that crap.
Don,
I know the dictionary definition. Still don’t see how that makes a whit of difference to what you claimed.
No. I think you don’t grok that saying something is a ‘”logical extension” or X’ implies that logic dictates the extension will result from ‘x’. That would make ‘the extension’ a consequence. And in a court ruling, that would suggest that you are implying that later courts who must follow precedent would be required to follow the ‘logic’ and so end up mandating polygamy.
That possibly you don’t mean that…. ok. But I think in context that’s how what you wrote suggest you thought.
I don’t think I’m “stubbornly refusing”.
But for this: Well, I think if SCOTUS follows the logic in this case, it will not give marriage rights to polygamists.
With respect to your complaint about being misunderstood, in my view, if someone says “if they follow the logic of the previous ruling then ‘x’ follows”, does tend imply that one is claiming ‘x’ will be a consequence. Because SCOTUS is supposed to apply their precedents.
I realize you say don’t think this. I accept that. But I think you are trying to parse some very fine line and that you should at least recognize that people are going to think you are implying that. At least now you are explaining your views instead of trying to enlighten us by ‘resort to irony’ or merely saying you didn’t say something and leaving it to us to try to sort out how you think didn’t strongly imply something you tell us you didn’t intend to communicate.
On answering questions: Sorry. I’m upstairs cleaning out a room in preparation of painting.
I don’t rule out anything. I think it is not a logical extension of this ruling nor do I think it is logical to call the right to polygamy the “same” right as the right to 2-person marriage. So no, I don’t think SCOTUS will rule that polygamy is legal based on polygamists and gays having the “same right”. The “same” right found in this ruling would be two two person marriage.
I think if polygamy is eventually granted by SCOTUS (and I doubt it will) the justices will use entirely different arguments to extend “two” to “multiple.” The extensions are qualitatively different.
Of course the argument they use may also be based on “due process”. Lots of different arguments use that. “Due Process” is not the full and complete argument in this ruling. And the fact that many rulings mention “due process” does not mean they all use the same “logic”. There is nothing in the “logic” of the current case that makes the extension fear a logical extension of this ruling..
I agree with DeWitt, Eli and Oliver. Mercury and CO2 are just proxies for PM2.5 and PAHs. However, environmental justice is a serious environmental concern. All harmful exposures are local. The middle class and wealthy can enjoy clean air and cheap power while the poor inhales the emissions. It makes sense that the cost/benefit, when calculated across the whole country, appears too high to justify increased pollution control.
Another benefit is that by implementing all of these costly environmental controls, the US will continue to lead the way into the future. We can’t expect the developing world to solve these problems. We let the genie out of the bottle and it’s our job to keep cleaning up old technology. Just one price to pay for being the lone superpower. Perhaps others would prefer to continue spending trillions on failed horror shows in the middle east.
Shub
With respect to:
Nothing in that comment changes the fact that you misrepresented what James said and meant. He did not say he “wanted” the transcript. He also did not demand transcript. Saying he did is misrepresnting him and is so even if you think you based your views on other evidence which you find believable and which you think “matters” to his conclusion.
My impression is he thinks many of the points you consider to be shown as factually correct may be dubious, and/or that they are irrelevant to his conclusions. But that’s an argument between you and him. If he doesn’t want to have it with you, so be it.
But that doesn’t change the fact that you did misrepresent him. I think you did so because you misunderstood him. It seems my interpretation of what he meant matches his interpretation of what he meant. I think he was very clear– and your misunderstanding is mysterious. But I think you did so.
I know you are going to continue to think he said what you think he said. That you might not change your mind doesn’t bother me. I merely wanted you to come here to discuss it so I could explain why my view is you misrepresented him. If you think my view is mistaken, we can agree to disagree. I don’t have a problem with that.
On the other topic of communication:
Likewise, I don’t have a problem with Don thinking I have no basis for interpreting his words both in one comment and later elaborating to imply what I took them to mean. I accept that he thinks he meant something different. I still don’t understand why he thinks all would think he meant what he says he meant. But he does– I accept that. I’m happy to agree to disagree with whether his words implied what I took them to mean, and accept that he didn’t mean to imply that.
I continue to think that the polygamy is not any sort of “logical extension” of obfergell. There is no ‘logical’ connection between the two. And if he wants to continue to discuss that, that’s fine with me. I was discussing that– it’s all over the previous thread.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #137412)
I wouldn’t bet on it. There are mercury advisories for fresh water bodies across the interior of the U.S — in 48 out of 50 states the last time I checked.
That isn’t a reason not to try and reduce mercury. Also, mercury tends to hang around in the environment and become concentrated by biological activity in ways that lead to human exposure.
Right. Like that.
He did not say he “wanted†the transcript.
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I provided a link in the tweet. People can read the comment stream and decide. Word games, not interesting.
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Shub
I did follow the link. I read what he wrote, and I interpreted what he wrote and what you wrote. I stated my view at his blog. You at least seemed to want to discuss my comment but were unable to do so there because you were blocked. So then you seemed to want to discuss my comment at Twitter– where in my view, the 140 characters did not permit discussion. In invited you to discuss your views on my comment here. You eventually came here.
If you think the issue is uninteresting, you are free to not discuss it. Ciao!
You are unable or unwilling to see the causal chain. The *first* thing JA should have done is to ask or wonder if there was a full transcript. Instead he chose to raise the question when I pointed out he was likely wrong.
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I informed you that I was not able to comment on his site. You went there again and claimed I defended sexists.
Oliver,
Mercury vapor in the atmosphere is a well mixed gas, like CO2, oxygen, nitrogen and argon. It is not like particulate emissions.
Source (.pdf).
That means that coal fired power plants in the US are most likely not the major sources of mercury in US lakes. In fact, only about half of mercury emissions are anthropogenic and only 40% of that half is from burning coal. Reducing stack mercury emissions from coal burning power plants in the US would likely not help much. That’s probably the major reason that the benefits of reducing stack emission in the US are so low. As I’ve said before and Kan repeated above, drastically reducing mercury emissions from coal burning power plants is ploy to force the closing of those plants. The health benefits are not significant.
There’s mercury in natural gas too.
Shub,
The fact that you think James “should” have asked for the full transcript first does not make this claim of yours correct:
Even if I were to agree he “should” have asked for the full transcript earlier that would not magically turn his position into “wanting” the transcript. James did not say he wanted it. What he wrote did not suggest he wanted it. As far as I can tell, he still hasn’t expressed any desire for it. Your claim he did misrepresented him.
I know you repeatedly tweeted that James blocked you. Nevertheless, I think I am allowed to visit James Annan’s site even if he blocks you. I told you that if you wish, you can discuss things here where there is no 140 char limit, and now you are here, and you may.
Btw, there’s an op-ed by Peggy Noonan in today’s WSJ (paywalled) about the danger of less than unanimous SCOTUS decisions that mandate significant societal and cultural change. Brown v. Board of Education, for example, was 9-0. Roe v. Wade was 7-2 and we’re still trying to deal with the consequences.
DeWitt,
There are dangers in split decisions especially on social issues.
But that’s not an argument that could sway anyone who believes a right exists to believe it doesn’t exist, nor will it sway those who believe it doesn’t exist to believe it does.
That’s just more misrepresenting and convoluted BS, lucy. Words have meaning and you don’t get to decide which words are interchangeable.
And when you infer that I meant one thing rather than another, after I have repeatedly explained that you are not correct, you are implying that I am either irrational, a liar, or both.
I explained what I am talking about enough for you to get it. You are either dim or disingenuous. And you really don’t seem to be dim.
You keep ignoring the fact that the fundamental traditional and legal definition of marriage has recently been changed by a majority decision that invented a right for gays under the Due Process Clause. Using the same line of reasoning they can change the definition again to allow polygamous marriage. They are called the Supreme Court for a reason.
I never claimed or implied that “logic dictates the extension”. You made that up. Just another bogus variation of the previous crap you made up about mandates, consequence whatever. The Supreme Court obviously does not follow the dictates of logic. They do as the majority pleases.
No mas.
lucia,
But it ought to sway the Justices themselves. They shouldn’t be imposing their social views on society as a whole when they aren’t even close to unanimous, especially when it appeared that things were moving in the right direction through legislation and state court decisions. They could have invalidated Section 2 of the Defense of Marriage Act on 14th Amendment grounds and left it at that.
Don Montfort
Word have meaning, and the surrounding words (like ‘logical’ ) do affect the full meaning of a word when it is used in a sentence of a paragraph.
No. I said I accept that you think you meant something different from what I understodd you to mean. I have explained why I thought you meant what you meant. This does not imply you are irrational, a liar or both. It means a receiver of the communcation (me) thought you meant something different from what the communicator meant (you.)
Fundamental traditional.. definition? In most countries marriage permitted polygamy. Isaac in the old testament had two wives. Men were supposed to marry their brothers widows in the old testament– as such polygamy seems to have been a rather traditional one.
Our laws have not given deferance to this “fundamental” defintion; I don’t know why they should now. Certainly the recent ruling doesn’t represent any change in not looking to ‘fundamental traditional’ definitions..
I don’t know if you meant the adjective ‘fundamental’ to apply both to “traditional” and “legal” I don’t quite now what a “fundamental..legal definition” is. In anycase, same sex marriage fell inside the “legal definition” in Illinois and a number of other States. So around here, that law did not change last week and presumably whatever the ‘definition’ means, that didn’t change.
I have not denied or ignored that the legal right to marriage is now recognized to extend to same sex couples and did not before. I have not denied or ignored that the recognition came as a result of this ruling nor that some people did not previously recognize it; many of those still do not recognize it.
You want to use some sort of language about “definitions” and then complain about people not accepting “definitions” changed. I neither deny or accept your claim about the “definition” changing. I am not ignoring your making the claim: I am hearing it over and over. My position is: I have no idea what your claim about the “definition” is even supposed to mean.
As far as I can tell looking at precedent, the law saw there was a right to 2 person marriage. They then applied that precedent to include 2 persons of the sex. The law changed in the sense that the right is recognized to include persons of the same sex. I have no idea how any the word “definition” has anything to do with last weeks ruling– though I know lots of people seem to believe it does.
DeWitt
I think it shouldn’t. If a Justice thought something was a right, I don’t think he should deprive someone of that right merely because the ruling is 5-4. And vice versa.
But that cuts both ways. The ruling was going to impose a social view no matter what. The questions is whose view was to be imposed.
They could. But if 5 judges think marriage is right and it extends to couples of the same sex, the fact they can do less than recognize the rights isn’t likely to be very persuasive. I don’t see why it ought to be. If a right is being violated, rulings that forbid the violations are proper.
I know some people disagree with the ruling, but I think the idea that judges should change their vote on this because the ruling is only 5-4 is a particularly weak one.
Lucia,
I might have this wrong. But if the Supreme Court did ~not~ rule that gay couples have a right to marry, it’d still be possible for the states or Congress to explicitly give them that right. Once the SC ruled that gay couples have a right to marry … it can still be overturned I think. Requires a constitutional amendment?
So what I’m saying (and this isn’t my original thought, I heard the argument from some pundit initially) is that once the SC rules on something, it effectively takes the matter out of people’s hands unless an overwhelming majority agree sufficient to amend the Constitution.
~shrug~ I’m not sure how I feel about this argument, but I’m pretty sure this is the argument DeWitt is talking about.
Oliver (Comment #137406),
No, I didn’t make that up. The SC told the EPA to consider costs before promulgating a rule. They did that because EPA claimed (explicitly) that they did not have to consider cost at all, only potential harm. Promulgating environmental regulations with no regard to costs is what the case was all about. I am not sure how you could have missed that.
lucia (Comment #137431),
Earlier you argued (if I remember correctly) that there was no need for a SC ruling on the right of first cousins to marry, because some states allow such marriages, and other states must recognize those first cousin marriages, even if marriage of first cousins remains unlawful in those states.
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It is clear that some states allowed same-sex marriages before the SC ruling, and presumably, states which did not allow those marriages would/should be forced to recognize same-sex marriages which took place in states where those marriages were allowed, based on the same logic as you suggested for first cousin marriages.
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So I do not see any reason why the ‘right’ to gay marriage is any different from the ‘right’ of first cousins to marry. Can you explain why you think these two instances are so different that the SC needed to find a new ‘right’ that went unrecognized for 200+ years?
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I think DeWitt is correct on this. The court made the ruling much broader than it needed to be. The court could just have thrown out the defense of marriage act because the definition of marriage is not something the Federal government has jurisdiction over (and never had). I do see this ruling as legislating from the bench, and so inappropriate and unnecessary for the court.
Mark
Yes. But in states that did not grant same sex marriage, those couples could not married. That would remain an imposition on those who think those states should grant it. That’s just as much an imposition as a POV as requiring states to recognize and grant ssm.
Courts have reversed in the past, so that is not impossible. Constitutional amendments are still permitted.
Yes. But my position is that permitting States to not recognize a right is still taking a position and it’s permitting those who want to not recognize ssm to have their social preference prevail.
I also think it’s what DeWitt was talking about. I still think the argument cuts both ways.
SteveF
I believe I argued the case is unlikely to be presented to the courts.
I do think cousins who want to marry might perceive “no need” to go to the trouble and expense and as a right, no one with standing will present it to courts. I could be wrong– but I suspect this is the case. Otherwise, some cousins would already be pressing the courts, and that hasn’t happened.
At a minimum yes. At a minimum, when presented with plaitiffs whose marriages were not being recognized by other states, I think the court might have overruled section 2 of DOMA on the grounds of equal protection.
The difficulty is once these plaintiffs with standing arrived, they asked for more. Five justices agreed that rights were being violated and gave the remedy they thought proper.
They could have done that. Possibly they would have narrowed the ruling if one of the four dissenters had been willing to sign on to a rulling made on that basis. But 5 justices actually think same sex marriage is a right aren’t going to see any reason to narrow the ruling. The argument that the ruling is only 5/4 is never going to convince them to narrow.
It’s possible that if section 2 of DOMA had not existed and states had given full faith and credit to other states marriages, these plaintiffs would have had little incentives to pursue the costly suits. (I think that’s the situation for cousins who wish to marry.) But section 2 of DOMA did exist and states did not recognize the marriages. So naturally, those whose marriages were not recognized filed a suit. They didn’t have the alternative cousins have.
I don’t need to explain they are “so different” because I already said that if cousins actually went to SCOTUS, SCOTUS might rule they have the right. I think SCOTUS might have ruled that not only before Oberfgell. So I think the recent ruling didn’t change anything on this count.
Lucia,
Ok. 🙂
I didn’t read all that crap, but this nonsense caught my eye:
“Fundamental traditional.. definition? In most countries marriage permitted polygamy. Isaac in the old testament had two wives. Men were supposed to marry their brothers widows in the old testament– as such polygamy seems to have been a rather traditional one.”
Oh, did you catch me making another mistake? No, we have not been talking about Isaac, the Old Testament and countries that permit, or permitted polygamy. We have been talking about the freaking country we live in. We have been talking about a U.S. Constitutional issue. This is just some unnecessary nitpicking argumentative BS and it’s typical of what you have been doing. And it doesn’t look like you will ever stop the foolishness. I won’t be back.
lucia:
Isaac’s wives were not married to each other; i.e., just as a contractor can have active contracts with several different customers who don’t know each other, his marital arrangements with each wife are most reasonably considered separate entities. So Isaac had not one marriage but two, each consisting of one man and one woman.
Not to your distorted version of it, no.
Don
I didn’t say or suggest you made a mistake. You mentioned the “fundamental traditional and legal definition of marriage”. I described what tradition actually has dictated. Tradition has also dictated chattel marriage and all sorts of other things.
But regardless of what this fundamental traditional definition you seem to believe in dictated: the argument ‘it’s tradition’ rarely strikes me as a strong constitutional argument, and would not in this case. Slavery was traditional. Chattel marriage was traditional. In my opinions, a ruling that was based our marriage laws on “tradition” might make it more difficult to square with ruling against suits requesting the government recognize polygamy– but details of how would depend on details of the ruling. Luckily we did not see such a ruling– and not just because of marriage.
I should also observe that if you are going to tell me you didn’t read what I wrote but are just going to respond to the bits that somehow caught your eye while you are not reading, and also complain that I don’t engage every single thing you say…. well… I don’t think I’m the one engaged in foolishness.
Anyway, obviously we aren’t going to agree on this. I’m happy to agree to disagree. Time for 4th of July fireworks. Our town has some tonight and tomorrow. Night night.
yguy,
It nevertheless permitted a man to be married to two women at once. This is a difference from marriage that does not permit a man to be married to two women at once. Our laws currently do not permit polygamous marriage.
It depends on how long a practice has to endure before it is labeled a tradition.
Monogamy is surely the most recent marriage practice to hold sway, not really becoming popular until the advent of agriculture. The farmer needed to brand children as his own so he could direct their work, so branding their mother was a necessary step. And small holdings couldn’t support more than one mother.
Prior to that the entire institution was far more casual.
Re: DeWitt Payne (Comment #137424)
The conclusion does not follow. “Well mixed†tracers can have very high concentrations in plumes emitted from sources. The source you cited mentions measurements of gaseous mercury in the plume of a coal-fired power plant more than 500x that of “background†tropospheric levels.
Aside from the incorrect physics/chemistry, have any arguments been made here based on any kind of health data?
Re: SteveF (Comment #137433)
IIRC, the EPA did not argue that they did not need to consider cost at all. They argued that they could decide, based on harms, that something needed to be done. They continued to say that costs could be (and were) taken into account later, at the stage when it was being decided what emissions standards to set. This is quite different from what you’re claiming was behind the EPA rule.
Re: DeWitt Payne (Comment #137429)
Things weren’t moving “moving in the right direction” across all states.
To take an parallel from abolishin: slavery was in the process of being abolished through legislation and state court decisions in many states. Viewed through a modern lens, things were “moving in the right direction.†The same arguably held for Civil Rights, a century later. However, in both cases there were some states willing (on the whole) to go to nearly any lengths to resist the direction. Should the Supreme Court should have stayed out of the Civil Rights question because it wasn’t close to unanimous?
Re: SteveF (Comment #137434)
One obvious difference is that LGBT people, just like non-white people and women, are in a class explicitly protected from discrimination, and therefore rights that other people have cannot be denied to them. By contrast, “first cousins†are not, AFAIK, a protected class.
There might be good reasons why states should not be allowed to “not recognize†cousin marriages which were legally granted in other states. People thus affected might be in a good position to bring a case before the courts. However, how is that relevant to Obergefell?
Oliver,
Deciding ‘something must be done’ independant of cost seems to imply that cost is not a consideration. The SC told the EPA that reaching a conclusion that ‘something must be done’ has to include an estimate of costs and benefits. If the costs and benefits are wildly disproportionate, as the litigants in this case claim they are, then the appropriate decision is ‘nothing must be done’.
