Santorum new presidential bid

[RonO]

Ex senator Santorum is running for president again. Unfortunately for
the ID perps the creationist IDiot rube has dropped the ID scam and has
gone back to calling it creationism.

You have to wonder if the ID perps will start bad mouthing that policy.

Santorum does sound like he is backing saner policies since dropping the
ID scam, but my guess is that won't win votes from his usual backers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/28/us/politics/rick-santorum-republican-2016-presidential-race.html

Ron Okimoto

[Inez]

I expect that Santorum will be trampled flat, cartoon style, when all of the Republican candidates come pouring out of the GOP clown car. Jeb Bush or Scott Walker or whatever supposed "electable" Republican will win the nomination and be thrashed by Hillary in the general due to the general odiousness of righty politics.

[Dale]

he seems to be talking more economically progressive, increase
minimum wage and middle class considerations

I'm from PA near where he was raised, they had him on the
local news when he announced

--
Dale http://www.dalekelly.org

[jillery]

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far away, Democrats were once accused of
nominating primary candidates incapable of winning the general
election. Apparently Republicans are determined to follow their
example.

--
Intelligence is never insulting.

[Earle Jones27]

*
Last time he ran (four years ago) he had seven children (or was it
eight – I believe that Number eight died young.)

Anybody know how many kids he has now?

earle
*

[*Hemidactylus*]

If Hillary becomes the Dem candidate for POTUS I might stay home,
especially if another Clinton versus Bush nightmare. I used to admire
Hillary as a rip off their head and poop down their neck Machiavellian,
but have become more idealistic.

Maybe I'll find a 3rd party that is appealing enough to pay for the gas
in my reasonably economical car. I'm struggling hard to get enthusiastic
for Bernie Sanders. Wow! Go Bernie! Yay! (in sarcastic April Ludgate voice)

Though he sickens me enough to not vote for him, I would not discount
Ben Carson. His accomplishments as a neurosurgeon speak for themselves,
especially given his disadvantaged childhood. The "Gifted Hands" movie
starring Cuba Gooding Jr. is intense when he's trying to figure out how
to separate those twins conjoined at the back of the head! But his views
on LGBT are abhorrent to me and his views on evolution in the book _One
Nation_ are hernia inducing howlers! Can he repair my gut *pro bono*
since he is responsible for the damage?

How can a neurosurgeon of such admirable renown be such a bonehead when
it comes to basic biology as evolution? Ughhh (double face palm)!!!!

He's a Seventh Day Adventist so maybe he's a vegetarian, which is a good
thing (if so), but his position in the culture wars wrt LGBT issues
makes me dislike him. Yet he *could* ascend to a prominent stature in
the current Repug free for all or become a VP candidate down the road.

I must say Carson is probably one of the most non-politically
accomplished presidential candidates ever! As far as accomplishments go
we have Reagan's movie career, GHW Bush's piloting in WWII and Teddy
Roosevelt's participation in the Spanish-American War. Separating twins
conjoined at the head trumps all that IMO! Oh yeah Eisenhower had a good
European theater record in WWII. But he didn't know how to act in a
surgical theater. And he set the stage for US in Indochina prior to JFK,
where FDR may have had the foresight to hold to a trusteeship for former
French colonies in Indochina had he lived and not punted to Truman.

I admire Rand Paul's filibuster on the Patriot Act, but won't be voting
for him either. His dad stood admirably with Byrd against the Iraq war.
But they both had their foibles!

[Inez]