Oliver,
“One obvious difference is that LGBT people, just like non-white people and women, are in a class explicitly protected from discrimination”
.
And where in the constitution is the process of defining a protected class described? Or are you suggesting that certain laws, passed by legislatures, define such classes? If the latter, please describe the federal legislation which defines gays and lesbians as a protected class, especially with regard to marriage. Seems to me the existing Federal laws did NOT define that protected class, at least not for the purpose of marriage.
SteveF (Comment #137446)
No, it means that you think the harms are clear enough that it’s worth moving ahead and working out the details at some point later in time. It doesn’t say that you will never take into account the cost.
Surely you know this kind of decision process from… life?
…before deciding that anything at all needs to be done. And now they’ll have to do it in hindsight, even though it isn’t clear that anyone is going to do anything differently by this point in time.
IF the litigants are correct. Big IF.
SteveF (Comment #137447)
Just curious, did you miss the entire Civil Rights movement?
Oliver,
The thing is: these potential plaintiffs don’t exist because all states do recognize those marriages when those marriages are performed in another state.
Had all states extended full faith and credit to ssm they way they all do for cousin marriage, many of (possibly all) the plaintiffs in obergefell would have had no standing to file this particular suit. But some states were not extending full faith and credit so plaintiffs with standing to sue were created. The suit was filed, and we know the outcome.
Lucia,
I thought that all states recognized those marriages too, but I looked it up and there seem to be at least a couple states which do not recognize out-of-state cousin marriages. My source was Wikipedia, so I could be wrong. Do you have a differing source?
SteveF
“Protected class” is used in cases involving due process and equal protection. Wikipedia has some information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class
There is a whole batch of due process/equal protection rulings that use this and then apply terms like “strict scrutiny”, “intermediate scrutiny” etc. to whether a law protects people in those classes “equally” with others.
Obergefell didn’t use that particular language in the ruling.
Also, I think Oliver may be mistaken. I may be mistaken, but I think LGTB have not been specifically recognized as a protected class at the Federal level. Perhaps Oliver can point to something.
Oliver,
My source was this:
http://www.ncsl.org/research/human-services/state-laws-regarding-marriages-between-first-cousi.aspx
But you are right– I may have overstated. It only says “States generally recognize marriages of first cousins married in a state where such marriages are legal.” So I must have skimmed by “generally”.
If these people exist, they could potentially be plaintiffs. Other than “full faith and credit” which everyone agrees is in the constitution, I think the arguments presented by these plaintiffs would be different from those in Obergefell.
lucia,
“Also, I think Oliver may be mistaken. I may be mistaken, but I think LGTB have not been specifically recognized as a protected class at the Federal level. Perhaps Oliver can point to something.”
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I am pretty sure he is mistaken. The defence of marriage act suggests he is in fact mistaken; Congress certainly did not consider in that law that same-sex marriage should recieve special protection.
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If there are states which refuse to recognize first cousin marriages conducted in other states, then it is my view that the legal question before the SC was essentially identical to the first cousin situation. I think that the court could have (and IMO should have) setteled the case by just requiring full faith and credit be complied with. That would have been a reasoned decision, consistent with the constitution, and which gave same sex couples the same ‘rights’ as first cousins… and everyone else. The issuance of marriage licences has always been a state function, and I personally see no reason why that should have changed.
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To be clear: outside of incestual realationships, I don’t give a hoot who people marry. I just think this SC ruling was poorly reasoned, absolutely not needed, and represents an unnecessary intrusion of the Federal courts into what should be a legislative function at the state level.
Oliver,
“Just curious, did you miss the entire Civil Rights movement?”
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No, I was aware of the events starting with Brown v Board of Education.
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Just curious: do you try to address the substantive arguments of people you disagree with? Seems to me you rarely do.
SteveF,
The cases would share similarities and also have differences. Certainly, if the laws on the books are similar, that makes them more similar than I thought.
That said, if the cases got to court, the differences between would matter to the logic. There is still the issue that the arguments against incest are entirely different from those against same-sex marriage. Obergefell didn’t use the “scrutiny” “class” arguments, but they still discussed the policy issues — like whether gay marriage is good or bad for kids etc. The side wishing to ban would argue:
* genetic defects.
* family power/dynamic issues (that is permitting incest marriages puts less powerful dependents in a tenuous position, and changes the parental incentive to support kids and let them become independent and so on.)
* possibly societal power issues. (Powerful families all marrying inside families has been used a method to keep wealth and power in a small group.)
I hear the third less often than the first. But these are the reasons and they are different from those advanced against gay marriage. These have always been the arguments, and obergefell doesn’t change them. The cousin-spouse challengers would need to argue these things.
The other difference– which wouldn’t be an argument in a case that did arise– but is a practical matter: I still tend to think plaintiffs just don’t exist. Regardless of what laws are on the books, you still need plaintiffs to mount a challenge. Last night I googled a bit to see if there could be any. I can’t find the page I found last night again. But it appeared there were roughly 5 or 6 cases during the past century that reached state court levels. Except for the case of a Montana couple who married in Montana, the cousins seemed to win all cases on various grounds. (I’m googling to find the page listing cases. I did find the most recent AZ case, it’s here: http://www.arizonafamilylaw.blogspot.com/2005_10_01_archive.html)
As the person whose marriage was granted out of state and wanting their marriage recognized generally won, there still may be no plaintiffs with standing to file at SCOTUS was created.
The oddity is that States sometimes have laws on the books that are almost never enforced by the states. It’s quite possible that absent a challenge by combative heirs, States who encounter a pair of married spouses aren’t aware the spouses are cousins and they just recognize the pair. When that happens, no-one gains standing for having their rights deprived. (A similar state existed vis-a-vis sodomy. Lots of sodomy was committed on a daily basis in the states where it was illegal. But Lawrence only had standing because a cop bothered to arrest him– which was relatively rare.)
FWIW: most– I think possibly all– of the actual court cases looked like inheritance disputes. Relatives were disputing the marriage after the husband’s death with the intention of disinheriting the cousin-wife. When the marriage was celebrated in a different state the wife generally one. The only exception I recall was the cases where a AZ residents drove to NM to married, then promptly turned around and continued to live in AZ.
I have to find that page again. (Should have book marked. The first disputes were in the 1950, the latest this century.)
The most recent case was Arizona. It looked suspiciously like Arizona may have changed their law precisely to make treatment of cousins the same as gay’s. Their laws had recognized cousin marriage performed in other states but their law was changed in 1996 which is the same year DOMA was passed and appears to be after the Hawaii courts ruled SSM. Prior to that, they recognized the cousin marriages. (The basis of the court ruling for the wife was that her marriage was essentially grandfathered in.)
If the change in AZ law was motivated by the Hawaii ruling for gay marriage, that might suggest their legislatures thought recognizing out of state cousin marriage did put them at a risk of having to recognize gay marriage.
Here’s the list of court ruling:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage_court_cases_in_the_United_States
SteveF,
I think the reasoning of the ruling leaves something to be desired. I think the dissents are even worse.
But I don’t think the reasoning results in the ‘logical extensions’ Don Montfort claimed. There are important differences in the arguments against incest, polygamy and gay marriage. The former two could end up made legal but I don’t think the ruling in oberfegel nor the argument for ruling for gay marriage makes much difference for arguments in favor for the former two.
Oliver,
The vast majority of the plume from a stack is not at ground level. Power plant stacks are tall for a reason.
I’ll rephrase: The health and environmental benefits of reducing mercury emission from coal fired power plant stack gas are minimal compared to the cost. The EPA claimed that didn’t matter. SCOTUS disagreed.
The Safeguarding America’s Future and Environment Act or the “Safe Act” is a bill just introduced by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).
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The bill calls for the establishment of a National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center to federally manage and regulate the necessary measures.
Re: lucia (Comment #137452)
You are right, in that Congress has not granted general protections to LGBT persons along the veins of gender, race, age, disability, etc. They are currently protected with respect to employment discrimination by the federal government or contractors. It remains open whether they will gain full status as a protected class, although given the precedents for race and gender, I don’t see why not.
Re: SteveF (Comment #137454)
See above. Also, my understanding of U.S. vs. Windsor and other similar cases is that section 3 of DOMA was found to deprive same-sex couples of their constitutionally guaranteed rights without due process, so DOMA may not be the best model to consider.
Re: DeWitt Payne (Comment #137459)
I don’t think the concern about plumes is so much about breathing mercury vapor, as it is about raising mercury concentrations in precipitation which falls to the ground and collects in the local or regional watershed. The source which you provided contains some (brief) disucussion about this issue.
The direct claimed benefits were relatively small. The EPA claimed that the indirect benefits were quite substantial. The claimants disagreed. The SCOTUS ruled that the EPA didn’t do their job in making the initial decision to regulate, which is a bit different from ruling that they can’t or shouldn’t regulate mercury.
Re: SteveF (Comment #137455)
Yes, I do try and address substantive arguments as they come up. I think you can see that from my previous comments, both in this thread and in others over the years.
I responded snarkily because you asked what seemed to be a bunch of rhetorical questions about Civil Rights and anti discrimination protections. Evidently mine wasn’t the most helpful response. I apologize.
Anyway, happy Fourth to y’all!
“But I don’t think the reasoning results in the ‘logical extensions’ Don Montfort claimed.”
I HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT EXTENDING THE LOGIC THAT WAS USED TO CREATE THE RIGHT, NOT EXTENDING THE RULING. I made it quite clear that I didn’t claim or foresee that the gay ruling now or in the future “mandated” “will have the consequence” “logically dictates” “results” in similar rulings for other classes of citizens who are less politically powerful and less sympathetic. That I “claimed” any of those things is made up BS. The same strawman with a lot of aliases. Every time I say that one of those characterizations of my opinion is wrong a new one gets made up. Bizarre.
I have made it quite clear that it is my OPINION that IF the logic of inventing a right to marriage for gays was applied or EXTENDED to other classes, they should also be allowed the right to marry whomever they chose to marry. I never said or “claimed” it would be applied or extended. I said what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. That is an OPINION. Due freaking Process is SUPPOSED to be for everybody. That is my OPINION. I don’t have to prove my opinion is a fact.
I have made it clear that I have not been CLAIMING that the gay ruling now or in the future “mandated” “will have the consequence” “logically dictates” or will “result” in similar rulings for other classes of citizens less politically powerful and less sympathetic. Period. I have not predicted, nor do I expect this SCOTUS to be logical and fair in their rulings.
And misrepresenting my opinion after it has been explained numerous times is just obsessive and stubbornly stupid.
Someone who has been reading my way too many comments on this thread with some care and attention, should have noticed that my name ain’t spelled the way someone is spelling it. Hey, maybe someone who has been nitpicking at me incessantly thinks I am spelling it wrong.
I shouldn’t have mentioned polygamy. Using incest marriage would have been a safer example. Most women don’t like the idea of husbands being allowed to have more than one wife, at all.
Don,
So are you saying you are claiming that these other things could could be justified based on logic that was not used in the ruling? Otherwise, what do you mean by “extending the logic that was used”? Because I don’t know, and I’m not reading or addressing the rest of what you wrote until you clarify what you mean by this all cap bit. (Though I have skimmed it and it does not seem to address my most recent comment in any way.)
FWIW:
Going back on my word: The right to marriage was not “invented” at all in this ruling. It pre-existed this ruling; the case contained numerous precedents on this. As it was not “invented” it was clearly not “invented” for gays.
lucia:
It also permitted divorce; yet, as Christ observed, “from the beginning it was not so.” This being the case, there is no sense in pretending either was ever anything but a spiritual disease vector relative to marriage as originally conceived.
yguy,
I went to a Catholic all girl’s highschool. I’m familiar with judeao christian doctrine. However, I don’t see the relevance of your comment to the recent SCOTUS case. Did you intend there to be a connection?
lucia:
Swell, but doctrine has no greater purpose than to bear witness to spiritual truths accessible to everyone through his or her own insight; or as Orwell put it, the best books tell you what you already know.
The ruling forces states to recognize a definition of marriage that is insane, because it deletes an indispensable component of marriage as originally conceived – to the detriment of any children with the misfortune to find themselves being reared under the auspices of a “gay marriage”.
It also constitutes an attack on the psyche of any American sufficiently commonsensical to understand that marriage is strictly a one man/one woman deal.
yguy,
Sounds like you don’t like the ruling.
Figgered that out all by yerself, didja? :p
So, Lucia, you were intent on telling me about misrepresentation. But what do you think about the Tim Hunt story yourself? I know you cited how a corporation would handle a situation like this but Hunt belonged to a university, not a corporation. Regardless of what he belonged to, it would be unfair if someone was removed from a job or position on shaky grounds. It’s been a good while since the story broke. Where do you stand on the matter? What do you think about Hunt?
Shub,
I think what I said in the comment I wrote at Annan’s, which you read after which you began tweeting at me.
I didn’t say anything about how a corporation would handle this.
I’m pretty sure based on things you’ve written here and twitter, you already have read what I think. But if you forgot, go to Annans (http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2015/06/which-hunt.html). Re-read what I wrote. That’s what I think. Then, feel free to come back here and engage whichever part of what I wrote you wish to engage. But don’t ask me to repeat myself.
When engaging, feel free to quote what I wrote.
Oliver (Comment #137463),
My earlier questions were most certainly not rhetorical. I actually wanted to know why you think same-sex couples have special protection, especially WRT marriage.
To repeat and clarify: my objection to the ruling is NOT that I object to same-sex couples marrying, nor that the ruling will lead to legalized polygamy. My objection is the intrusion of the SC into a policy controversy, with the courts decision representing an intrusion into decisions normally (and properly) handled by state legislatures.
yguy,
“but doctrine has no greater purpose than to bear witness to spiritual truths accessible to everyone through his or her own insight”
.
Please spare us this rubbish. Different people find very different ‘spiritual truths’, or even, shocking as it may seem to you, find there are no such things.
Luciam I see nothing in those comments about whether you think Hunt did something wrong.
Shub Niggurath
You didn’t ask me if I think he did something wrong. You asked me what I think of the story. You asked me what I think about Hunt himself. You asked me where I stand on the matter. That’s a lot of open ended questions. You are now asking a different open ended question which is whether he did something wrong. Wrong can have a huge range of meanings.
I think Hunt was affiliated with UCL with what is called an “honorary position”. The purpose of honorary positions is mutual PR; it is not employment. Both the party granting the honor and the honoree have a right to sever the affiliation for any reason at any time. No process, enquiry or reason is required for either to sever the affiliation.
I think Hunt made a very stupid joke that tended to convey a message that cuts against UCL’s mission to encourage women to enter and remain in scientific positions. Also, the message resulted in bad PR for himself and due to the existence of the affiliation, resulted in bad PR for UCL. UCL placed a phone call, which Hunt’s wife answered. As a result of the information in that phone call which one presumes Hunt’s wife communicated to him, Hunt chose to sever the relationship as was his right.
I’m not seeing anything irregular on UCL’s part here. Perhaps they did do something irregular, but if they did, that behavior doesn’t seem to have come out in public.
Hunt caused them bad PR and said something that audience members interpret as meaning women do not belong in science. Since UCL’s purpose in granting the honor is almost certainly to gain good PR and have mouth pieces communicate messages that are welcoming to women, he failed to hold up his end of the bargain as honoree. As such his decision to resign was the correct one.
I hope that answers your question.
You are being tedious and ridiculous, Lucia. It’s a sad thing to watch.
You keep saying that I am claiming this or that. I have explained this numerous times. I am stating my opinion based on my understanding of the Constitution and the law. It’s an opinion shared by some sitting SCOTUS Justices and a lot of other legal eagles. You act like it’s coming from freaking Mars.
I am not claiming, or whatever else you want to call it that my opinion is fact and I am not making the claims or predictions you imagine I am making. If I had made the claims that you keep inventing and falsely alleging I am making, you could find a freaking quote or two to substantiate your repeated BS misrepresentations.
Now please be sensible and try to let go of this. Just say that you disagree with my opinion, which simply put is: “If Due Process and Equal Protection is good for the gay geese, it’s good for the polygamous geese.” Please list the reasons you disagree that the sister wives are entitled to Due Process and Equal Protection, if you care to, and then move on.
Thanks Lucia. That doesn’t answer my question though.
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You do realize ‘causing bad PR’ is not cut-and-dried? For instance a prominent person may be falsely accused of a heinous act. The news may be splashed all over, ‘causing’ bad PR. His company may fire him. Presumably investigations will clear his name sometime and the company will gladly take him back. But what if the heinous act is not an act but what one has said? And not what one has said but what has been reported as having been said by others, who left out crucial bits that change the very meaning of what was said?
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On Annan’s blog, you did mention large companies when talking immediately preceding Hunt’s question.
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Ron Graf (Comment #137460),
Mr Sheldon Whitehouse understands that all Mr Obama’s efforts to control CO2 via EPA rules will likely disappear if Hillary loses in 2016. Considering that he knows his bill will never make it out of committee, never mind actually being considered for a vote, it is mainly designed to provide election propaganda: “See, those evil Republicans want to destroy the Earth; they wouldn’t even allow this wonderful bill, needed to protect Gaia, out of committee!” IMO, Whitehouse is a political hack, nothing more. And not a very smart one.
Shub,
I’m not sure what to make of your hypothetical which contains important facts with no parallel to the Hunt story. But I’ll engage it.
First: It is a fact bad Public Relations (PR) resulted from his lame joke and his handling of questions afterwards. There was lots of public reporting and criticism in newspapers and so on. This is bad PR.
Second: With respect to PR, Public Relations are bad even if they spring from a misunderstanding. So all the “twisted” or “distorted” doesn’t change the fact that the joke that was told resulted in bad PR.
While one may correctly believe whether the story was twisted ought to be important to judging Hunt’s character I think it’s irrelevant to figuring out whether UCL should prefer that he not represent their views. Even if we evaluates this under the assumption of the ‘story taken out of context’ version of events, UCL is wise to prefer he not be in a PR position. Because, at a minimum, he says things in ways that are misunderstood, and result in bad PR.
He was wise to sever that relationship with them. UCL was justified in preferring he not have the power to cause them bad PR.
On the other bits:
* I haven’t accused him of a heinous act nor as far as I can tell has UCL. Acts have to reach a level that is much more wicked before that. For example: murdering someone and throwing their body in a chipper shredder is ‘heinous’.
* Hunt was not an employee (or at least seems not to have been.) As such UCL couldn’t fire him because he was not employed.
* Even if he had been an employee, all reports indicate he is the one who decided to sever the relationship. Had he been an employee (which he is not) UCL would not have been able to force him to remain with them. It would certainly be odd for them to carry out some sort of formal investigation.
Some company somewhere might fire and re-hire someone (say an accountant) after he is cleared of the suspicion of a “heinous crime” (say of murdering his wife with an axe.) They would do that because they always value his talents as an accountant and still do.
But few companies would put someone who is poor at PR back in a PR position. Hunt is bad at PR. He wasn’t an employee– but somehow you want to put forward a hypothetical that involves and employee and a company. But even in that context: It had a company fired an accountant who was bad at accounting the company would not hire him back after his name is cleared of accusations that he was an axe murders. The reason they wouldn’t hire him back as an accountant is he is a poor accountant. They prefer to fill the job with someone who is good at the job and that’s what they would do unless for some reason some idiotic law forced them to give the bad accountant his job back.
Hunt is bad at PR. UCL is right to prefer not to continue to grant him an honor which amounts to little more than hoping “we can have Hunt create some good PR for us” especially as he does it for free in the capacity of a ‘not an employee’ and both sides can sever the relationship at will. (Hunt exercised this choice.)
BTW: On of my rules is if you ask a rhetorical question, you must first supply your own answer. But in fact, I think I have already addressed the hypothetical.
Don,
Where in (Comment #137465) (Comment #137466) did I claim you said anything you did not say?
The #137465 asks a question. The #137466 addresses a premise in an if then block you wrote: “IF the logic of inventing a right to marriage f”.
You did write something in the form of “IF X then Y”. My pointing out ‘X’ is false is not suggesting or saying you claimed X was true. It is simply pointing out that X is false. It’s important to discuss whether X is true or false when discussing logic involving “if X then Y” statements.
Perhaps you can answer my question and tell me what in those comments represents a claim that you said something you did not claim. Otherwise, maybe you should take a breath and calm down.
For your convenience, my question is:
Where in (Comment #137465) (Comment #137466) did I claim you said anything you did not say?
So you see what you did there Lucia? You used a ‘PR’ framework to analyse Hunt’s actions, as a corporation would do. You are therefore essentially using labor laws, your experience with Illinois, and corporate thinking to assess the matter. Hunt is an academic and UCL is a university. Corporate thinking can be spineless, unprincipled, or courageous. It has no standard.
Under your regime anyone’s life and reputation can be destroyed easily. Hunt was flying back to the UK when the BBC caught him before takeoff and put their questions. Without presenting the question asked, the answer was presented as his response to allegations of sexism. This was followed by a discussion of what he said with two people, one of whom was at the lunch and neither of whom was Tim Hunt. Your impression of Hunt’s bad ‘handling of questions afterwards’ stems from the BBC interview which omits the question put to him, and the badness in the situation stems from slander.
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Even the lowest possible bar – bad public relations – requires the words and deeds that caused them be true. ‘Bad PR’, unfortunately is only a hair’s breadth away from witch-hunting.
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There is another question you haven’t answered yet. You threw an accusation of support of sexism, and something about ‘behavior’ – both yet to be substantiated. You can choose not to answer, of course, but I doubt only you can be strict about people’s words and meanings, particularly when inserting yourself into conversations when the other person is incapable of participating.
Steve, as Sen. Whitehouse unveiled his bill to committee asking for a department to run the National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center Ted Cruz reportedly told him: “The post office is coming available.”
Ron Graf,
Whitehouse was appointed to be a US district attorney by William Jefferson Clinton. While Whitehouse was a sitting Senator:
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Bill Clinton recognizes crafty talent for bending the rules for personal gain when he sees it. Consider who he married.
I used to think the damning thing about Whitehouse was that he relied on Skepticalscience to get his science fix. I changed my opinion after realising John Holdren and Barack Obama did the same
Shub
I think this is the correct framework. It’s the framework that describes the relationship between Hunt and UCL.
No I’m not. I live in Illinois and that influences what I view appropriate legal doctrine and practices including in the area of labor law. But the Hunt UCL interaction appears not to have anything to do with labor laws because Hunt was not an employee at all. Not here, not in England. If he was an employee in England, and those laws apply and his rights under labor laws were violated there, he should exercise them using the local laws. He doesn’t seem to be suggesting UCL violated an UK labor law. Nor is anyone else.
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I’m also not formulating my opinion based on the assumption that UCL is “corporate” analysis and I didn’t introduce that frame. You introduced the the corporate frame in your hypothetical saying”. His company may fire him.” I’m engaging your hypothetical about what a company might do and would do. It’s a bit odd for you to introduce the corporate analogy and then suggest that I am resorting to this framework. I am willing to address the frame you introduce if you bring it up. It just happens that under that frame, which you introduced it would be fair for the company to fire their employee. If you think this has no bearing on the matter, fine. It has little bearing on my thinking either. I’d rather stick to UCL rather than these hypothetical frames you wish to bring up.
First: In the context of the Hunt story, his life was not destroyed. He’s got a house, a loving wife, a pension. I’m sure he’s still got friends and associates. He no longer has an on-going honorary position with UCL. This does not represtent destruction of one’s life.
Second: People don’t have a “right” to insist others think well of them. Moreover Hunt’s reputation is not “destroyed”. He remains a Nobel prize winner. He’s kept his money. His wife and friends still think highly of him. Some other people don’t. That’s the normal status of most people’s reputations. This is not a situation where a reputatio was “destroyed”.
Third: Tim Hunt did handle that interview badly. We don’t need to argue about whether he was or was not misrepresented or was or was not blindsided. Even if he was, he still handled the interview badly. One of Tim’s problems is that he is bad at PR.
Finally: I don’t think it’s any easier to destroy anyone’s life and reputation in ‘my’ regime than others. I’m not entirely sure what your point is here. As far as I can see, UCL has neither power nor responsibility to muzzle the BBC or other news agencies. Neither UCL nor the BBC has the power or responsibility to muzzle twitter. People on twitter have a right to express their views. So do bloggers. The result is that people’s reputation can be enhanced or damaged when stories circulate– this is true whether the stories are true or false.
I think this regime of mostly free speech holds in the UK. It’s not just “[lucia’s] regime”.
I don’t know why this is the “lowest possible bar”.
It is untrue that PR is only bad if the story that circulates is based on truth. Public Relations are bad if the story circulates and causes reputational damage. Period.
If one’s affiliation exists primarily to create good PR for Y, and one creates bad PR for Y instead, Y is justified in cutting the affiliation. What other steps they might need to take when cutting the affiliation depend on contractual obligations or local laws. But as far as I can tell, the Hunt-UCL relationship was one where either side could cut the ties with no particular fuss. Presumably both entered into this relationship wanting it to be open in this way. For whatever reason, Hunt elected to do exercise his freedom to cut the ties. He did so.
He had a right to; I don’t criticize him for his decision to exit his association with UCL under the circumstances.
I saw a complaint but didn’t see a question. What is your actual question? If you actually state it, I might be able to answer it.
SteveF
Hard to tell who was the the teacher and who was the student during the ‘bending the rules’ lessons between Hill and Bill.
“Where in (Comment #137465) (Comment #137466) did I claim you said anything you did not say?”
Where in my comments did I say that you said anything in 137465 or 137466 that I didn’t say? Those comments are useless BS that was nonresponsive to my previous comments. This was my reply to those comments:
“You are being tedious and ridiculous, Lucia. It’s a sad thing to watch.”
The rest of my comment was me summarizing this BS circular discussion:
“You keep saying that I am claiming this or that. I have explained this numerous times. I am stating my opinion based on my understanding of the Constitution and the law. It’s an opinion shared by some sitting SCOTUS Justices and a lot of other legal eagles. You act like it’s coming from freaking Mars.
I am not claiming, or whatever else you want to call it that my opinion is fact and I am not making the claims or predictions you imagine I am making. If I had made the claims that you keep inventing and falsely alleging I am making, you could find a freaking quote or two to substantiate your repeated BS misrepresentations.
Now please be sensible and try to let go of this. Just say that you disagree with my opinion, which simply put is: “If Due Process and Equal Protection is good for the gay geese, it’s good for the polygamous geese.†Please list the reasons you disagree that the sister wives are entitled to Due Process and Equal Protection, if you care to, and then move on.”
Now unless you want to address that substantively and honestly, that’s all I have to say (unless I change my mind). Maybe you can explain why one wife in this apparently happy family should not be entitled to a Due Process right to marry the person of her choice and to enjoy the same legal status as the other wife:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/polygamous-montana-trio-applies-wedding-license-32162748
SeveF,
Before I consider such a request, I’m gonna need a reason to give a damn what you want.
Maybe they do, but they don’t find any that contradict each other.
Nominal Americans who make such a finding have no business voting, because they have no understanding of what makes America worth living in. Enjoy.
Don,
I’ve engaged your complaints that I misrepresented you repeatedly. You don’t seem like it when I engage them; you seem to not like it if I don’t engage them.
As for your most recent question
Your comment “Don Monfort (Comment #137478) ” appeared to be replying to my 137465 or 137466. In that comment you wrote “You keep saying that I am claiming this or that. “. The phrase “keep saying” suggests you think I am currently saying or at least recently made that sort of claim– not that I wrote it sometime long, long ago. So I wanted to know if you found something in my most recent comments. I then asked.
I think it’s obvious this conversation is over. Feel free to have the last word.
yguy,
Wrong. Lots of people find ‘spiritual truths’ that contradict those of other people.
Wow.
yguy,
Wow, you write just like an intolerant religious zealot! It is my considered opinion that you are either joking with us or are an imbecile. For your sake, I hope it is the former.
SteveF,
It’s hard to know how to respond to someone who just decreed I have no business voting and implied I have “no understanding of what makes America worth living in.”
My understanding was the fact that nearly all adult American citizens have the right to vote was one of the things that makes America worth living in.
“My understanding was the fact that nearly all adult American citizens have the right to vote was one of the things that makes America worth living in.”
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Yes, that and tolerance of differing religious views. yguy seems more aligned with the tolerance level of ISIS than the tolerance in the United States. Maybe he missed the whole separation of church and state thing in the constitution.
SteveF
Yes. I thought of them while mowing the lawn.
Worth noting: the simultaneous existence of ISIS,numerous denominations of American Christians, several Jewish branches, quite a few adherents to Islam and a host of other religions (e.g. Budhist, Hindu and so on) is proof that many groups who believe they have found ‘spiritual truths’ disagree on the substance of those truths.
Mind you: They agree on some elements, but many spiritual people disagree on the substance of ‘spiritual truth’ to show disagreements exist.
This is just more tedious nonresponsive silly BS:
“Your comment “Don Monfort (Comment #137478) †appeared to be replying to my 137465 or 137466. In that comment you wrote “You keep saying that I am claiming this or that. “. The phrase “keep saying†suggests you think I am currently saying or at least recently made that sort of claim– not that I wrote it sometime long, long ago. So I wanted to know if you found something in my most recent comments.”
I just explained my reply to your 137465, 137466 BS. We should be past that. Try reading harder.
This is you saying just exactly what I said “you keep saying”. Notice the date and time:
“lucia (Comment #137458)
July 4th, 2015 at 6:22 am
SteveF,
I think the reasoning of the ruling leaves something to be desired. I think the dissents are even worse.
But I don’t think the reasoning results in the ‘logical extensions’ Don Montfort claimed.”
I didn’t claim that the logical extension of the reasoning would result in any freaking thing. You made that up. I said the opposite. That I don’t expect people like polygamists, who are not a cause celebre and don’t have political power, will get the same right that has been extended to gays. What is so freaking hard to understand about that?
“Don Monfort (Comment #137478)
July 4th, 2015 at 10:45 pm
You are being tedious and ridiculous, Lucia. It’s a sad thing to watch.
You keep saying that I am claiming this or that.”
Notice the date and time.
You have misrepresented what I have said from the start of this ‘discussion’ and you continue to do so. You won’t answer my questions and you pick little snippets of my comments to reply to with some nitpicking BS and you fail to make substantive replies to the substance of what I am saying. This is freaking ridiculous.
You carry on about claims I have not made and refuse to address the issue, which is my OPINION, here in a nutshell: “If Due Process and Equal Protection is good for the gay geese, it’s good for the polygamous geese.†What is your problem?
Now avoid this again:
Maybe you can explain why one wife in this apparently happy family should not be entitled to a Due Process right to marry the person of her choice and to enjoy the same legal status as the other wife:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/w…..e-32162748
OK I will give you the last word, again:)
(unless…)
This is like the James Brown Farewell Tour that started in the late 70s. I was taken in about four years in a row by the PR that it was the LAST CHANCE to see a performance of Soul Legend Godfather of Soul etc. James Brown and His Famous Flames! If he hadn’t died, he would still be on that Farewell Tour.
I would say we all have some common beliefs. ISIS, fundamentalist christian, feminists and the Rainbow Coalition could probably find something they agree on. Tolerance of course is derived form tolerate. So if I condemn…verbally..but still tolerate someones worldview can I still be part of the tolerance brigade. How about if I fine you $135000 because you follow your religious beliefs. Is that tolerance? I’m pretty sure be headings and throwing gays off buildings gets you excluded from the tolerance club but where is the line?
My point is comparing any “radical” in the US to ISIS is like comparing my bottle rocket I shot off yesterday to a nuclear bomb
chuckrr,
All those groups no doubt agree on things like the sky is blue, but not much else.
lucia,
You can hardly have any understanding of a phenomenon the existence of which you disavow. Furthermore, it’s the easiest thing in the world for a refugee from a somewhat doctrinaire religion to get the wrong idea about it.
In any case, you’re welcome to provide an example or two.
SteveF,
This is not interesting. If you could raise something resembling an intelligent objection to what I said, that might be interesting.
You don’t say.
Well what the hell, in for a penny, in for a pound: there is no such thing as a person who believes, with the core of his or her being, that there are no spiritual truths.
What’s your considered opinion now? 🙂
Well how very ominous. What dire consequences should I expect if you decide it’s the latter?
lucia,
Believe it or not, I didn’t have you in mind when I said that; and to have an opinion one way or the other I’d have to at least know enough about your position to be sure we’re talking about the same thing.
Suffrage is value neutral, and can just as easily turn America into a banana republic as a shining city on a hill.
SteveF,
One cannot help but wonder how a disbeliever in spiritual truths has managed, given that I’ve yet to make such overtures, to divine that I’m on the verge of advocating the execution of anyone I disagree with.
Everybody missed it, at least in the sense that the phrase appears nowhere in the document. As for the concept as it relates to the Constitution, preliminary indications suggest I’m way ahead of the curve relative to you.
For those eating popcorn and watching the show (like myself), what’s the operating definition of spiritual truth for the purposes of this discussion?
Yguy: “…doctrine has no greater purpose than to bear witness to spiritual truths accessible to everyone through his or her own insight…”
Actually doctrine often mixes universal truths such as the “golden rule” with “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife,” for example, when wives were equivalent to property. I agree that doctrine has more to do with civil order than divinity. The later is simply the authority establishing the order.
.
The root of the marriage issue is the authority of the church has been gradually replaced by the authority of the state. In my opinion the state thought for a while it could preserve all contractual implications of marriage for gays with civil unions without stepping into the church domain. But the state forgot they already stepped in with JP marriages and issuing of licenses, etc… So, for the state to give equality they would have had to pull back government out of personal business, which is unthinkable, of course.
.
But despite the argument being about equality of marriage rights, my feeling is that it was really a logical evolution of gays establishing social recognition and normalcy. Unfortunately, there is a lot of pent up animosity that motivates in-your-face demonstrations and spiking the football at the feet of perceived opponents, which makes it appear that gay’s motives were to tear down social order and civil order.
.
It remains to be seen whether the gay community will accept their new responsibility to improve the social fabric with their new status, whether they will generally make as good or better parents etc… Building order is harder than tearing it down. I am betting they will do as well as straights. After all, they are our sons, daughter, brothers and sisters.
chuckrr
Sure.
If you fine me for my religious beliefs, suggest I should not vote because of them or suggest I should be deprived of other rights or the right to hold my beliefs, I would think you intolerant. You haven’t done so.
I’m not sure where the line is. But suggesting those who deny the existence of spiritual truths ought not to vote is on the intolerant side of the line.
I think you might have missed the point of the mentioning ISIS. yguy seemed to claim that no one’s “spiritual truths” contradict each other.
I merely point out that ISIS believes some “spiritual truths” that do not accord with those believed in by many other people. So yguy is mistaken.
The only sense in which I compared anyone in the US with ISIS is to note that the two groups hold opinions that differ from each other on many points. So, in fact, I agree on the bottle rocket, nuclear bomb analogy.
I’m pretty sure SteveF is also agreeing that the two groups differ. That’s actually our point. The fact that they differ shows yguy is mistaken in his claim.
Mark Bofill
The phrase was first injected into the comment-sphere in
yguy (Comment #137469)
I understood it to mean “a truth” that is “spiritual” in nature. That would mean it is the opposite of “a falsehood”. And doesn’t have some other nature (say “mathematical” or “material”). But perhaps yguy will turn out to have meant something else.
Lucia.
:> Ask a dopey question.
I got the ‘truth’ part. I’m honestly seldom confident I understand what people mean by ‘spiritual’ until the conversation progresses far enough to give me some context. It wouldn’t surprise me to discover that most people don’t think it ambiguous though, now that you draw my attention to it. Possibly it’s just me.
Thank you though.
Mark,
I didn’t think it was dopey. I’m just explaining how I interpret it. I assume questions like 1+1=2 are not “spiritual” in nature. Also, “chocolate tastes good” seem more material and so not spiritual. I tend to expect “Does God exist?” and “If he does exist, does he give a hoot about people?” to be spiritual in nature.
Ok.
I’ve heard (or maybe heard of, or maybe saw in a movie or read in a book, sorry)[edit: I’m under the impression that] people claim for example that experiencing natural beauty: mountains or deserts or what have you, can be a spiritual experience. Perhaps I take the expression in this context too literally, perhaps what’s meant is just strongly emotionally moving or conducive to a reflective state of mind or something similar. Then again, maybe they literally mean spiritual experience.
I also definitely recall from direct experience conversations where people differentiated between the religious and the spiritual. Spiritual as in ‘pertaining to religious matters’ is pretty clear to me. Once we get away from religion, my confidence that the word names the same thing in my mind as it does in the mind of the person speaking dwindles.
Mark
Sure. But I think the broader sense of ‘spiritual’ results in finding people disagree on what constitutes a “spiritual truth“. Generally speaking one finds more consistent agreement about what constitutes a mathematical, physical or material truth than a “spiritual” truth.
Almost everyone agrees 1+1=2, cat fur is ‘soft’ relative to ‘concrete’, at atmospheric pressure, water freezes near 0C and so on. But we see quite a bit of disagreement as we go toward claims about “other adjective truths”.
Lucia,
Yes. I wonder if that’s part of the problem here.
Yguy, what do you make of this? What did you mean by spiritual truths?
yguy,
“Everybody missed it, at least in the sense that the phrase appears nowhere in the document. As for the concept as it relates to the Constitution, preliminary indications suggest I’m way ahead of the curve relative to you.”