On Friday, May 29, 2015 at 4:23:10 PM UTC-7, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> On 05/29/2015 12:02 PM, Inez wrote:
> > On Friday, May 29, 2015 at 4:28:11 AM UTC-7, Ron O wrote:
> >> Ex senator Santorum is running for president again. Unfortunately for
> >> the ID perps the creationist IDiot rube has dropped the ID scam and has
> >> gone back to calling it creationism.
> >>
> >> You have to wonder if the ID perps will start bad mouthing that policy.
> >>
> >> Santorum does sound like he is backing saner policies since dropping the
> >> ID scam, but my guess is that won't win votes from his usual backers.
> >>
> >> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/28/us/politics/rick-santorum-republican-2016-presidential-race.html
> >>
> >> Ron Okimoto
> >
> > I expect that Santorum will be trampled flat, cartoon style, when all of the Republican candidates come pouring out of the GOP clown car. Jeb Bush or Scott Walker or whatever supposed "electable" Republican will win the nomination and be thrashed by Hillary in the general due to the general odiousness of righty politics.
>
> If Hillary becomes the Dem candidate for POTUS I might stay home,
> especially if another Clinton versus Bush nightmare. I used to admire
> Hillary as a rip off their head and poop down their neck Machiavellian,
> but have become more idealistic.

Hillary isn't my idea candidate but I doubt she would actually set poor people and minorities on fire, as whoever the Republican nominee is will want to do.

If you listen to the words coming out of Carson's face hole he's a bozo. I don't really care about his past career, there are tons of neurosurgeons and not all of them would not make good presidents. I don't think he can appeal to people who aren't the Republican base.

> I admire Rand Paul's filibuster on the Patriot Act, but won't be voting
> for him either. His dad stood admirably with Byrd against the Iraq war.
> But they both had their foibles!

Meh. It wasn't a real filibuster, it was just him grandstanding.

[Chris Thompson]

I counted that as a case of the broken clock.

Chris

[*Hemidactylus*]

How would you evaluate the stances of the ACLU on Limbaugh's
doctor-shopping or on the Citizens United vs. FEC case? Broken clock
right twice a day or a good clock that rules sometimes in an
inconvenient manner?

https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-asks-court-protect-confidentiality-rush-limbaughs-medical-records

https://www.aclu.org/aclu-and-citizens-united

[Mr. B1ack]

These problems with Carson seriously bug me too. Although
he has SOME good ideas, his willingness to dismiss reality
on the evolution issue shows some serious cognitive dissonance
is going on in his head ... meaning I can't trust him to be
president. Where ELSE is he willing to totally disappear clear
realities ???

His take on gays/gay-marriages ... that's just an opinion on
some very subjective issues. There's no emperical science
that will tell you if gays should get married or not - that's
one of those 'human things', emotional mush.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Friday, May 29, 2015 at 12:03:11 PM UTC-4, Inez wrote:
> On Friday, May 29, 2015 at 4:28:11 AM UTC-7, Ron O wrote:
> > Ex senator Santorum is running for president again. Unfortunately for
> > the ID perps the creationist IDiot rube has dropped the ID scam and has
> > gone back to calling it creationism.

Ron O is furiously riding his hobbyhorse. Kalkidas had a great inspiration
when he changed the Subject line of his reply to an Okimoto boilerplate OP
to read,
"Discovery Institute: RonO's co-dependent enabler".
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/sRMGVmCLaZ4/X_HWcol3vEgJ

> > You have to wonder if the ID perps will start bad mouthing that policy.
> >
> > Santorum does sound like he is backing saner policies since dropping the
> > ID scam, but my guess is that won't win votes from his usual backers.
> >
> > http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/28/us/politics/rick-santorum-republican-2016-presidential-race.html
> >
> > Ron Okimoto
>
> I expect that Santorum will be trampled flat, cartoon style, when all of
> the Republican candidates come pouring out of the GOP clown car. Jeb Bush
> or Scott Walker or whatever supposed "electable" Republican

Don't forget the two Hispanics, Rubio and Cruz, and the governor
of Texas, umm, what's his name ... :-)

> will win the nomination and be thrashed by Hillary in the general due
> to the general odiousness of righty politics.

The general odiousness of Hillary's attitude towards the death
of four Americans, including an ambassador, in Benghazi
("By now, what difference does it make?") and her reaction to the
cold-blooded murder of Qadaffi before that (she laughed when she heard
about it)isn't going to sit well in the primary and presidential
debates, if her opponents have the guts and savvy to play these things up
in the right way.

Have the survivors of that Benghazi fiasco been allowed to testify before
a Senate committee yet about how it all happened?