.
Nah, you haven’t clue. Even if you are unaware of if, the phrase “separation of church and state” has a long history of common use in describing US constitutional language: from Wikipedia-
Perhaps you think Jefferson misunderstood the constitution. Which would be consistent with your apparent level of comprehension of the concept of religious tolerance.
Mark Bofill,
I think you will enjoy this woman’s post on spiritual truths.
http://www.nextavenue.org/5-most-inconvenient-spiritual-truths/
Her list contains
1. You will never finish everything on your to-do list
2. You will not win the lottery or sell a million-dollar screenplay (or invent the next
3. You will probably never wear those clothes you’ve saving from the ’80s.
4. You will not marry George Clooney (or Angelina Jolie).
5. People will disappoint you.
It’s worth noting that:
#4 is not untrue for some people. Both Clooney and Jolie are married (not to each other.)
#2 is also not true for a few lucky people.
#1 can be be made false provided you are careful about what you put on your list. #3 is a probability statement… I’d say it’s probably true.
#5 is probably true for many if not most people. But like #1– the to do list, some may be able to avoid it by reducing their expectations of others. I think those who achieve Nirvana find they are not disappointed in people.
I generally wouldn’t have considered these spiritual truths.
yguy
I didn’t say you knew I was in the class of people who you think ought not to vote. But as far as I can tell, I think there are no spiritual truths. So I appear to be in that class.
Mark has correctly pointed out that it’s possible none of us really know what sorts of things you thing even fall in the category of spiritual truths. I’ve agreed hes correct. As such, we are going to need to you define what you mean by the term more precisely. Giving examples of items you believe to be “spiritual truths” will help. Meanwhile, there is no point in me providing examples that I think prove people have disagree which items are spiritual truths because it may just turn out I do not understand what you thin falls in the category.
I invite you to answer Mark’s question and tell us what types of truths can even be “spiritual truths”.
Interesting claim. I think near universal suffrage for adults is one of the things that makes the US a good place to live.
Lucia,
Thanks! 🙂
Me neither.
An acquaintance once introduced me to a word (he claimed it was Hawaiian slag) ‘da-kine’, which I never really got my head around. Best I could tell, it was ‘a thing’ or ‘a kind’ of thing. Except when it wasn’t, apparently. ~shrug~ I never got it from context. I get the same sort of quicksandy feeling when the word ‘spiritual’ comes up.
I got a kick out of this from the article you linked:
I remember that book! I hadn’t thought about it in decades. That and what was the name of the other one with the biplanes? Illusions, or something like that?
[Edit: yeah, verified. Illusions, and Johnathan Livingston Seagull, by Richard Bach. Apparently he’s written a sequel to Illusions. Oh well, of the two I liked JLS better, it was more fun. :)]
Say, would you look at that. Wikipedia has an article on da kine. I was pretty close after all.
Mark Bofill,
Nothing lucia said in #137504 is in discord with the basic idea.
lucia,
I’m amazed that you’ve bought into such an obvious non sequitur.
yguy
You claimed this
Whatever these truths are or might be, if they were truly “accessible to everyone through his or her own insight” then everyone who uses their insight to identify them would agree what they are. That is: they would all believe in the same ‘spiritual truths”. Otherwise, they are not “accessible to everyone”. So you are must be mistaken in your claims about these.
Arguing by labeling my observing that finding evidence that people disagree about what they are is a “no-sequitor”, and not explaining what makes it a non-sequitor does not constitute supporting your claim.
You highlighted the word belief. If you think there is something about the word “belief” that makes this a non-sequitor, and you wish others to have a clue why you think so, arguing by placing words in bold tags isn’t a convincing way to convince anyone that the statement is a non-sequitor.
Using bold for emphasis is fine, but you need to actually provide some support for your claim.
Beyond that, I”m under the impression you haven’t provided a single example of even one “spiritual truth” and haven’t explained what their properties and so on.
I’m sure you think you have some deep truth tucked away somewhere in your head. If you do, I’m happy to agree to disagree with you that notion.
Mark Bofill,
I think the nub of ‘spiritual truth’ according to yguy is here:
“doctrine has no greater purpose than to bear witness to spiritual truths accessible to everyone through his or her own insight”
Which strikes me as pretty standard fundamentalist Christian claptrap. See, if you only had sufficient “insight”, then you would believe the same sorts of things as yguy. And if you don’t believe his rubbish, well, then you are just a non-insightful person. Looks to me like yguy says the sorts of things white-knuckled intellectual lightweights say when challenged on their proselytizing.
.
You can see some of the same behavior in CAGW alarmist types; I don’t think that is a coincidence.
SteveF,
Possibly. I don’t know how useful it is to speculate though, when we can go directly to the source. I’m still hoping he (yguy) clarifies further.
lucia,
“All who sin are servants of sin.”
Sin is disobedience to conscience, which is the voice of God telling you, wordlessly, that you have, or are about to, do something stupid.
Which does not patently contravene the idea that it is making the US an increasingly bad place to live, as many have voted themselves largesse from the public treasury by electing people who care for nothing more than their own power.
Mark,
ygyuy has been asked several times to provide examples of those (presumably universal) ‘spiritual truths’. If I were you, I would not hold my breath waiting for even a short list.
.
Once yguy gives examples, people like Lucia will quickly point out that they don’t think those things are true, and the proselytizing game is kinda over, since yguy will be reduced to saying that people who don’t believe them to be true lack sufficient insight to see ‘the truth’. It is a Witch Doctor argument.
yguy
Thank you for the example. It appears that it is an example of a ‘spiritual’ idea that some who are spiritual would not call a “truth”. Evidently Budhists would disagree as they don’t even believe sin exists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_views_on_sin
I brought up suffrage in response to this accusation of yours.
My claim is that universal suffrage is one of the things that makes America worth living in. Nothing more; nothing less.
You seem to want to debate whether universal suffrage is a panacea. I’ve never claimed so. It need not be a panacea to be one of the things that makes America a worth living in. As far as I can tell, you have decided to go on a tangent of discussing the lack of perfection in our system rather than trying to support your original claim about my groups understanding of what makes American worth living in. Your claim appears to be wrong, and I suspect you know you can’t support it. But if you can, do so rather than trying to change the subject to something else.
SteveF
Cross posted. I could add more examples of groups of who don’t think his example of a spiritual truth is a truth. But one example is sufficient.
Steve F’
Don’t you think we all believe our “insight” is superior. Not to say someone doesn’t have the superior insight just that we all think that.
“all who sin are servants of sin”.
.
Very funny example. Is cutting off the heads of people, based on “God” wordlessly telling you to, a sin? You are a joke.
chuckrr,
“Don’t you think we all believe our “insight†is superior.”
No, I don’t. I think most try their best. Some become very delusional, like yguy. The problem with “insight” into “spiritual truths” is that there is no objective truth involved (a clear sky is blue when the sun is up) which people can agree on. Some people have more insight than others in understanding objective reality, but that has nothing to do with yguy’s rubbish.
Lucia,
I know you and Steve F were just using ISIS to make a point. As usual I didn’t make mine very well. I think these types of conversations often are mostly about semantics. That’s the thing with a word like tolerance. It sounds good but what does it really mean. I’m sure ISIS even feels that they are tolerant at times. (We’ll just throw the gay off the building but we won’t kill the rest of his family…tolerance). And then we move onto spirituality..good luck with that. I’m not saying these conversations aren’t interesting obviously I think they are but often as Mark pointed out it just comes down to defining words with all their innuendos. Now when and if we ever get past the semantically arguments then we get to actual proofs. I think Steve F hit the nail pretty well yguy’s argument is simply appeal to authority. He’s trying to dress it up but that’s all ti is.
yguy, please stop while you are not too far behind.
” It is a Witch Doctor argument.”
.
OK, that’s maybe a little harsh. More like an “emperor’s new clothes” argument.
I’m going to argue what I think is yguy’s case. 2 vrs 2 might be less lopsided and more entertaining than 3 vrs 1.
Perhaps it’s taking the original idea out of context to say everyone. Maybe the universal that could resonate with everyone is as simple as ‘sin is the willful disregard of what one believes to be right’. I don’t know much about Buddhists but no doubt Steve or Lucia will correct me if I’m wrong. I expect that they (Buddhists) have a concept of what is ‘right’, or ‘proper’ or some normative ideals. Further, I suspect they have a concept of what is ‘wrong’, improper, or contrary to normative ideals.
Although I’ll admit, I’m struggling to figure out what the larger point was and how to get back to it. 🙂
chuckrr,
“I’m not saying these conversations aren’t interesting”
.
I find them uninteresting, and mostly a waste of time, but letting rubbish like yguy’s proselytizing stand unchallenged is just too much of an irritation.
Steve F
I know we all try. At least most try, and I think you and most here are very introspective in that regard. But even that act of introspection involves a certain amount of pride (deservedly so) that you are conducting a thorough and unbiased analysis. So you think you’ve put an additional layer of thought into the issue. And you would be right. In your case it would be true and in yguy’s case it would be spiritually true. But you both think you have superior insight
Lucia, you are one more in the long line of people who make up their mind about something or someone without gathering the facts. The BBC ‘interview’ which Hunt handled consists of a voicemail message/s sent by Hunt in response to questions that unknown as they were not broadcast. Only you could know why that would be a bad ‘interview’.
.
The question you haven’t yet answered is simple: do you think Tim Hunt did something/anything wrong in his speech at the Seoul lunch? Shouldn’t be too difficult to answer.
Stevef,
Oh. 🙁 I thought we were having fun.
I was having a good time anyways. But it’s fine if this isn’t entertaining for you, I don’t have to argue this.
…Although Joe Pesci’s words from My Cousin Vinny come to mind. I could use a good ass kickin, I’ll be very honest with ya…
🙂
Steve F
“I find them uninteresting, and mostly a waste of time”
I know but I do learn some new subtle and not so subtle ways to insult people. Sometimes at my expense. Mostly though I was referring to before he arrived.
Mark
Let’s suppose they do. In that case, you turn the Jesus quote into;
it wouldn’t follow they think doing something improper is “serving” doing something improper.
““All who [do something improper] are servants of [doing something improper].—
Even if someone thinks doing something improper is improper, it doesn’t follow they believe that someone has become the “servant” of doing something improper.
I also don’t know much about Buddhism, but they don’t believe in the Christian concept of “sin”. Beyond that, many describe Buddhism as not believing in God (though that might be simplistic.) But given their notions about God or “a deity” it’s unlikely what they believe associated with “doing improper things” has anything to do “the voice of God telling you, wordlessly, that you have,…”
Obviously, we would need several Buddists here to better explain. But most references describing their beliefs describe something that would not happen to agree with that particular Jesus quote.
I suspect that many for other religions would consider it to have a similar “truth” content to “Johanthan Livingston Seagull”. They might politely say nothing at all. But mostly, it’s a quote from the New Testament. Some people consider that to contain many truths; others do not.
Lucia,
Funny you should say that. I’d posted a question to yguy about that very thing (‘servant’) idea but promptly deleted it because I didn’t want to interfere with a focus on your response (which I didn’t see till I posted the comment which I then deleted). I was inviting him to reword / elaborate I think, or to tell me if he agreed with my rewording.
Regarding ‘God’, I gather the same thing from my admittedly inadequate quick scan reading about Buddhists. It appears to me that at least some Buddhists don’t believe in ‘God’ in the same sense that Christians believe in ‘God’.
….
I was hoping that by looking at the larger point being made that I’d be able to spin this in some alternative manner or interpretation that would still support the overall point. Unfortunately, reading back over the thread, I don’t think there was a larger point in dispute. This makes me sad. I can’t retreat from this battle to win the war if there isn’t some larger conflict.
Oh. Well. Sorry yguy, I tried!
🙂
Shub
I believed I engaged whether or not Tim did anything ‘wrong’ last time you asked. You are now specifically asking about at the lunch.
Before I answer:define what you mean by “doing something wrong”.
I will in the meantime say: He did something that would justify criticism, which resulted in bad PR, and which justified UCL wishing to end their affiliation with him. I have no idea whether that opinion translates into what you consider my thinking he did something “wrong”, or not. But it’s what I think about his talk in Korea.
lucia,
What you’re apparently missing is that there is another means by which a putative spiritual truth may be identified than insight, which is the light God shines, if you’re open to it, on whatever it is you’re looking at. That other means may be called self-deception. Clearly, then, professed belief or lack thereof implies nothing about the veracity of anything labelled a spiritual truth.
yguy,
Do believe whatever “spiritual truths” you want. But leave others in peace to believe whatever they want. Most of all, please do not be so presumptuous as to imagine others should agree with your religious views, or worse that you ought to ‘save’ them by converting them. You will only make yourself look ridiculous, and piss lots of people off at the same time.
yguy,
Beg pardon?
I seem to be reading you saying that another means by which we can identify spiritual truth is self deception. This makes no sense to me, which causes me to doubt I’ve understood you properly. Would you mind clarifying this?
[Edit: are you suggesting that people believe they identify spiritual truth via insight, but are in fact deceiving themselves? If so I object to your phraseology; self deception is not in fact an avenue to ‘spiritual truth’ but rather to ‘a positive belief in a spiritual falsehood’]
yguy,
“What you’re apparently missing is that there is another means by which a putative spiritual truth may be identified than insight, which is the light God shines, if you’re open to it, on whatever it is you’re looking at.”
Wow! You’re nuts.
SteveF,
Guess I might as well just let this stand as a testament to your proclivity for drawing completely unfounded conclusions.
Actually most of the fundamentalists I’ve run into take offense at the idea of doctrine taking a back seat to insight; but you are of course welcome nonetheless to revel in your idiotic prejudices.
Mark Boffil
I suspect this is a spiritual truth all people of good faith can agree on
Not sure mind you… but ‘prolly.
yguy
I didn’t say it said anything about diagnosing the veracity. Scan back, read what I actually wrote.
yguy
I’ve read this over several times. So, are you advocating doctrine take a back seat to insight? Or the opposite? Taking your comments here in toto I can’t tell.
yguy,
Were you in Chicago this weekend at the Grateful Dead concert?
Lucia,
Birds are just smallish dinosaurs…. and most seem to act like they think they are free. They ‘prolly have their own spiritual insights…. like “‘bugs are yummy”, “toilets are where the tail is”, and “only fools are afraid of heights”. They confirm these things are true whenever the rays of God’s sun shine down on them, so they can see what they are doing…. sort of like yguy’s beams of light.
Bofill,
Missed the “putative” qualifier, did you?
yguy,
One of the few rules around here is that if you ask a rhetorical question, you must volunteer your answer to your question in your comment. I sometimes don’t notice violations, but I see you have violated this rule.
Please volunteer your answer to “Missed the “putative†qualifier, did you?” Ideally, you answer will be responsive to Mark’s real non-rhetorical question which was “Would you mind clarifying this?”.
yguy,
I ~did~ miss the significance of the qualifier. You have an admirable economy of expression. Myself, I prefer to add an extra sentence or three to be sure my reader follows, but some tell me (ridiculous, I know) that I’m overly fond of the sound of my own voice.
Go figure. 🙂
I think I know what you meant now, but I’d be pleased if you would do me the kindness of explaining your remark with greater clarity and verbosity.
Thanks.
Lucia,
Universal spiritual truth?
I’m worried about what you got against birds!
:p
Mark,
Very funny video clip.. 🙂
lucia,
You’re not paying attention. I never said anything about diagnosis, and I have no idea what it has to do with anything.
You claim my proposition is false because people disagree about what they call spiritual truth, obviously assuming that they all come to such beliefs through what I call insight. I am pointing out that you have no way of knowing how they came to those beliefs, wherefore you cannot possibly know they arrived at them through what I call insight; and those who arrived at them by self-deception would naturally (neglecting dumb luck) disagree with those guided by insight, which is perfectly consistent with everything I’ve said.
Lucia,
Maybe a rule against wild eyed religious proselytizing would be helpful.
yguy,
And I didn’t say you said used the word diagnosis. So, your not having said it doesn’t mean I failed to pay attention.
If you prefer me to use another word, let me rephrase this
yguy,
This is irrelevant to my point. My point is no matter how you believe they came to their beliefs , they disagree with your beliefs.
yguy,
The arrogance of this position is breathtaking and audacious. Those who believe what I believe are insightful, those who do not are guided by self deception.
It does not occur to you how unlikely it is that you are the lucky one guided by insight instead of self deception? [edit: this is rhetorical. I think it ought to, if you consider it.]
It’s interesting that the religious ideas we develop as we grow from being children into adults are often and largely shaped by the religious ideas we are raised with. I suspect we could analyze numbers and get a significant correlation. If so, wouldn’t it be more of an accident of birth rather than insight that led a person to spiritual truth? [edit: rhetorical questions run wild. I think it would be more of an accident of birth than anything else]
The problem, or at least a large part of it, is that the US has a system where the government provides a series of benefits to those who undergo a religious ceremony.
Now Eli to be sure has nothing against religious ceremonies. Some bring joy and laughter to his soul, but what would help would be to separate the marriage ceremony, it should be done in the local registry office, from the religious ceremony, which should be done in your place of worship, or not at all, as both wish.
Lucia,
Let me rephrase yguy’s core argument: “Anyone who disagrees with what I think is a spiritual truth could not possibly have insight…. ’cause if they had insight they would agree with me. Or more to the point: I am right and all who disagree with me about spiritual truth are wrong, because… well…. because I have insight, and they don’t… because they don’t agree with me about spiritual truth.”
.
The utter circularity of his thinking is lost on him. And he obviously isn’t joking; I am forced to conclude he is an imbecile.
Eli,
I think you and Kenneth agree on something. I’m going to look out my window to watch for the signs that the apocalypse is on us.
Mark Bofill,
Your comment is spot on.
.
But one note in passing: not all who are raised in a religion continue to accept that religion….. or for that matter, any religion. I shrugged my shoulders and thought “this is all crazy self-delusion” when I was about 14. I still attended Sunday school and church for a while to please my parents, but I was always thinking of other things, like the cute girl in my Sunday school class, Scientific American articles, school projects, etc.
SteveF,
Absolutely, and thank you for making this point. I was suggesting that we’d find trends if we studied this, not that it was an absolute rule that every child adopts the religion s/he was raised in. I’ll wager darn fewer children raised in Maryland end up deciding Shiite Muslim beliefs are the ones ‘insight’ tells them are correct than Catholic beliefs. However, I will also wager that if we examine enough cases, we will indeed find instances where exactly this has occurred.
[edit: well, I doubt the data are there, but … if we had perfect information, I betcha we’d find the example I raised or a similar one]
Eli,
I am pretty sure all states recognize a marriage that is conducted as a religious ceremony or as a civil ceremony. The marriage license is the same. The details of the ceremony seem irrelevant.
“Those who believe what I believe are insightful, those who do not are guided by self deception.”
I could be wrong but I think this is an incorrect paraphrase of what yguy said. I think he is right when he says people arrive at their conclusions through what he calls insight vs and those who arrived at them by self-deception. Self deception may be a bit to far if you don’t have access to information it’s hard to blame it on the self. That’s just my observation it may not be yguy’s. My question for yguy is… Do you know who has the insight and how do you know?
chuckrr,
He knows because only those who agree with him on spiritual truths can possibly have ‘insight’. It is witch doctor logic.
chuckrr,
I wasn’t really paraphrasing. I took a couple of steps and as always may have made errors:
given) yguy suggests there are (at least) two path to ‘putative’ spiritual truths: insight and self deception.
1) I assume based on some of his comments above that yguy is a person who adheres to a belief in spiritual truths. I may be making an error here, certainly.
2) I speculate that yguy arrived at his convictions either by ‘insight’ or ‘self deception’. This could be false.
3) I reject as nonsensical that he would adhere to convictions he believed were based on ‘self deception’. I think this is reasonable.
4) I therefore assume that yguy adheres to his convictions about spiritual truths based on the belief that they rest on ‘insight’ and not ‘self deception’.
…
But I then go on to suggest that it’s neither insight nor self deception in many cases, merely early training.
lucia,
Your eyes deceive you, as the question was not rhetorical. It was asked to ascertain where Bofill went awry; and while I figured I’d made a good guess, an answer other than “yes” was within reason as far as I knew.
I’d say that would be pretty much an exercise in stupidity at this point, wouldn’t you?
Of course you probably think that one’s rhetorical as well.
Bofill,
To be sure. Whose is it?
Oh.
BTW, I don’t think I’m attacking yguy. I said the position was arrogant and audacious, not wrong. For all I know, yguy’s got the truth, the whole truth and nothing but.
Just that personally, I wouldn’t walk into Vegas and put it all down on the roulette table at number 11 and have confidence I’d win. But some people do that and win.
yguy
That is a rhetorical question.
Bye.
yguy,
Yours, isn’t it? [edit: not a rhetorical question.]Looks rhetorical to me.
I thought this was your position. Do you disagree?
There.
Mark,
He’s moderated for having responded to explanation of the rule by repeating the violation in a way I suspect was intentional. I’m the judge and executioner on this, so he email and IP are moderated.
Oh.
Beg pardon yguy, question withdrawn.
Thanks for clarifying Lucia.
yguy is not worth this. Cio.
Lucia,
“Mark,
He’s moderated for having responded to explanation of the rule by repeating the violation in a way I suspect was intentional. I’m the judge and executioner on this, so he email and IP are moderated.”
.
Thank you.
The Rabett would be wrong.
People who perform marriages are licensed by the state to perform marriages. Basically anyone can be licensed to perform marriages. No state has a religious test for who can perform marriages. Judges, Justices of the Peace, and others perform valid marriages, along with priests, ministers, pastors, bishops, deacons, rabbis, imams, etc.
The state does not differentiate between marriages performed by ministers or non-minsters/religious people.
The idea has always been for a religiously neutral position by the state irt marriage.
Boom…..Lucia for next opening at SCOTUS
Both the majority and the dissent agree that cost should be considered in formulating regulations. The real dispute here is the underlying positions of the justices concerning how much supervision the EPA should be subject to by the courts. What the EPA wants to do is to have its regulations entrenched before there is any real substantive review of their effect. What the majority and others want to do is make sure that costs are considered from the outset, which acts as a significant brake on regulation. I think that what is going on here is to a great extent not explicitly discussed in the opinion. That is not uncommon in Supreme Court opinions.
A very relevant consideration here is both EPAs competence and honesty of the EPA in doing its studies. in this blog,Steve MacIntyre mentioned that he thought that the EPA did a very poor job in the Massachusetts v. EPA case.
JD.
Lucia, you can and should apply any standard of your choosing to determine if Hunt did something wrong. I have asked the question about three times now. I am beginning to suspect you are trying to wriggle out of what you take to be a difficult situation. At this rate you will next ask me to define what I meant by “is”. You said you were ‘agnostic’ a while back, there is yet more information available now. I don’t think you are the kind who criticizes others for their opinions and refuses to put your own on the line. Most of what you have offered above are (a) chronology (which is not judgment), or (b) argument from consequence (the bad PR thing), which sidesteps judgment.
JD Ohio,
“What the EPA wants to do is to have its regulations entrenched before there is any real substantive review of their effect.”
.
Good observation, and this instance is the perfect example: as soon as the decision was announced the EPA was already saying that it would have no real effect, since many of the targeted coal fired plants already had started capital projects to comply with the regulation. IMO, the EPA has been out of control and causing more harm than environmental good for a long time. Only Congress changing the laws under which the EPA operates will make much difference.
Shub,
I could chose any definition of wrong I prefer. But I want to answer the question you are actually asking. To do so that I need to know which definition of wrong you are using. As you keep refuse to clarify and complain about my not answering your unclear question, I will get the dictionary definition and give you the different answers under the many different definitions of “wrong”.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/wrong
He didn’t do anything immoral.
Although as a matter of truth or fact, women don’t cry in labs any more than men do. But we would argue about whether he meant that. So I have a mixed opinon on this one.
His action, judgement and method wrong. So he was was wrong by this definition.
What he did was not in accordance with recommended practices. So he was wrong by this definition..
What he did was whacked out and out of order. So he was wrong by this definition.
What he did was neither suitable or appropriate: so wrong.
Irrelevant to the question.
Not immmoral or evil. Not wrong by this definition.
Telling an inept joke and forcing the audience to suffer it politely in a situation where they really couldn’t get up seems to fall under this definition of wrong.
Irrelevant.
He was wrong by this definition.
He was discourteous to some audience members: So wrong.
Didn’t impute evil to anyone. So not wrong.
So: By some definitions he was wrong. By others not.
I hope you now believe I’ve answered whether he did anything wrong. It is still my view that I gave a full description of my view. You could look up the dictionary definition, read the numerous definitions of wrong and know you had an answer. Or failing that, you could have told me which of the definitions you meant when you asked if he did anything “wrong”.
Shub
There doesn’t seem to be any more information now than prior to June 14 when I commented at Annans.
My opinion already takes into account that there are many things we don’t know. You can keep pointing out we don’t have the full BBC transcript of the interview and such like. But I long known we didn’t have it and such like. You seem to think this should “matter”. In fact: it plays a very small part in forming my opinion (although it does support my contention Hunt is bad at PR and bungled here. Were he good at PR he would not have agreed to record a message. The other stuff you want to inject is irrelevant to diagnosing whether he is bad at PR: he s*cks at it.)
There are things that we appear to know and we have know for a long time.
For example, based on this guardian interview of Hunt and his wife, I can see that Hunt bungled:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/13/tim-hunt-hung-out-to-dry-interview-mary-collins
This was published June 13– before Annan posted and before I said I was agnostic. I’d already read it. This article is not the BBC article. It discusses the BBC article. It was posted after Hunt resigned, and evidently after he was well rested.
In the guardian article:
Hunt himself admits telling the dumb joke. In fact, he ways
“““I stood up and went mad,†he admits. “I was very nervous and a bit confused but, yes, I made those remarks – which were inexcusable…”‘
(He goes out to give an excuse for his inexcusable remarks. )
In the article, even his wife thinks he that was stupid.
His wife’s defense — if you want to call it that– is
Obviously, most of the audience in Hunt’s Korean audience do not know Tim. Likely one knew him.Tim is a grown up. He must have known most of his audience did not know him.
If we believe his wife, we are to conclude that these Hunt’s audence was likely to interpret it at face value. Hunt is a grown up– he should know they are likely to interpret it at face value. Some did.
That it was part of Tim’s upbringing to make his own audience members the butt of his jokes….well.. maybe. But he said something to their faces they were likely to think he meant. That meant he was likely to offend. He also risked alienating women from science– as some would think that he thinks what he said and not wish to have to be subjected to that during their careers.
So.. uhmmm boner move. Explaining the joke later doesn’t fix this problem.
His wife thinks he’s not a sexist–well swell. But he is a guy who tells sexist jokes that suggest women don’t belong in labs with men and he tells those to audience of women scientists who don’t know him well. Even his wife thinks this sort of audience are likely to not realize he doesn’t mean it and were likely to be offended.
So: the joke was told and it was stupid. It was PR. It had the potential to send alienating message (except possibly to those how ‘know’ Tim Hunt which happens not to be the audience who he was addressing.) It may well have sent that message.
This joke and the reaction to it embarrassed UCL. Their being affiliated with a ‘comedy act’ that tells this sort of joke sends a message they don’t want to send. They don’t want to be mopping up and explaining that the message is just a misunderstanding. That people who “know” Hunt know he didn’t mean woman should be segregated and so on.
As the purpose in the honorary position is for UCL to gain good PR, not to have to spend their time mopping up bad PR, I think this is enough to justify their wanting the affiliation broken.
We also know Hunt resigned from the same article, as was his right. I’ve said over and over I find nothing to criticize in his decision to do that.
I have now idea why you think we have “learned” anything that we did not already know in that article.
Conclusion: UCL was justified in wanting to break off their affiliation with Hunt. Hunt was correct to resign.
You seem to have issues with the BBC interview. Other than the fact that Hunt’s handling of that shows he is terrible at PR, I don’t think it’s very relevant. We learn all we need to know in some detail in the Guardian article. Hunt may well be a nice guy. He may well have meant it as a joke. But even if we assume he did, UCL still had good reason not to want him to be affiliated with them. As a Nobel prize winner, he can now circulate in his own name, write his own books, grant his own interviews. As he no longer has the honorary affiliation with UCL, UCL doesn’t need to have their name associated with what he says. His speech doesn’t appear to be their speech. Each party has the right to speak for themselves and do so in the manner they prefer communicating the message they prefer.
This seems like the appropriate outcome to me.
Bofill,
Then pilgrim, you don’t think too good. You’ve attributed to me a position which is preposterous on its face, which I never came within lightyears of taking. If that isn’t a form of character assassination, however subtle or ineffectual, I don’t know what is.
Hunter, in most European countries a religious marriage ceremony has no civil law validity, it is only the civil marriage ceremony that counts, which is the situation Eli was recommending.
IEHO, it would be much better to go to such a system.
Eli,
That’s true. But it still didn’t avoid arguments about same sex marriage.
I do somewhat agree with you. I think, to an extent, people do fail to distinguish between marriage ‘the sacrament’, as Roman Catholics would call it, and marriage, the ‘civil status’. Permitting clerics to perform the ceremony that creates the civil status does make the distinction more difficult for people to recognize.
But really, any Roman Catholic who divorced and wished to remarry in the RC church had to understand the distinction. The RC church does not recognize divorce (though they have their own annulment process.) Similar things happen in some other groups. For instances, Orthdox Jews have something (I don’t know the name.) I think woman need some sort of paper work from former husbands to release them.
Lucia (#137587) –
The word is “get”.
Are we now going to see some pastor be sued for refusing to marry a same sex couple (not rhetorical)? I would think that the availability of a civil ceremony would prevent that sort of thing, but I’m not holding my breath.
DeWitt,
People can always file suits about anything. The question is do those filing have a hope of winning. My understanding is anyone filing would lose big time on this.
We already have tons of examples of courst not forcing clerics to do things:
1) Roman Catholic priests can’t be forced to solemnize the marriage of a divorced person.
2) Roman Catholic priests can’t be forced to solemnize the marriage of non-Catholics.
3) Roman Catholic priests can be forced to let Roman Catholics marry in whatever the heck parish the couple picks– they can insist you marry in your own parish.
4) Roman Catholic priests can’t be forced to marry even non-practicing Catholics.
5) Roman Catholic priests can insist you have had a first communion and confirmation before marrying you. ( My father had to be confirmed before getting the priest to marry my parents.)
The list goes on. Churches pretty much have their discretion on this and there’s no reason to expect this is going to change. I’m pretty confident that if a gay couple tried to get a Roman Catholic priest to marry them and a local district court made the blunder of believing the 1st amendment did not apply, this would to to a higher and higher court until they lost. (It might not reach SCOTUS because as long as a lower court ruled to apply the 1st amendment, the upper court would likely turn away any appeal.)
The harder question is whether universities can retain tax exempt status and under what circumstances they can. I imagine an actual honest to goodness seminary could turn away whomever they wish. But university with a broader mandate that admitted students of all faiths would likely have a more difficult time getting around rules that apply to other similar universities that don’t happen to be nominally religious. (I’m thinking of tons of Roman Catholic Universities like Notre Dame, Marquette and so on.)
Dewitt,
Here’s a story discussing the issue of tax exempt status.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-tax-exemptions-religious-20150626-story.html
They discuss ministers being forced to marry people along the way.
(italics mine.)
So: one can justifiably fear tax exempt status could be yanked. But ministers will not be required to marry same sex couples. Those couples will need to find willing clerics or have civil ceremonies.
About polygamy and same sex marriages. I am in favor of same sex marriages. I’ve considered marriage a legal contract and that there is a right for people to make contracts. That one can contract with one person but not two raises the question, why is that? I’d like to see some arguments against against polygamy and compare them to ones used against same sex marriages. What I expect from our rulers is not much. They’ve won rights for some people but will not do the same for another smaller group. Hopefully tip toeing away from the issue.
Polygamy confuses inheritance in small plot agricultural environments. Even serial monogamy does so, which is why widows were often killed or forbidden to remarry or required to marry a brother of her husband.
Follow the money.
Well there is a solution which would eliminate the worry about tax exempt status for religious organizations. Eliminate the corporate tax the FICA tax and set a flat income tax.
Ragmaar,
The short answer is that civil marriage involves both a contract between the two parties and entering a civil status recognized by the state. (In the US the state would be individual states and the federal government.) To people can make a contract for each other, but they cannot create the civil status by the state without the cooperation of the state.
As a trivial example: A single person can’t write an ordinary contract with another single person that creates an obligation for the federal government to make each others social security residue go to the person the two individuals chose. The state decides that based on civil status which is something the state creates.
So with respect to polygamy: Provided this type of contract is not criminalized, people can enter many sorts of joint contracts. But they can’t create the “civil” status of “married”. They become more like a corporation, but the state gets to decide whether they have achieved the civil status of “married”.
Some sorts of contracts are also not permitted– but to discuss how that affects polygamy, we would need to know the sort of contract the polygamists wanted to set up. But currently, in the US, no state recognizes plural marriages. Civil marriage involves 2 people.
Lucia (Comment #137590) July 6th, 2015 at 3:31 pm
” (It might not reach SCOTUS because as long as a lower court ruled to apply the 1st amendment, the upper court would likely turn away any appeal.)”
If the upper court turns away any appeal does this not mean it has considered the evidence and made a decision?
In this case surely the role of the Supreme Court would be to hear an appeal against this decision?
You are right that if an appeal was not made against the upper court decision then it would not reach SCOTUS but anyone making the first effort would surely push on to the second, especially in a case asserting their right to a plurality of wives or appeals.
Sorry [not wanting to be Hunted] for the assumption of wives, I presume the Mormons allow polygamy both ways.
angech,
Not necessarily.
Yes. They could push, but that doesn’t mean the higher court must grant an appeal. They can permit the lower courts ruling stand. SCOTUS often doesn’t grant appeals– for a range of reasons.
Lucia:
It seems to me the granting of civil rights by a government ought to be fair. The movement against polygamy over time say for instance laws against it, I don’t think was brought about by a concern for fairness but for less admirable reasons. There is the idea that rights do not originate from government, but we know in practice it’s more nuanced than that. In this case rights have be given to a new group, but not to a minor group of polygamists. It was the unequal granting of rights argument that helped the same sex marriage movement advance. A married man having granted rights under the law to their wife, can then not grant those same rights to another man unless, first divorce. Seems the idea of civil marriage puts everyone into an inflexible box. One size fits all. This is permitted, and this is not. Not flexible enough until recently for same sex marriages, and not flexible enough for polygamists. We may see that government granting rights can be a problem. They have a history of excluding some from those rights.
Thinking about angech’s question about polyandry (since polygyny is clearly part of the Mormon history), I did a quick check. This source defines plural marriage as “the marriage of one man to more than one woman.” Based on that, it appears that polyandry was not practiced.
The history, detailed here, seems quite harsh to modern sensibilities. For example, “Congress passed a statute requiring a man to take an oath affirming that he was not a polygamist before he was allowed to vote.” What’s equally interesting is that it appears that the Supreme Court considered the situation from the perspective of prevailing public opinion, rather than a Constitutional perspective, declaring polygamy to be “uncivilized.” One can regard the recent SCOTUS ruling as consistent with this history of respecting mores of the time.
Ragnaar,
To evaluate the reasons you need to know them. The ban has generally been of polygyny (with no particular thought to polyandry) I think bans against polygyny were brought about for a number of reasons and most have to do with fairness to women and children and fairness to non-wealthy men and young men not positioned to accumulate many wives. Also for reasons of social stability in societies where some degree of equality was desired.
The fact is: polygamy is qualitatively very different from marriage of two. It’s pretty easy to recognize this if you start thinking of all the other laws related to civil marriage that must be changed if you permit polygamy. They touch on property rights, visitation in hospitals, rights to decide on treatment for incapacitated spouses, presumptive fatherhood, and a host of other rights that come when one is has the civil status of married. We don’t need to change this for same sex marriage– the same laws apply equally well.
But we have to change a huge number with polyandry. Just looking at one: If I am incapacitated, my husband can visit me in the hospital. He is also the one who can make decisions for me– I don’t need to set up paperwork. If I had two husbands, which one has the right to make the decisions? A law would have to be enacted to decide which of the husbands is the one with decision making authority.
Now I’m not saying the need to enact new laws makes the situation unsolvable. But the huge host that would need to be changed actually highlights that the two polygamy and polymory are very different from two person marriage.
HaroldW,
It’s important to distinguish between things criminalizing polygamy and merely not bestowing civil status.
Much of what you are reading there is about polygamy being criminalized; it also was not bestowed civil status. Polygamy is still criminalized in Utah and a man can go to jail for claiming to be “spiritually married” to more than one woman. But as a practical matter, the state of Utah mostly restricts criminal investigations to cases that end up violating other laws (forced marriage, underage marriage, violating welfare laws and so on.) When we have all adults living together and self-identifying as marrying, Utah usually doesn’t do anything — though they might if the group was especially vocal bringing attention to themselves.
In many states polygamy is merely not given civil recognitions rather than crimilized. These are different things. And indeed prior to Oberfegell, same sex marriage was merely not extended civil status in many states– it was generally not criminalized. So the two really are different.
Notice the “sister wives” family moved to Nevada.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Wives
A number of constitutional scholars have noted that Kennedy’s opinion finding a fundamental right based in dignity makes it very difficult to distinguish marriages of more than 2 people. But since the Supremes don’t practice logic, I don’t expect such a ruling any time soon.