Peter Nyikos

[Roger Shrubber]

Shades of Milton. "I was told that I could listen to the radio at a
reasonable volume ...". Anybody want to speculate about the radio
in somebody's office? The effect of the echo chamber? I grant it
may not be a radio per se. But the talking.points of the echo chamber
show up again and again. Make sure it's diet Koolaide or you are
destined for diabetes. It sucks to have them chop off extremeties.

[Peter Nyikos]

You sound incoherent, Shrubber. Has your seriously paranoid reaction
to the idea of human-chimp civil unions completely unhinged you?

If I were to play the propaganda game your way, I would post dark
suspicions about you being in deep denial over the fact that we
are descended from animals very much like chimps, -- just like a
creationist.

Will you also post a foaming-at-the-mouth tirade against Jared
Diamond, author of _The Third Chimpanzee_?

"The title of the book refers to how similar taxonomically chimps
and humans are, as their genes differ by just 1.6%, whereas chimps
and gorillas differ by 2.3% (p. 19). Thus the chimp's closest
relatives are not the other apes with which it is classed, but
the human (see Homininae). In fact, the chimpanzee-human difference
is smaller than some within-species distances: e.g. even closely
related birds such as the red-eyed and white-eyed vireos differ
by 2.9%. Going by genetic differences, humans should be treated
as a third species of chimpanzee (after the common chimpanzee and the
bonobo).[1] Or possibly the chimpanzee's scientific name should be
*Homo troglodytes* instead of *Pan troglodytes.* As Diamond observes
in his book, this would provide food for thought to people passing
this side of the bars of a cage with the label *Homo.*

As expected, your ranting and raving against me completely
missed every single one of the points I was trying to make with
my questions to RSNorman. I've explained these points to him a few minutes
ago:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/bypd3hSHoFk/dfuG7TNEoZYJ
Message-ID: <83356848-2ea9-40c6...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: Biological Evolution Has Reached Its Limit?
Date: Fri, 29 May 2015 20:02:08 -0700 (PDT)

But I expect you to remain in deep denial about my real intentions.

Peter Nyikos

[Roger Shrubber]

Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Friday, May 29, 2015 at 10:58:08 PM UTC-4, Roger Shrubber wrote:
>> Peter Nyikos wrote:

...

>>> Have the survivors of that Benghazi fiasco been allowed to testify before
>>> a Senate committee yet about how it all happened?

>> Shades of Milton. "I was told that I could listen to the radio at a
>> reasonable volume ...". Anybody want to speculate about the radio
>> in somebody's office? The effect of the echo chamber? I grant it
>> may not be a radio per se. But the talking.points of the echo chamber
>> show up again and again. Make sure it's diet Koolaide or you are
>> destined for diabetes. It sucks to have them chop off extremeties.

> You sound incoherent, Shrubber. Has your seriously paranoid reaction
> to the idea of human-chimp civil unions completely unhinged you?

For definitions of incoherence that equate to the audience being
unfamiliar with pop culture references, sure.

> If I were to play the propaganda game your way, I would post dark
> suspicions about you being in deep denial over the fact that we
> are descended from animals very much like chimps, -- just like a
> creationist.

So what you are saying is, that you are not posting such suspicions,
you are just elaborating on and forwarding the potential of such
suspicions without any intent to, well you know, sew them into
the minds of your audience, but by no means whatsoever are you
attempting to play a propaganda game, because, after-all, you
placed a conditional clause ahead of painting a scenario that you
are definitely not trying to impugn me with but nevertheless
feel compelled to elaborate upon. And you don't really accept
that your invidiousness is an essentially dishonest bit of bullshit.

Look, Peter, Baby, if you want to confess to us about some deep
compulsion you have regarding having sex with chimps, don't let me
stand in your way. I can't figure out if you have some special
attraction to chimps, or if it's more of some strange escape clause
you imagine about how chimps might be a pliable sex-slave that
gets you past some of your moral reservations about sex-slaves.
I'm assuming that you have moral reservations about sex-slaves,
please forgive me if I'm wrong.