Lucia –
I agree that much of the legislation was about criminalization, but the part about a voting test strikes me as going well beyond. What would one say in modern times about a 19th century voting law which required prospective voters to aver that they were not homosexual, say?
In addition, the assets of the Church were seized (except apparently for the large Temple block in Salt Lake City). Here’s a bit of the SCOTUS ruling:
So SCOTUS went beyond enforcement of bigamy, to legitimize sanctions against those who approve of it. Sounds like thoughtcrime to me.
One more citation showing how things have changed. From Murphy v. Ramsey (1885) [emphasis mine]:
HaroldW
I”m not sure it’s going well beyond criminalization. I think some states don’t permit convicted felons to vote. http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=000286
So I think curbing voting rights for criminals has been a common notion. If polygamy is criminal and felons aren’t allowed to vote, then taking away voting rights for polygamy is linked to the notion it’s criminal.
Probably about the same thing they’d say about the requirement to pledge you aren’t a polygamist!
There’s no doubt that treatment of polygamists was harsh. There is no doubt treatment of Mormons was harsh. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Nauvoo,_Illinois
There were multi factors involved, polygamy was certainly among them.
But arguments against polygamy and how it is unfair and poor public policy long predate the LDS church. (The arguments about ‘public policy’ won’t use that term– but the discussion of effect on social structure is a public policy argument.)
Lucia,
Did you miss this:
“stan (Comment #137602)
July 7th, 2015 at 7:30 am
A number of constitutional scholars have noted that Kennedy’s opinion finding a fundamental right based in dignity makes it very difficult to distinguish marriages of more than 2 people. But since the Supremes don’t practice logic, I don’t expect such a ruling any time soon.”
Aren’t you going to hound stan, like you did me?
Don,
I like your posts and share some common ideas with you. But sometimes you post stuff like this that makes me think you spend too much time in the perpetual food fight over at Climate Etc.
Mark, stan made essentially the same point I did. Ragnaar’s comment is along similar lines. I am wondering why they have not been misrepresented and hounded, like I was. You don’t have to care about it. I didn’t start a food fight. I was defending my position against serial misrepresentation and gratuitous nitpicking.
If the voting limitation was for convicted felons only, I’d agree with you. But the test was whether one belonged to a church which allowed and encouraged (at the time) polygamy: [emphasis mine]
That’s the part which I think goes over the line. Yet SCOTUS affirmed this limitation in Davis v. Beason.
All that this is meant to imply is that SCOTUS looks to current mores to judge whether behavior is licit. From that decision, a reference is made to local statutes:
“Licentiousness” is one of those terms whose meaning changes with the times. I’ve no doubt that in the Victorian era, many current lifestyles would be considered licentious. As society becomes more accepting of behaviors formerly classed as “deviant” (as a disparagement, not as an indication of rarity), this expands legal tolerance. [I find this a positive trend.] During my lifetime, I’ve seen acceptance widen to include inter-racial relationships and now LGBT (well, at least LG marriage). It wouldn’t surprise me if the trend continues, eventually including polygamous relationships. [With informed consent, naturally. I doubt that anyone would advocate relationships involving fraudulent concealment of other spouses.]
Stan,
Johnathan Turley weighs in on the gay marriage ruling:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trouble-with-the-dignity-of-same-sex-marriage/2015/07/02/43bd8f70-1f4e-11e5-aeb9-a411a84c9d55_story.html
“Dignity is a rather elusive and malleable concept compared with more concrete qualities such as race and sex. Which relationships are sufficiently dignified to warrant protection? What about couples who do not wish to marry but cohabitate? What about polyamorous families, who are less accepted by public opinion but are perhaps no less exemplary when it comes to, in Kennedy’s words on marriage, “the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and familyâ€? The justice does not specify. It certainly appears as if Obergefell extends this protection because same-sex unions are now deemed acceptable by the majority. The courts may not be so readily inclined to find that other loving relationships are, to quote the opinion, a “keystone of the Nation’s social order†when they take less-orthodox forms. But popularity hardly seems like a proper legal guide to whether a relationship is dignified.”
Lucia:
Laws dealing with what I’ll call limited POA that a spouse has and spousal inheritance rights would also have to be addressed. It’s conceivable that a 1st spouse would see their rights diluted and/or the 2nd spouse would have limited rights. The clean family structure of the present would become more complicated. While polygamy is not aggressively prosecuted in general, I suppose there’s a tendency to throw the kitchen sink at those who break other laws and just about every news story in that case brings up the fact that one is a polygamist. Say the concern was for the 2nd spouse’s rights. Do we tell them, don’t do that? Don’t get married. How does society protect them beyond saying no? So it seems the situation has us back at women’s rights. While a failure to grant civil rights seems not too bad, 2nd spouses and their children lacking access to Social Security survivor benefits can impose hardships. Que the lawyers.
Ragnaar
I’m not sure which polygamist news stories involving prosecution for others you are familiar with.
The sorts of polygamist stories I’ve encountered on the news stories are like this Texas raid:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/17/us/texas-yfz-ranch-seizure/
…
This isn’t a charge of jaywalking treated severely because the accused is a polygamist.
More:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/who-foots-bill-for-polygamist-communities/
Ragnaar,
It’s clear no spouse would have the rights that do exist under 2-person marriage. You can’t really split the right to make medical decisions. If they disagree, one or the other one wins– or they have to go to court. Going to court and having a judge decide isn’t the current right.
Could be men’s too. If a man had the right to marry multiple woman, a woman would have the right to marry multiple men. Heck, make that a spouse would another spouse of their own choosing. Contracts might be able to deal with this– but then that’s not a civil status. If civil marriage expands to more than 2, lots of laws have to change to specify lots of different things and the resulting relationship is very dissimilar to 2 person marriage.
As far as I can tell, the only arguments that polygyny and 2-person marriage resemble each other is that both have been traditional and they are both procreative. The argument to tradition highlights that polygyny appears in the Bible; the argument for procreation is that polygyny tends to be very procreative especially when families exert pressure on females to marry at quite early ages.
But it’s the lack of ‘tradition’ and ‘procreative ability’ that were often advanced against gay marriage. You can’t say how an opinion that was never written might really operate, but if those arguments about tradition and procreative nature had prevailed in Obergerfell and appeared in a majority opinion, we might have had a hard time explaining why we shouldn’t permit polygyny. Of course, whether those would prevail later would depend on other elements of this-hypothetical-opinion that-did-not-get-written.
Of course cases where polygamists are engaged in illegal activity make the news. Most polygamists keep their noses clean and maintain a low profile to avoid prosecution and persecution.This case has been prominently in the news:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Buhman
“As far as I can tell, the only arguments that polygyny and 2-person marriage resemble each other is that both have been traditional and they are both procreative.”
Well, there is the same argument advanced that gay marriage and traditional man+woman marriage resemble each other. It’s the ‘dignity’ angle on which the gay marriage decision was based. Are polyamourous families entitled to ‘dignity’? Logic would seem to dictate that they are. It seems that legal scholar Jonathan Turley thinks the gay marriage decision could be extended in that direction:
Jonathan Turley: “Dignity is a rather elusive and malleable concept compared with more concrete qualities such as race and sex. Which relationships are sufficiently dignified to warrant protection? What about couples who do not wish to marry but cohabitate? What about polyamorous families, who are less accepted by public opinion but are perhaps no less exemplary when it comes to, in Kennedy’s words on marriage, “the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and familyâ€? The justice does not specify. It certainly appears as if Obergefell extends this protection because same-sex unions are now deemed acceptable by the majority. The courts may not be so readily inclined to find that other loving relationships are, to quote the opinion, a “keystone of the Nation’s social order†when they take less-orthodox forms. But popularity hardly seems like a proper legal guide to whether a relationship is dignified.â€
“You can’t really split the right to make medical decisions.”
Parents have co-equal rights to make medical decisions for their children. Generally, even if the parents are divorced or were never married.
Jonathan Turley has been campaigning for polygamy for quite some time. He has been advancing arguments in favor of polygamy under 10 year old Lawrence long before Obergefell. The quote you posted shows the weakness of the argument Obergefell increasing the likelyhood of polygamy because the argument is so poor.
His main argument is to present a series of unanswered rhetorical questions. Sorry, but asking a series of rhetorical questions and not volunteering answers does not mean the questions are hard to answer. It’s not even an argument. His saying “it certainly appears” is a claim of how things look to him. Presumably “it appears” that way to him. But that doesn’t mean there is anything in the majority ruling that suggests his vision is anything other than impaired. At a minimum, he can’t actually find any quotes to explain why “it appears” this way to him.
I am not surprised that he is making ambitious arguments– and likely will continue to do so for his clients. (He has been representing The Browns of Sister Wives.) Lawyers always advance multiple theories– hoping if one doesn’t work the other will. But the his merely advancing an argument doesn’t mean his argument is strong. The one above is clearly vapid.
Belittling well-respected legal scholar J. Turley is not a very productive argument. Turley has been campaigning for the rights of a lot of people without showing any kind of bias or favoritism for quite some time. He is for equal rights. He is one of the good guys. And I haven’t heard anyone question his legal chops or complain about his rhetorical questions, until now.
His rhetorical questions have substance and meaning that you obviously ignored. It’s good that you didn’t go into law with that rhetorical question phobia. Judges pose what would sound to you like rhetorical questions all the time. They expect all their questions to be taken seriously. His/her Honors would have had you standing out in the hall, a lot.
The problem you are having is that you don’t understand the argument. It has something to do with extending equal rights to all. You must have missed this quote Turley provided from the majority ruling “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity.†Rights that some people don’t think should be denied to individuals, because it might necessitate changing or adding a few laws.
Thousands of laws are changed, dropped or added to the books yearly. Family and marriage law has gone from the father owning the family, to some very complicated stuff that extended rights and power to the wife and kids.
If you missed the quotes and links that Turley put in that article that are relevant to his argument, you need to get your eyes checked. Or slow down and concentrate. Don’t ignore the parts you don’t like.
“His saying “it certainly appears†is a claim of how things look to him.”
No it isn’t. It is a statement of how things look to him. It is his highly informed opinion. He is a legal scholar of some repute. Major networks legal eagle ‘go to guy’. His opinion carries weight. But you are free to trash his opinion, just as you did my very similar opinion.
Here is Turley’s website commentary expanding on the op-ed for which he had limited space to make his case. Maybe he has some additional quotes in there that will help you understand:
http://jonathanturley.org/2015/07/05/obergefell-and-the-right-to-dignity/
Don
I didn’t belittle him.
Just because I am generally silent on your misrepresentations of what I say doesn’t mean I don’t notice them. I am not reading beyond this misrepresentation. I might bother to continue to engage you if I thought others were interested, but I suspect they are not.
Good move, lucia.
This ain’t belittling, to some:
“Jonathan Turley has been campaigning for polygamy for quite some time.”
Right off the bat the attack. That is patently false and blatantly invokes bias that you can’t substantiate. He has been campaigning for equal rights. He is for gay rights. He is for the rights of the accused, minorities of all stripes, etc. He is one of the most respected legal scholars of our day. He is a liberal Democrat that Republicans respect.
“His main argument is to present a series of unanswered rhetorical questions.”
That is not his main argument. You are just trying to make him out to be an idiot.
There is more foolishness like that, but this is the worst:
“I am not surprised that he is making ambitious arguments– and likely will continue to do so for his clients.”
You are blithely dismissing his argument, because he has polygamist clients in one case. He is not arguing in the op-ed for his clients. He is doing just fine for them in the court room. He is stating his honest and very-well informed, principled and consistent legal opinion. If he had said the same things (and I am sure he did) a couple of weeks ago about gay’s being entitled to marriage rights, you would no doubt have approved. Now it looks like you are questioning Turley’s integrity. Too bad he ain’t here to set you straight.
You could go leave similar comments on his blog. Let him know what you think of him, his campaigning for polygamy, his poor legal arguments and all his rhetorical questions. I am sure he would take you seriously.
This is not an attack; it is an observation. He cheered the ruling decriminalizing polygamy in 2013: See
“Turley also cheered the recent ruling as a “victory for morality.â€
He worked to achieve the ruling.
http://onpoint.wbur.org/2013/12/23/polygamy-legal-defense-sister-wives
Oped in favor:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/21/opinion/21turley.html?_r=0
I anticipate some quibble about ‘campaigning’. But working toward achieving it– and going well beyond mere legal representatino– is ‘campaigning’ in my book.
Not going to engage the rest… and I’m putting you on delay. You’ve previously complained about how this is all so tedious, so spare yourself.
The best thing about restructuring marriage law to accommodate polygamy would surely be the joy of filing taxes joi-oi-oi-oi-ointly. 😉
“I anticipate some quibble about ‘campaigning’. But working toward achieving it is ‘campaigning’ in my book.”
In that case, is this what you meant?:
“Jonathan Turley has been working toward achieving polygamy for quite some time.”
That’s even worse. What I suggest you need to do to correct it:
“Jonathan Turley has been working toward achieving decriminalization of polygamy for quite some time.”
You keep forgetting the elephant in the room “decriminalization” modifier. That is what the ‘sister wives’ case is about. Not campaigning for, or arguing for polygamy. You know that.
Do you not approve of the ruling decriminalizing a type of family relationship that is the choice of consenting adults so they don’t have to live in fear of prosecution, lucia? That is all that Turley has been arguing for. See below.
Cheering the decriminalization of polygamy is not equivalent or similar to “campaigning for polygamy”.
“He has been advancing arguments in favor of polygamy under 10 year old Lawrence long before Obergefell.”
There you go again. Do you have any evidence that Turley is in favor of polygamy, or that he has advanced arguments in favor of polygamy? He may find polygamy very distasteful. He has been arguing for the “decriminalization of polygamy.” For tolerance. Privacy for consenting adults. Choice. The same type of arguments that were made to decriminalize sodomy and abortion.
Is cheering for a “victory for morality” the same as “campaigning for polygamy”? Not at all. From the link you provided. Did you read it?
“People have been prosecuted under this since the 1950s…There is no cohabitation clause anymore, that was struck down, the court did what we suggested. Utah now has a conventional bigamy law…Many people are confusing bigamy with polygamy. Bigamy is having multiple marriage licenses. That’s a crime that is committed almost exclusively by people who hold themselves as monogamists. It is not a crime that is generally committed by polygamists who traditionally have one marriage license and the rest are spiritual marriages.
******So what Utah has now is it says that anybody, regardless of the structure of your family, with more than one license can be prosecuted. We have no problem with that. Polygamy is legal. In the same way that homosexual was decriminalized in Lawrence v. Texas. It is now legal to be plural in a family. Polygamy does not mean having multiple marriage licenses, it means having a plural family.******â€
Turley also cheered the recent ruling as a “victory for morality.â€
“Reynolds in my view is one of the most infamous decisions the court has ever handed down. It was filled with rather racist and hateful statements directed against Mormons. The language the courts used was clearly to denounce what it considered to be an amoral practice that it associated with Africa and Asia. It’s an opinion that I recommend that people read, because it’s truly horrific. It’s astonishing that it has never been overturned. In fact, it is the foundation for what are called morality laws. The most interesting aspect of Judge Waddoups’ opinion is it shows a clean break from our long history of morality laws that banned everything from fornication to adultery to cohabitation. These are laws in which the majority simply criminalizes things they consider to be fundamentally immoral. This case represents part of a trend in which we’re moving away from those laws and in my view we’re a better nation for it. I happen to think that the Sister Wives’ case is a victory for morality in the sense that it lets every family follow its own faith and values so long as they don’t harm others. For me that’s a victory for morality, and it’s also a victory for privacy. In fact, I think this has a lot more to do with privacy than it does with polygamy.â€
Do you see anything in there that you disagree with, or find vapid?
I have made substantive arguments. You can allow this to appear on your blog or not. It’s obviously your call to apply your own standards of fairness and honesty. I hope you surprise me. I still like you. Just not quite as much.
Oliver
Presumably there would be a schedule “P” to account for all the possible variations of number of partners, legal obligations and rights granted in a state and so on. What fun.
Don
Oh my. You like me less. I’m going to go off and have a good cry.
Nice dodging, Lucia. I rest my case.
U.S. income tax changes to accommodate polygamy wouldn’t be simple but I see it as possible. There are 4 filing statuses but there could be 1. Everyone would file their own return. The Married, Married Filing Separately and Single statuses each have their own attributes and there are some inequities with the current situation. With same sex marriages the IRS allowed people to file jointly and amend past returns if they were married subject to some rules. The ability to file as Married Filing Jointly does in some cases increase household income by reducing taxes, but that’s not always true. 2nd wives would sometimes benefit using the Earned Income Credit (EIC) which might not be available to them if they had a legally recognized marriage. However, one must tread lightly when claiming the EIC as it is on the IRS’s radar and can involve thousands of dollars.
Don Monfort:
Finally.
Can we pop bubbly now and move on?
Ragnaar,
My only claim is the fact that all these zillions of changes have to be made is evidence for how different polygamy is from two person marriage.
Obviously, changes to tax rules can be made– that’s always true. But you keep forgetting the 2nd husbands. :-).
Carrick,
One hopes.
Lucia, you answer to my question demonstrates a fundamental weakness, that unfortunately some people have come to see as desirable, or even a strength. You admit in effect that you do not have enough information to judge Hunt morally. Yet you are content to let Hunt bear punishment. This is terrible. Pragmatism has several merits but fails as a moral philosophy. A judgment when needed, can simply be ‘we do not have enough information to reach a conclusive judgment’. Your argumentative position is equivalent to this, but you are nevertheless keen to kick Hunt to the curb. Scary.
Shub,
Wrong. As far as I can determine, he wasn’t punished. Allowing Hunt to elect to sever his relationship with UCL is not punishing him. Perhaps you think something else is ‘punishment’, but if so, you are going to have to specify what the ‘punishment’ was and specify who meeted it out.
Shub,
Your are pretty worked up about this; it is unclear to me why. I get more worked up about ISIS rounding up and raping teenage girls because they happen to not be Muslims.
.
I don’t think Hunt did anything terribly wrong (after all, a public statement in poor taste is not a crime). He probably should have been more aware that the PC police are everywhere, and they would never let a Nobel Laureate get away with making a public statement which was not PC. PC police are mostly leftist academics and journalists (both groups widely recognized as morons), and they try their best to inhibit the free exchange of ideas, especially on college campuses. But there isn’t a whole lot anybody can do about it beyond pointing out the PC police are in fact morons, and suggesting that they ought to focus on real problems like Muslim terrorists (ISIS and the like). They are not going to criticize Muslim terrorists, because those terrorists will….well… kill you if you cross them. The PC police prefer safer targets like Hunt.
.
That organizations, scientific and otherwise, roll over when pressured by the PC police is a dog-bites-man story… most organizations absolutely hate any kind of bad PR.