Alternatively, you might be one of those people who wants to reduce
all of your personal morality to a concrete set of rules. Such people
run afoul of their own attempts to codify rules for all time. For
example, 'thou shall not steal' seems to get codified as a foundational
rule which is then equally applied to people who steal because they
are too lazy to work and children who steal bread because they are
starving. That type of codified ethics renders judgements that are
"morally" reprehensible, unless one subverts their moral judgement
to the whims of the rules they construct to attempt to codify moral
behavior. I'm saying that the rules we construct to approximate
morality should not take per-eminence over our foundational sense
of morality. Our attempts to codify morality may very well suck
and so relegating moral judgement to the rules we propose to approximate
good moral judgement is a cop-out.

The point? I'm unimpressed by your attempt to invoke various rules
about acceptable behavior to justify your attempts to justify
fucking chimps. Take a cold shower. Leave chimps alone.

[Chris Thompson]

I think they were right in the case of Limbaugh, and wrong in Citizens
United. I despise Limbaugh, but I despise invasion of privacy by the
government even more. And if they can get away with doing it to a
powerful gazillionaire radio personality, what chance do I have?

The ACLU, I think, made a serious error in CU. Sure, it's important to
make sure political speech is not banned. But that right should be
accorded to real people, not made-up legal entities, whether it be a
corporation or a union or what have you. My feeling is that an entity
deserves those rights if it can be put in jail for abusing them.

Chris

[Sneaky O. Possum]

Chris Thompson <the_th...@earthlink.net> wrote in
news:JNqdnaUXN6vab_TI...@earthlink.com:

> On 5/29/2015 9:59 PM, *Hemidactylus* wrote:

[snip]

>> How would you evaluate the stances of the ACLU on Limbaugh's
>> doctor-shopping or on the Citizens United vs. FEC case? Broken clock
>> right twice a day or a good clock that rules sometimes in an
>> inconvenient manner?
>>
>> https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-asks-court-protect-confidentiality-rush
>> -limbaughs-medical-records
>>
>> https://www.aclu.org/aclu-and-citizens-united
>
> I think they were right in the case of Limbaugh, and wrong in Citizens
> United. I despise Limbaugh, but I despise invasion of privacy by the
> government even more. And if they can get away with doing it to a
> powerful gazillionaire radio personality, what chance do I have?

And yet, freedom of speech is protected by the Constitution, and
doctor-patient confidentiality isn't.

The only issue in the Limbaugh case was whether the Palm Beach County
prosecutor had the right to seize Limbaugh's medical records before
filing charges against him. If he'd been arrested before the records
were seized, nobody would have batted an eye.

> The ACLU, I think, made a serious error in CU. Sure, it's important to
> make sure political speech is not banned. But that right should be
> accorded to real people, not made-up legal entities, whether it be a
> corporation or a union or what have you. My feeling is that an entity
> deserves those rights if it can be put in jail for abusing them.

Like the people who were imprisoned under the Alien and Sedition Acts
for saying nasty things about the president?

Putting people in jail for abusing their right to speak freely goes
against the whole point of giving them the Constitutional right to speak
freely in the first place.

Nor is there any good reason to restrict the right to speech to
individuals. The same article that forbids Congress from abridging the
freedom of speech forbids it from abridging the right of the people
peaceably to assemble: it makes no sense to argue that people have the
right to assemble into larger groups but those larger groups don't have
the same right to speech that every member of them has.

The real problem is that there's no plausible way to distinguish
spending money to publicize a political position from publicly
advocating a political position, which was the crux of *Citizens United
v. FEC*. If financing a political campaign qualifies as political
speech, and wealthy individuals are allowed to spend their own money
financing political campaigns, there's no logical basis for prohibiting
wealthy organizations of people from financing political campaigns.

Fortunately, the Constitution doesn't guarantee a right to
privately-held wealth: all we need to do is make it illegal to be rich,
and it won't matter whether organizations have the right to free speech.
Simple!
--
S.O.P.

[*Hemidactylus*]

On 05/30/2015 04:02 PM, Sneaky O. Possum wrote:
> Chris Thompson <the_th...@earthlink.net> wrote in
> news:JNqdnaUXN6vab_TI...@earthlink.com:
>
>> On 5/29/2015 9:59 PM, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> [snip]
>>> How would you evaluate the stances of the ACLU on Limbaugh's
>>> doctor-shopping or on the Citizens United vs. FEC case? Broken clock
>>> right twice a day or a good clock that rules sometimes in an
>>> inconvenient manner?
>>>
>>> https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-asks-court-protect-confidentiality-rush
>>> -limbaughs-medical-records
>>>
>>> https://www.aclu.org/aclu-and-citizens-united
>>
>> I think they were right in the case of Limbaugh, and wrong in Citizens
>> United. I despise Limbaugh, but I despise invasion of privacy by the
>> government even more. And if they can get away with doing it to a
>> powerful gazillionaire radio personality, what chance do I have?
>
> And yet, freedom of speech is protected by the Constitution, and
> doctor-patient confidentiality isn't.

Wouldn't that fall under privacy, which via *Griswold* and *Roe* sorta
emerged from the penumbra of the Constitution/BoR?

> The only issue in the Limbaugh case was whether the Palm Beach County
> prosecutor had the right to seize Limbaugh's medical records before
> filing charges against him. If he'd been arrested before the records
> were seized, nobody would have batted an eye.

For me the issue was the apparent hypocrisy of Limbaugh given his stance
on the War on Drugs, which has resulted, from programs such as Operation
Pipeline, in mass incarceration of minorities. It was also ironic that
an evil liberal organization, the ACLU, would file an *amicus* in his favor.

Limbaugh's "gazillions" and status in the societal hierarchy may have
given him some advantage versus some poor schmuck who wound up addicted
to painkillers and got himself in trouble.

>> The ACLU, I think, made a serious error in CU. Sure, it's important to
>> make sure political speech is not banned. But that right should be
>> accorded to real people, not made-up legal entities, whether it be a
>> corporation or a union or what have you. My feeling is that an entity
>> deserves those rights if it can be put in jail for abusing them.
>
> Like the people who were imprisoned under the Alien and Sedition Acts
> for saying nasty things about the president?

Free speech is an ideal. Isn't there some limitation, such as copyright
infringement or shouting fire in a crowded theater, or divulging secrets
to the enemy?

> Putting people in jail for abusing their right to speak freely goes
> against the whole point of giving them the Constitutional right to speak
> freely in the first place.

If they read out the contents of a bestseller into a digital recorder
and give this content away or sell it online as multiple files, their
speech infringes on the copyright.

> Nor is there any good reason to restrict the right to speech to
> individuals. The same article that forbids Congress from abridging the
> freedom of speech forbids it from abridging the right of the people
> peaceably to assemble: it makes no sense to argue that people have the
> right to assemble into larger groups but those larger groups don't have
> the same right to speech that every member of them has.

Assemblage rights emerge from individual rights. But at some point the
assemblage, due to various factors like wealth, power or other forms of
leverage trumps the individuals who remain independent untermenschen.
The language of the Declaration is that we are all created equal, and
this carries over to free speech rights of the first amendment in the
context of the oft abused 14th amendment's equal protection clause. We
should enjoy equal rights under the law, but in the sense of Orwell's
Animal Farm, some are more equal than others. 4 legs are good. 2 legs
are better. No legs, but occupying office space with windows, cubicles
and a Delaware charter, is even better. By virtue of their ever emerging
protected class status, corporate assemblages are becoming more equal
than humans. There's a power asymmetry. This isn't anything novel. It
started getting relevant 10 years before *Plessy v Ferguson* with the
infamous railroad case *Santa Clara*. This case was around a decade
after the 1877 election compromise that put Hayes in the White House and
ended Reconstruction. The rights of freed slaves were being eclipsed
(trajectory of 1877 compromise toward *Plessy*) , where those of the
robber barons and their companies were ascendant. And in the era of this
gilded social darwinism, we got the wonders of good breeding propaganda
where eventually the "feeble minded" would wind up less equal than
others and get their tubes snipped or tied by law. What was it that
Justice Holmes said in *Buck v Bell*? And this was decades before the
"welfare queen" sent conservatives into a tailspin of fear and loathing.