Sure, SteveF, leftist green loons are passive ISIS supporters. On home territory, you will get away with any amount of your ridiculous rants.
Lucia:
There are differences. I was going at it from guiding principles. I started with a golden oldie, the right to make contracts. To that I’ll add the right to the same protections and opportunities afforded married individuals. That approach worked for me with SSM.
“Many Libertarians argue for the complete privatization of marriage, making marriage a matter of individual contract and — for those who want it — a religious ceremony, thus removing any need for state recognition of marriages. As long as marriage is licensed by government, however, same-sex couples are entitled to equal legal rights. The same rule applies to other government programs, from tax laws to Social Security to adoption. Libertarians would like to get government out of most areas, but as long as government is involved, it must treat citizens equally.†http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/06/25/op-ed-libertarians-have-long-led-way-marriage
It must treat citizens equally. So the question going forward might be, do we care or will we just have libertarians crying in the wilderness for years once again as with SSM?
SteveF, I think back and I find myself getting worked up in situations like this: in sequence, with, RPSr, Willie Soon, Peter Wadhams, and now this guy (not the only example). There is a disturbing tendency in academia to disrespect senior and emeritus professors not from a healthy dismissal of old ideas but something else like spite and jealousy (stick it to the Nobel winner).
.
Plus, Steve, I followed the story from day one, so to speak. Hunt was done in by a stitch-up job though no one in particular intended for this to happen. I should stay away from such situations for my own mental well-being.
Shub,
With respect to his interactions with UCL< the bits that are not in dispute based both on the guardian interview with Hunt and his wife (liked above) or UCL's web page: * Hunt told a stupid joke that could easily be perceived as suggesting women don't belong in the lab. * Hunt was criticized publicly for telling the stupid joke. * UCL tried to get in touch with Hunt. They failed to get in touch with him got in touch with his wife. (My guess is they called his house and she picked up the phone.) * Hunt's wife related her version of her conversation with UCL conversation to Hunt. * Hunt turned in his resignation without talking to UCL. * UCL accepted the resignation. * UCL posted a ( web page reporting that Hunt had resigned ). On it the they state “sent a clear signal that equality and diversity are truly valued at UCL”.
You are imputing an awful lot about this being a “punishment” or injecting a lot about “morality”.
UCL doesn’t want to have people who represent them going around telling jokes that can be perceived as sexist. It’s bad PR for them and also sends a message counter to their intention. In this case the person was not an employee, the relationship was an “honorary” position which exists for no other reason than PR. Hunt severed it.
You can call it “PC” which — the view that someone shouldn’t tell jokes perceived as sexist does fall in that general umberella. But in my mind the fairness issue would apply equally if some person with a honorary position at Bob Jones University told jokes that suggested Jesus sinned and that everyone should be a atheist (‘but seriously now’.)
Raggnar,
I’m not sure where you are trying to go. Are you trying to explain your view whether polygamy should be legal? I thought you were just discussing hypothetical tax laws.
Lucia, why so much on what UCL did? I asked what your opinion was. I asked whether you did think he did something wrong. UCL’s actions have no bearing on the question. If you cannot answer the questions conclusively today, UCL does not possess any more secret information than what you do, and certainly did not have this information 24 hours after his speech. UCL’s clearly a second-rate university, or precisely, a university with a second-rate administration. Their opinions are worthless.
RB (Comment #137658),
Maybe you should read what I actually wrote. I did not suggest anybody is supporting ISIS, passively or otherwise. I do suggest that the PC police mostly ignore absolutely abominable acts, and focus on easy targets like Hunt. They will also, like our dear President Obama, refuse to acknowledge an association between terrorists who act, by their own declaration, on the tenets of the Muslim faith, and the Muslim faith itself. Since Mr Obama and the PC police could hardly be mistaken about that, I find it very odd how the terrorists pretty much all turn out to be Muslims.
.
Yes, in my book the PC police are morons. Allahu Akbar amigo.
Shub,
“There is a disturbing tendency in academia to disrespect senior and emeritus professors not from a healthy dismissal of old ideas but something else like spite and jealousy (stick it to the Nobel winner).”
.
I honestly don’t think it is like that at all. There are lots of emeritus professors who remain warmly clutched to the bosom of academic institutions. Like, say, Paul Ehrlich and Stanford. People are driven out when their thinking is ‘beyond the pale’ of what is PC, and what is PC is defined by the politics of the PC police (that is, the faculty). Remember the Harvard faculty driving Larry Summers out of the University because of comments they thought inappropriate (non-PC)? I think the motivation is just about always 100% political, as with Hunt, Soon, and others.
SteveF,
Yes. IMO another good example of this is all of the sudden condemnation of the Confederate flag in the wake of the Charleston church shooting. Certainly, we can make arguments about the Confederate flag; what it symbolizes, whether it should be up. But arguing about the Confederate flag in response to this shooting? [edit: What’s that about, nothing.] Are we now going to pretend that if the Confederate flag wasn’t up that nutcases wouldn’t murder people they hate? [I guess] That’s completely ignoring a hard problem in favor of doing something brainless and easy that has little to nothing to do with the issue.
[Edit: Rhetorical. Just shoot me. No don’t I’ll fix it.]
Shub
You asked numerous open ended questions. Including questoins as open ended as this
I think I answered them all, elaborating for clarification.
It seems to me you have
Which question? Whether UCL acted fairly or not certainly has bearing on where I stand on ‘the matter’ and what I think of the story. I don’t think it’s possible for me to answer the sorts of questions you ask without discussing whether UCL treated Hunt fairly.
I’ve answered questions conclusively: UCL treated Hunt fairly. UCL’s had enough information to justify their actions within 24 hours of their speech. That is one thing that has not changed.
That the answer to questions of the sort you asked.
I do not judge Hunt as immoral– I also told you that. I haven’t seen any evidence to the contrary. Possibly if the “due process” some on twitter are yammering were forced on him we might find evidence of that– or we might continue to see none. But that part hasn’t changed. But as I haven’t judged him immoral and I continue to not judge him so, I don’t see how you have anything to complain of in my suspending judgement in this regard.
Re: Mark Bofill (Comment #137667)
Mark,
Removing the Confederate battle flag won’t solve the problem, but the people who put up the flag did so because it sends the symbolic message that certain beliefs and attitudes are still alive and well in the state of South Carolina. It follows that removing the flag is also a way for the people of South Carolina to send a symbolic message: that they want move on beyond those beliefs and attitudes.
Oliver.
Yes. And this was my point, and AFAIK the point SteveF was making in the text I quoted. Instead of actually doing something to solve problems the PC police would have us send symbolic messages.
Meanwhile children are given away as sex slaves in Koran contests in ISIS controlled territory, while we fiddle with +100 year old flags.
Mark,
I’m not sure exactly whom you are referring to as the “PC police,” but many people (including myself) are in favor of having the flag taken down not as a substitute for, but as one step toward actually solving the problem.
What does is comparison meant to show? That we should ignore racism and other serious problems in our own country and concentrate on mounting a new ground offensive in some other country halfway across the world?
Oliver,
Ok.
What it is meant to show? Well, I was supporting my original point. The point is that the “PC Police” would rather attack easy targets that don’t really accomplish much than deal with the real problems. The real problems are much more difficult, costly, inconvenient, complicated, etc.
Apparently, “Control what you can control” is considered to be common-sense advice by sports people, among others.
RB,
I think that’s a fine idea. My objection translates in those terms something like this: Control what you can control, and don’t kid yourself that by doing so you’re controlling what you can’t or won’t try to control. Fooling yourself about what you’re actually accomplishing seems like a poor idea to me, that’s my issue.
Don’t understand, Mark. I don’t think anybody was making a connection between Tim Hunt, or a flag, and the condition of women in Syria.
Oliver,
“That we should ignore racism and other serious problems in our own country and concentrate on mounting a new ground offensive in some other country halfway across the world?”
.
Rhetorical question alert. 😉
.
If you actually consider the reality of the abominations going on halfway around the world (systematic murder, rape, beheadings, etc.) in the name of a theology, and if you consider the stated objectives of those carrying out those abominations (destruction of countries, extermination of undesirable groups, and much more), then the moral imperative seems pretty clear to me. Whatever racial prejudices remain in the USA today, offensive as they may be, are a minuscule evil by comparison. Lower the Confederate flag all you want: there will still be a handful of crazies. Meanwhile an enormous and organized evil, with clear stated plans to do even worse than they have already done, remains largely unaddressed by our heroic president.
.
Have you actually thought about this? (Not a rhetorical question.)
RB,
Sorry, I must have misunderstood the point you were trying to make with the ‘control what you can control’ comment. It’s all good. 🙂
Oops.
Just noticed this.
yguy,
You may consider this my sincere apology for misconstruing your position in a preposterous and offensive way. I am honestly pleased to hear it. By way of explanation but not excuse, it’s not at all uncommon for me to run into people who espouse exactly the position I mistakenly attributed to you.
Regards.
Mark Bofill (Comment #137681),
Don’t worry, your reading skills are just fine; most anyone would have concluded exactly what you did from yguy’s comments. Based on the context and his other comments, I would say that he does indeed think about ‘insight’ exactly in the way you concluded. If not, them yguy needs to work (a lot!) on improving the clarity of his writing. Either way, you are not at fault for reading the plain meaning of his words.
SteveF (Comment #137679)
Not at all. I was asking what he meant by his comparison, and giving one possible reading.
The argument is ridiculous. Clearly there are zealots and rapists and murderers out there in the world. That does not diminish our our moral (and pragmatic) imperative to clean up race-motivated violence and inequities in our own backyard.
You can’t seriously be in favor of an expanded foreign ground war, yet spend as much time as you do griping about a few wasted tax dollars here and there.
Apparently a fair sight more than you have.
Oliver,
See, that’s the thing. It’s not an easy problem. What’s the solution, you might ask me. You might ask, ‘go back to war in the middle east?’
But this misses the point. These are hard problems without easy solutions. But just because these are hard problems without easy solutions does not mean we should pretend we are solving problems when we are ignoring them. Want to talk about the Charleston shooting? Maybe we should outlaw all guns. Maybe we should mandate that everyone be armed and trained. Maybe we should increase surveillance on our citizens and sacrifice more liberties, or have psych evaluations on everyone, or maybe not. We could talk about the problem.
Talking about the Confederate flag, no matter how worthy a topic that might be, no matter how good the arguments to do so, is not talking about solving the problem of crazies (racist or otherwise) murdering minorities in churches. I object to it because it allows people to feel good about themselves by pretending to do something while completely ignoring the problem.
This is the point I make with ISIS. The point is not that we should go get back into a war in the middle east. The point is, let’s not pretend that we are striking a blow against racism or slavery by playing with flags, while we ignore the real problems. Let’s not feel good about ourselves for pretending to do something when what we are in fact doing will have almost zero effect on the problem we profess to care about. This is hypocrisy in my view.
I hope this clarifies.
SteveF,
Regarding YGuy, there are times I’m happy to be wrong. In the interests of civility, I’ll gladly take yguy’s word for it. Were I in his position, I’d appreciate some apology. It’s the least I can do.
Believe it or not, I usually don’t deliberately try to tick people off around here. I like the fact that reasonable conversations can be had at the Blackboard. 🙂
Mark,
I appreciate your clarification. I agree that these are hard problems, and there needs to be actual discussion about how to solve the problem, even if some of the alternatives seem unpalatable to one side or the other (e.g., no guns or all guns).
If taking down the flag is nothing more than political pandering, without any actions to back it up, then yes, absolutely, I agree it is worthless, and worse than that it’s just a smokescreen to avoid addressing the deeper problems. However, talking honestly about what the flag actually represents and why it should (or even why it shouldn’t) be taken down might be a step toward the discussion I think we both agree should be happening, so I’m not ready to dismiss it quite yet. It’s only worthless if we the public accept it as “the solution” and then drop the ball.
Oliver,
“Clearly there are zealots and rapists and murderers out there in the world.”
.
I would be hard pressed to find a more inaccurate characterization of what is happening in the Middle East. Sure, there are zealots, rapists and murderers everywhere, but they don’t usually organize, set up an army, and make plans to create a religiously governed world by destroying countries and exterminating whole groups of undesirables…. like Jews, homosexuals, Christians, etc.
.
I would almost guess that you wee toying with me, but that is not your style. You and Mr Obama may some day recognize what needs to be done, but I won’t hold my breath waiting. Fortunately there will be no need to wait very long for Mr Obama: he has only 19 months left in office.
Oliver,
Fair enough.
SteveF,
So are you willing to pay the taxes to wage an expanded war or not?
SteveF, Ehrlich has two things going for him: his friend is friends with the president (i.e, his friends still move in influential circles), and his professorship is endowed by a donor who gives lots of money to Stanford. Compare with fellow depopulator Garrett Hardin who though not quite kicked to the curb was quite down in the end having seen his ideas fall out of fashion.
chuckrr,
And which authority would that be?
I consider the question inaptly phrased, but Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Hugo, Flaubert, Dickens, Steinbeck and Stephen King certainly had it. And young children all have it, at least if it isn’t crippled by their upbringing; but even then it may remain latent, as we know from, e.g., the few former Islamic terrorists who have publicly rejected their diabolical heritage.
Why, through insight, natch. 🙂
Bofill,
Fair enough, it’s forgotten.
“I don’t think it’s possible for me to answer the sorts of questions you ask without discussing whether UCL treated Hunt fairly.”
.
Really? What Hunt said was independent of UCL, and your opinion on what he said ought to be independent of UCL. Where does it enter the picture? It doesn’t.
.
“I do not judge Hunt as immoral– I also told you that […].”
.
That’s what I concluded because that’s what I understood: you withhold pronouncing an adverse judgment on Hunt’s character and/or his words unless further/newer evidence emerges. Well good.
.
That’s exactly what the university ought to have done too ’cause then you wouldn’t have been able to make this argument-from-consequence.
Oliver,
“So are you willing to pay the taxes to wage an expanded war or not?”
.
Sure, so long as Mr Obama would not restrain the military from actually eliminating ISIS (something I am not confident of). By the way, taxes are necessary, I’m just not happy paying for stupid things that accomplish nothing, like oh, Solyndra, or an over-reaching EPA, or higher food costs because of ethanol in gasoline, or multiple climate modeling groups, or solar power subsidies, or….. the list is very long.
Shub
My answer to your really is “yes”. As long as he has an honorary position, his speeches will be seen to reflect on the entity who is giving him the on-going honor. So it’s connected.
He is now disconnected (which appears to be your complaint.)
As for witholding: Please review lucia (Comment #137583) which I wrote to answer your ambiguous questions about “wrong”.
I wrote
That’s my current judgement. Of course it would change if other evidence came forward. Of course I withhold adverse judgement until I am aware of evidence he did something wrong. I tend to think this is preferable to making an adverse judgement when I don’t have evidence he did anything wrong. I don’t know what your complaint is here.
As far as I can tell, that is what they did. There are two things each of which individually suggests that what they did:
1) They tried to contact him. HE resigned without speaking to them. So there is little to no evidence they “judged” much of anything much.
2) They have every right to cut the PR association for any reason including embarrassment. They were embarrassed and presented with a PR disaster. They don’t need to hear ‘his side’ to be embarrassed or know it was a PR disaster. It. Was. His ‘side’ wouldn’t change that.
So: there’s no evidence they “judged” him in the way you seem to think they did. They cut a PR association.
Re: Oliver (Comment #137687)
I agree. One of the arguments offered for a boots on the ground strategy against ISIS and the threat it poses is the perception of success it creates and the potential to inspire i.e., the symbolic value. These arguments go nowhere, you can point to some local problem that can be addressed and the counter-argument will be ‘But ISIS’..
SteveF,
Obama created the power vacuum that ISIS or, as he prefers to call it, ISIL (that’s another story), filled by his premature withdrawal from Iraq. He’s never going to admit that was a mistake, so he’s unlikely do do anything significant to fix the problem he created. I wonder if he is even aware that he makes mistakes. My bet is that he thinks that anything bad that happens as a result of an action he takes is always someone else’s fault.
Re: DeWitt Payne (Comment #137702)
If he hadn’t pulled out, you’d say that he doesn’t care about what the public wants regarding this question
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Further from Michelle Fluornoy :
I guess some insurance policies are OK, whether or not the generals are fighting the last war.
RB,
No, I wouldn’t. Presidents are supposed to lead public opinion if what the public wants isn’t prudent. Does the phrase ‘bully pulpit’ mean anything to you? That’s not really a question. It’s a paraphrase of a line from an old TV miniseries, Wizards and Warriors. Besides, this isn’t a pure democracy. While getting out of Iraq was part of his platform, he had enough time in office to have seen it would be a mistake.
While we’re speaking of doing things by public opinion polls, the public didn’t want Obamacare by a large margin.
Has anyone reading here noticed that individual rights proctected by the Bill of Rights and well enumerated there are more protected on an individual level while the unenumerated rights that the Supreme Court might eventually “discover” are not discovered at the individual level but rather are adjudicated only when a sizable portion of the population favors these rights.
Rights to me as a libertarian are at the individual level and need recognition and protection there. An example, using the recent gay marriage “discovered” right that obviously stemmed from political pressure, is that if marriage had been privatized from the beginning this right would have been recognized from the beginning as would the currently much less favored marriage of more than two adults.
Kenneth,
We are a loathed minority, not a favored one……Don’t count on getting any special rights from the Supremes.
My views on the US military presence in the world will be very different than that of many of you posting here.
We need to increase our presence in the world through more free exchange of citizens and true non government interventionist free trade (not the free trade that results from government restricted trade in so called free trade agreements). We need to eventually decrease our military foreign presence to zero.
We have military bases and troops stationed in foreign nations left over from WW II and the Korean War. Obama as a Democrat would rather spend/waste national treasure on domestic programs but does not have the political intestinal fortitude to make meaningful cuts in military spending and foreign military presence. As a result he does halfway measures that are bound to fail. The opposite of this lack of stomach goes to the Republicans when it comes to domestic programs. We end up with the worst of both worlds – an expanding government that are children and grandchildren cannot afford.
By the way I am not one of those polyannaish person who thinks that our interference in foreign affairs causes these conflicts. Without our presence there will be conflicts its just that those conflicts will not involve us.
Kenneth
But it wasn’t privatized. It would have been difficult to privatize it in the days when women lost their right to contract when they married.
But beyond that: privatized marriage would not be a civil status. It would be a private arrangement. Currently, people may enter into private arrangements if they wish. In most states they can call it whatever they wish.
But most people want civil marriage to exist and to have certain default features. So that’s not going to go away. The most those who like the idea of private arrangements are likely to get any time soon is the ability to enter into private arrangements (which mostly they can.)
DeWitt,
“While we’re speaking of doing things by public opinion polls, the public didn’t want Obamacare by a large margin.”