If the assemblages (of moneyed people) can conglomerate and amass more
wealth and power and leverage the political game against individuals
(versus the lesser folks who game the system from below with their
benefits schemes), we wind up with tyranny. And as multifaceted
behemoths with heavy handed managers, profit hungry shareholders and an
ethical mandate solely driven by fiduciary concerns, corporations wind
up less accountable than real people as things like limited liability
shield the people inside the bubble from full responsibility for
consequences of their actions. If a real citizen dumps a can of paint in
a stream there will be hell to pay. If a manufacturing company releases
toxic effluent within acceptable standards, what then? Sociopathy pays
dividends.

In *Hobby Lobby*, we had female employees whose rights butted up against
the closely held assemblage rights of their more powerful bosses, who
even as individuals enjoy more wealth, power, status and prestige than
the female employees. The women should have enjoyed, like Limbaugh, some
privacy as to their medical/pharmaceutical history. Wasn't this a
privacy guarantee in the vein of *Griswold* and that other case about
unmarried people? The corporation should be blind as to the birth
control methods the women chose, although to their credit they didn't
have problems with contraceptives in general, just the abortifacients.
But *Hobby Lobby* like *Citizens United* enjoyed an overly pro-corporate
court.

> The real problem is that there's no plausible way to distinguish
> spending money to publicize a political position from publicly
> advocating a political position, which was the crux of *Citizens United
> v. FEC*.

*Citizens* may have had narrower implications than popularly understood.
I'm not sure. It was initially mostly about commercials about an
anti-Hillary hit piece. But Toobin in _The Oath_ seemed to broaden the
focus a bit.

From what I recall the Solicitor General in the original case (before
it went to reargument) held that books merely mentioning a candidate
were fair game, which raises my hackles. I'm not familiar enough with
McCain-Feingold to know if this assumption by the SG was accurate. Yipes!

> If financing a political campaign qualifies as political
> speech, and wealthy individuals are allowed to spend their own money
> financing political campaigns, there's no logical basis for prohibiting
> wealthy organizations of people from financing political campaigns.

What about a corporation asserting its personhood and running as a
candidate?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/12/AR2010031204127.html

> Fortunately, the Constitution doesn't guarantee a right to
> privately-held wealth: all we need to do is make it illegal to be rich,
> and it won't matter whether organizations have the right to free speech.
> Simple!

Income inequality and wealth concentration can be addressed without
making wealth illegal.

[*Hemidactylus*]

On 05/30/2015 12:09 AM, Roger Shrubber wrote:

[snip personal references]

> ...if you want to confess to us about some deep

> compulsion you have regarding having sex with chimps, don't let me
> stand in your way. I can't figure out if you have some special
> attraction to chimps, or if it's more of some strange escape clause
> you imagine about how chimps might be a pliable sex-slave that
> gets you past some of your moral reservations about sex-slaves.
> I'm assuming that you have moral reservations about sex-slaves,
> please forgive me if I'm wrong.

I am having a difficult time envisioning a chimp as a pliable sex slave.
I would think once the chimp starts objecting there might be some
serious consequences involving a very irate chimp with strength much
greater than a human. The human might be lucky to still have an arm or
leg not forcibly removed and bashed over their head repeatedly.

[*Hemidactylus*]

On 05/29/2015 10:31 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Friday, May 29, 2015 at 12:03:11 PM UTC-4, Inez wrote:
>> On Friday, May 29, 2015 at 4:28:11 AM UTC-7, Ron O wrote:
>>> Ex senator Santorum is running for president again. Unfortunately for
>>> the ID perps the creationist IDiot rube has dropped the ID scam and has
>>> gone back to calling it creationism.
>
> Ron O is furiously riding his hobbyhorse. Kalkidas had a great inspiration
> when he changed the Subject line of his reply to an Okimoto boilerplate OP
> to read,
> "Discovery Institute: RonO's co-dependent enabler".
> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/sRMGVmCLaZ4/X_HWcol3vEgJ
>
>>> You have to wonder if the ID perps will start bad mouthing that policy.
>>>
>>> Santorum does sound like he is backing saner policies since dropping the
>>> ID scam, but my guess is that won't win votes from his usual backers.
>>>
>>> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/28/us/politics/rick-santorum-republican-2016-presidential-race.html
>>>
>>> Ron Okimoto
>>
>> I expect that Santorum will be trampled flat, cartoon style, when all of
>> the Republican candidates come pouring out of the GOP clown car. Jeb Bush
>> or Scott Walker or whatever supposed "electable" Republican
>
> Don't forget the two Hispanics, Rubio and Cruz, and the governor
> of Texas, umm, what's his name ... :-)