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Yes, Mr Obama is IMO more motivated by ideology than any president since Lyndon Johnson, though some might argue Reagan was comparable. The “ram it down their throats” positions he takes on global warming and health care seem to me far more ideologically aggressive than anything Reagan did, save for flattening tax brackets. Abandoning Iraq is a similar ideological choice, and one that ignores factual reality… just like refusing to admit that nearly all terrorists are associated with the Muslim faith. I find him both an irritation and a fool. I will be happy to see the back of him.
Kenneth,
“We need to eventually decrease our military foreign presence to zero.”
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You can mount a strong argument that military bases in Europe and Asia make no sense. I think it is a weaker argument that organized rape, pillage, crucifixion, slavery, mass murder, and beheadings demand no response from civilized people.
Kenneth,
And you say your position isn’t pollyannaish. How many foreign bases were there and how many troops were stationed overseas in November, 1941?
This is classic isolationist foreign policy. It’s been referred to as Fortress America. According to Foreign Policy magazine, it’s not even a majority position of the American public.
Just because that idiot Colin Powell convinced Bush to use the existence of WMD’s in Iraq as the sole basis for Gulf War II doesn’t mean that there weren’t other more valid reasons for intervening. Then that other idiot, Paul Bremer, totally fracked up the aftermath of the war. Ultimately, Bush takes the blame for both, as well as failing to provide adult supervision of the Republican majority Congress. Doing things wrong does not mean, however, that the things shouldn’t have been done in the first place.
SteveF,
Three words: Putin. Ukraine. China.
The point is to keep government out of marriage if we want to protect individual rights and not just those enumerated ones and those eventually enumerated by political pressure.
I would think that a marriage contract that can written based on individual cases and needs would better than one that is supposed to fit all cases – unless modified by other contracts. Perhaps the no marriage option would be a better and easier to make decision in some cases without the government’s apparent blessing of marriage and its giving that arrangement preferential benefits.
DeWitt, it would be polyannaish not to recognize that neither WW I nor WW II made the world freer – and at what costs. It would be polyannaish to not consider the Iraq war a major waste of lives and money. Even a warhawk would not be sufficiently polyannaish to think that a military effort can be sustained without public support or that initial support for military action can seldom be sustained for lengthy periods of time.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #137713),
Rich countries can (and should) be responsible for their own defense. The US ‘umbrella’ has allowed governments in Europe, and to a lesser extent Korea, to avoid a serious (and expensive) strategic defense budget. Pulling troops from these places should help focus otherwise very fuzzy (mostly leftist) minds. If they would rather roll over for Putin than defend themselves, there is not much we can do to save them.
Kenneth,
I don’t know about not making the world freer. Do you think the defeat of the Axis powers would certainly have happened without U.S. involvement? (not rhetorical) Did the defeat of Nazi Germany not make the world freer? (rhetorical, my answer: I thought it did.)
I basically agree with the rest of your comment.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #137715),
Are you suggesting that fighting Hitler was not worth it? I hope that is not your position.
Kenneth,
I don’t think we need to keep government out of marriage to protect individual rights whether numerated or unenumerated. I think it’s just as easy to protect them with or without civil marriage and just as easy to violate them with and without civil marriage.
I think having all marriage contracts be written individually and tailored would be an unmitigated disaster. It’s better to leave the writing of individual contracts to sophisticated experienced people who have experienced dealing with lawyers and who are not currently in the throws of strong emotion (and possibly panicked due to unintended pregnancy or a variety of other situations.)
Re: DeWitt Payne (Comment #137712)
Hope they are not the Wolfowitz ones .
I thought you were going to say ‘Iran, Iraq, Syria’
“I believe one reason (marriages are declining) is because marriage has become a three-way contract between two people and the government, which is regulated by the state from wedding vows to divorce decrees.†– Wendy McElroy http://www.wendymcelroy.com/ifeminists/2002/0716.html
A few comments at the link about what’s happened with governments increased interest in marriage. I’ve seen marriage or not marriage affect income taxes and college financial aid awards. The U.S. Income tax code is sprinkled with what I’d consider possibly unfair rules related to marital status. Income thresholds and rate differentials based on marital status. There is no compromise that would satisfy both married and unmarried people as completely fair. One reason for this I suppose is the code is somewhat political. Not a benign objective system.
SteveF,
What rich countries. I can think of only one in Europe that could possibly qualify if you don’t count the UK as an European country. The rest are basket cases, some further along than others. I’m also leaving out Switzerland as they can indeed defend themselves, but not anybody else.
Sure there is, but not with our current President. Putin plays him like a violin, or perhaps better, a balalaika.
Kenneth,
In what alternate universe did the outcomes of WWI & WWII not make the world more free?
Is there possibly a new series exploring this by alternative history & SF writer Harry Turtledove?
https://www.sfsite.com/~silverag/series.html
Because here in the universe most of us live in the outcomes of those two wars led to more prosperity, more freedom, more humanity. It can be argued quite convincingly that WWII was the unnecessary war due to the bungled peace after WWI. And certainly WWI was avoidable as the great Eagles stumbled their way to oblivion. But then in retrospect all wars are likely avoidable.
DeWitt,
All of Europe, save for a few former East Block countries, have much higher per capita income than the Russians. It is not that they can’t afford strategic defense (and credible armed forces in general), it is that they choose to spend their tax money on other things. That ought to change.
Ron Graf,
I’m not aware that was ever the case under Mosaic law.
No, the root of the marriage issue is the abuse of the institution by its participants, which tends to condition their offspring to follow suit.
That would be the worst case scenario, seeing that community is dominated by people who think down is up.
This is wrong on one level and dubious on another:
1. There is no way they will not be worse parents, because they will deliberately deprive their children of either a father or a mother.
2. There is no reason to believe the negative consequences of these arrangements will become generally known, because the media and academia have too much invested not to cover them up.
Speak for yourself. Rachel and Laurel Bowman-Cryer are no sisters of mine.
SteveF,
And someone should give me a Ferrari. I’m not holding my breath on either one, which I consider to have equal probabilities of happening.
Europe disarmed for good reason. There’s a long history of bad actors taking control of one country or another and trying to take over someone else. If no one has much in the way of armies, that can’t happen. We were supposed to take care of threats from outside Europe and the bases and and troops were assurance that we would. No one imagined that an American President would ever be elected that thought that America was a threat to others.
Also, armies in countries with high per capita income are more expensive because you have to pay the soldiers more.
Hitler was a monster that the German people of that time to their eternal shame allowed to rule. The US has some shared blame for not doing more to help the Jews leave Europe at that time. Some blame the anti-sematism of the Roosevelt state department. Recall that we did not enter the war until we were attacked by Japan. What would have happened if Pearle Harbor never happened?
The winning side in WW II divided the globe and allowed the Soviet Union to unfree a huge population. The expansion of Communism certainly did not make the world more free. The Cold War was not a sign of freedom. Wars always expand the powers of governments involved as a necessity of the time, but then continue on in peace time.
Kenneth,
That seems to me a dodge of the key question. Sure Hitler was a monster, and in addition to carefully planned extermination of ‘undesirables’ he invaded and took over other countries, where his exterminations continued. Are you suggesting that war against Hitler’s Germany was not demanded by the circumstances? Are you suggesting that any organized government (like ISIS) doing similar things today does not demand military action? (not rhetorical questions) For me, the only legitimate question is how to most quickly destroy such monsters, not if it is the right thing to do. Unfortunately, our courageous president thinks restricting the size of the region where they can practice their atrocities is enough.
DeWitt,
Of course the Europeans will not spend money on defense if they get it for free from the US. If they are afraid of the consequences of having their own armies, then they should pay for the defense services provided by ours. Either way, they need to change how they spend their tax money. I agree, no one is going to give you a Ferrari.
My dumb tablet let me use anti-sematism where it should be antisemitism.
SteveF, you left out Stalinist USSR and Maoist China, Pol Pot Cambodia of your list requiring military action. I am hoping that was not a dodge.
“I think having all marriage contracts be written individually and tailored would be an unmitigated disaster. It’s better to leave the writing of individual contracts to sophisticated experienced people who have experienced dealing with lawyers and who are not currently in the throws of strong emotion (and possibly panicked due to unintended pregnancy or a variety of other situations.)”
Lucia, I doubt whether you or I would know exactly how privatized marriage would work, but I would think that there would be standard contracts that would cover most peoples requirements and at the same time allow those who want/need something different to do that.
You are quite right on the issue back in time of married women not having and actually losing contractual powers on marrying. Marriage and contract law were the domain of the individual states.
I know my grandfather was the executor of my grandmother’s father’s estate, but that it was my grandmother who was executor of her mother’s estate. My great grandmother’s will stipulating that my grandmother’s brother’s debt that he had owed to his father (and mother?) be deducted from his inheritance was executed. My great grandmother outlived her husband and I need now to go back and determined the dates of their deaths.
Kenneth
Standard contracts would likely exist. But likely, there would be numerous standard contracts– at least 1 per state and alternative versions. One per state would be required because various states would certainly pass laws prohibitting or requiring certain clauses in any contracts creating ‘marriage-like’ states. Each state would also decide which features make an agreement ‘marriage-like’. Is it cohabitation? Is it an agreement to have children or attempt to adopt them? Would merely discussing offspring make it ‘marriage-like’. Is it one that discusses sex between the partners? And so on.
Some states would be loathe to permit something like requiring either partner to be grant sex at some minimum regular intervals for example especially if that was in anyway connected to money. Most states should be loath to pre-determine custody situations prior to the birth of kids.
Also the mere fact that people are presented with a multi-page contract (and it would need to be multi-page) would invite tweeking. And the tweeking would often be being done in situations where at least one partner is naive.
The state would know this situation, and so would write lots of laws. This means the state would not be entirely ‘out’ of the contract, just as it isn’t entirely out of any other type contract. I cannot enter into a contract to sell myself into slavery nor into one that makes someone else a slave. This may seem like an extreme example, but states would be creating a huge body of law to ensure that some hypothetical contracts are void and some provisions are voidable. This means standard contracts would end up long and complex. People signing them would not necessarily know what they mean. They would get tweaked, and the equivalent of marriage, divorce and custody law would be even more complicated and in many ways worse and more unjust than it now is.
Yes. Some states laws differed from each other. But in the Victorian era, often married women in UK and US did not have the right to contract. In some states they did. My impression is generally Western states granted women more rights sooner. This may have merely been the result of their not existing until after people began to agree women ought to have rights more-or-less equivalent to mens.
Kenneth,
Not sure about Maoist China; the information available may not have been so clear as with ISIS. With Stalin in the early days of his regime, and with Pol Pot, there was probably enough information to act, although I am not absolutely certain of that. I would add to your list the Rwandan genocide in 1994, where Bill Clinton and others refused to intervene, leading to the slaughter of ~1 million civilians, including most of the family members of a little girl I was helping to support at that time; fortunately, she and her mother hid in the forest for several months and survived.
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With ISIS, there is plenty of graphic information to justify military action.
The Bangladesh genocide was perhaps worse than the Rwandan one. Yet another negative for Nixon .
RB,
Indefensible policy choices are not associated with left or right politics, just cowardice and immorality.
An assessment of the US policy regarding that genocide from a policy-maker at that time:
I think Europe is not so much opposed to war or military action as they need the resources to keep their heavy domestic agenda alive. Same as what I think Obama has in mind. Lots of rat holes to fill and so little time until the day of reckoning arrives.
As near as I can tell, libertarian, effectively isolationist, foreign policy requires the presence of rational actors. Since it’s fairly clear that no such animal exists, libertarian foreign policy fails.
The problem of engagement in the Iraqi region is that it has been historically complicated since the Czarist times/Sykes-Picot. Here is one assessment in support of the current U.S. strategy there, equating ISIS acts to say, the crimes committed by Assad’s regime.
Meanwhile, it appears that the federal government needs to upgrade their cyberwar strategies.
SteveF,
Do you think that Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia could ever spend enough on defense to stand off Russia? Because they’re next on the list after Putin absorbs however much of Ukraine that he wants.
Russia has a population larger than France and Germany combined. Adding part or all of Ukraine will only increase that margin. No single European country can stand up to Russia. That requires action by NATO, and that won’t happen without US leadership, which isn’t in the cards right now.
We have to deal with the world as it is, not how we would like it to be or how it would have been if different decisions had been made in the past. In the world as it is, we’re it. Without us, China will dominate Asia and Russia will dominate Europe. My impression is that this is how Obama would like it to be.
Why no one has been fired over this is beyond me. In old Japan, the floors would have been covered with intestines, and heads if the officials had proper seconds for their ritual suicides.
It may never happen but it certainly won’t happen if the U.S. is distracted by ISIS.
It might be enlightening for the hawks here to list all the occassions we went to war and should have gone to war in your opinion in one column and in another the cost in lives,, in another the casualties, in another the cost in dollars, in another what was accomplished by the military action, in another what freedoms were relinquished and in another whether you agreed with actions that were carried out. Use estimates for those actions that you would have approved but did not occur. Add up the results so we can talk about practical policies.
Iraq – $2T – $6T (estimated); >190K casualties. Massive failure. Strongly disagree.
DeWitt,
The OPM director resigned. I read Beth Cobert from the White House budget office is taking her place.
I feel safer already.
I agree that NATO must coordinate European defense. It is just that the Europeans need to contribute a heck of a lot more than they have been to the common NATO defense. No, small countries like Estonia can’t alone stand up to Russia (they are neither Swiss nor Israelis, both of whom probably would). But NATO forces certainly can jointly counter Russian threats… I think someone other than Mr Obama needs to help focus European minds.
Kenneth,
You can’t compare a hypothetical where we didn’t intervene with what actually happened. You have no idea what the situation would be now and how much it would have cost in blood and treasure if we had, for example, left Saddam in place and allowed the sanctions to expire. We know that we didn’t intervene in Rwanda and 500,000-1,000,000 people died. But they weren’t us, so I guess it doesn’t matter to you.
That being said, there’s no guarantee that if we had intervened, it would have made a difference in the long run.
It’s like the Wolfowitz pre-emptive doctrine and Darth Cheney never go away, however much history proves them wrong.
RB,
It is unclear what your point is. ‘Darth Cheney’? Why don’t you just say what you think? (Not a rhetorical question.)
Kenneth,
What makes libertarians essentially unelectable for higher public office is the standard libertarian take on international relations. It just doesn’t work to mind your own business when you are dealing with mad men and worse (like ISIS). Until/unless Libertarians embrace a far more realistic foreign policy, they will remain on the extreme fringe of American politics.
RB,
Not intervening is a choice with consequences too. How about Hitler’s invasion of the Rhineland in 1936? Failure to intervene decisively then had catastrophic consequences in terms of blood and treasure.
It’s not at all clear that the current situation in Iraq was inevitable. Do you think we should have let Saddam have Kuwait? Everything else flowed from that decision, much as WWII was a direct consequence of WWI and the choices the British and the French made after WWI. The current situation in Iraq was also the result of a number of bad choices made along the way.
You don’t get do-overs.
DeWitt,
The contrast between Gulf War I and II was that only one of them was pre-emptive.
SteveF: When Cheney still gets op-ed space to redeem himself, it just makes me speechless.
RB,
Why would that make you speechless? [not rhetorical] I still don’t understand what you’re trying to say at all.
It would help if you’d explain from the beginning, for example, what is it that you think Cheney did that requires redemption, and go on from there to what point you’re trying to make by talking about him.
Mark,
It’s OK, feel free to ignore it ..
Aww. 🙂
Look, Cheney was extremely unpopular. I could volunteer reasons I think he’d need redemption. His support for water-boarding, for example. But my volunteering reasons wouldn’t explain what you are trying to get at.
OK. I drop it.
Maybe RB is referring to Cheney’s stance on same sex marriage. Up until 3 years ago it was at odds with hope and change.
SteveF, in my mind libertarians should not run for political office but rather contribute on an intellectual level. Political philosophies are changed at that level and not by elections.
Government failures in the domestic and military domains stem from the same inherent weaknesses. The problem is getting the various sides in these discussions to admit to failures. The defenses of these failed policies are very much the same.
DeWitt, I suppose if you come up with your list of military interventions that you approve or disapprove, we could point to cases were maybe you did not care. If we got involved with every case of atrocity and civilian mistreatment in the world we would have a very expensive and busy military.
Did any proponent of Medicare or the recent Iraq war before both were initiated get the eventual costs anywhere near correct? We entered both under false pretensions.
Kenneth Fritsch:
Why would these be mutually exclusive, at all? There are millions of libertarians. Surely some can “contribute on an intellectual level” while others can run for political office while others can… knit sweaters.
That sounds like a rhetorical question, but I’ll assume it isn’t. If not, I would wager the answer is no. I would also wager none of the proponents of Medicare or the recent Iraq war approve of how either were handled. It is difficult to show the cause of their inaccurate estimates.
One tried and true tactic in politics is to allow your opposition to get a bill passed but to sabotage it to such an extent the bill is a failure, making your opposition look bad for having passed it (it happens outside of politics as well). On top of that, there is the maxim of, everybody loves a winner. The reality is if the Iraq war had gone smoothly and without a hitch, nobody would be complaining the “false pretensions” underlying it.
Maybe in fifty years people will be able to look back and accurately judge the situation without undue bias. I don’t know. I wouldn’t count on it.
DeWitt: <blockquote "It’s not at all clear that the current situation in Iraq was inevitable. Do you think we should have let Saddam have Kuwait? Everything else flowed from that decision, much as WWII was a direct consequence of WWI and the choices the British and the French made after WWI. The current situation in Iraq was also the result of a number of bad choices made along the way. You don’t get do-overs."
+10 — Every policy can be flubbed.
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BTW, today is the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre that interrupted Clinton’s golf game or dictation long enough to rally NATO air support for the Bosnians. The intervention is now his proudest accomplishment.
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At the same time there is wisdom in non-intervention in that it promotes self-responsibility for security and avoids the appearance of imperialism. In that way it saves American blood and treasure in the long run as well as the short.
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The game of Risk has not just one tactic or strategy but a subtle skill. We should elect a president who will not shy from it nor relish it, just one willing to entertain it.
The game of Risk has the strategy of rolling an inordinate number of 4s, 5s and 6s when defending against my pushes that should have had no chance of failure.
Or at least, that’s what my last two games have led me to believe.
Ukraine is going to need to roll some 6s. Sadly.
I think Ukraine is going to need to roll some, “People stop being apathetic chicken****s.” Unfortunately, that doesn’t fit on the side of a die, so they’re probably out of luck.
Diplomacy is, IMO, a much better game than Risk. There’s no random element. It also has a much higher stress level. Figuring out when to turn on your allies before they turn on you is intense.
“It [Diplomacy] also has a much higher stress level.”
For sure. I advise a physical before playing. ;O)