Rubio and Cruz are both Cuban-American. Rubio grew up in the curious
orbit of Calle Ocho, thus he's an obligatory hardcore Republican by
birth (Bay of Pigs betrayal by the Democrat Kennedy sealed that deal).
Cruz grew up way outside that orbit, so may have become a Republican as
a matter of living in Texas (something in the water there).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz

Not sure of his eligibility to run for POTUS, given he was born in
Canada and his dad was born in Cuba only being naturalized in 2005.
Maybe his mom confers citizenship on him. If elected he might get
similar flak that Obama did.

[Inez]

A quote taken out of context. She was asking what difference the motivation of the rioters made, not what difference the death of the people made. The Benghazi stuff is a big fat nothingburger.

> and her reaction to the
> cold-blooded murder of Qadaffi before that (she laughed when she heard
> about it)isn't going to sit well in the primary and presidential
> debates, if her opponents have the guts and savvy to play these things up
> in the right way.
>
> Have the survivors of that Benghazi fiasco been allowed to testify before
> a Senate committee yet about how it all happened?
>

The Benghazi committee is trying to put things off until closer to the election for political reasons. They've got nothing, and no one cares except for people who aren't going to vote for her anyway.

[RonO]

On 5/29/2015 9:31 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Friday, May 29, 2015 at 12:03:11 PM UTC-4, Inez wrote:
>> On Friday, May 29, 2015 at 4:28:11 AM UTC-7, Ron O wrote:
>>> Ex senator Santorum is running for president again. Unfortunately for
>>> the ID perps the creationist IDiot rube has dropped the ID scam and has
>>> gone back to calling it creationism.
>
> Ron O is furiously riding his hobbyhorse. Kalkidas had a great inspiration
> when he changed the Subject line of his reply to an Okimoto boilerplate OP
> to read,
> "Discovery Institute: RonO's co-dependent enabler".
> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/sRMGVmCLaZ4/X_HWcol3vEgJ

Projection is a way of life with Nyikos. This is TO and Santorum was
one of the the biggest political IDiots there ever was. This was true
until he dropped the ID scam and went back to call what he wanted taught
creationism instead. He was the rube that allowed Philip Johnson to
draft his "amendment" to the no child left behind bill. He was the
IDiot that had the bait and switch run on him in Ohio and was stupid
enough to write an editorial on how IDiocy was going to be vindicated in
Ohio in 2002. What happened in Ohio in 2002? All of that is real and
relevant political history for TO. Your stupid harassment is just
denial of reality.

Like I said this is TO and politics should be associated with the topics
of TO. You are the one that should get a life and instead of harassing
me for your years old stupidity. You should be admitting the stupidity
and moving on.

Just follow your link and go to this post and deal with it without your
usual denial. Why not do something like that for a change? Why did you
have to remove the material and run again? Why did Kalk remove the
material and run in denial. What else did he do besides change the
thread title? Sad is an understatement if IDiocy at this time.

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/sRMGVmCLaZ4/HjLNH2fucnAJ

Ron Okimoto

[Sneaky O. Possum]

*Hemidactylus* <ecph...@allspamis.invalid> wrote in
news:h9-dnQyeQNkI0PfI...@giganews.com:

> On 05/30/2015 04:02 PM, Sneaky O. Possum wrote:
>> Chris Thompson <the_th...@earthlink.net> wrote in
>> news:JNqdnaUXN6vab_TI...@earthlink.com:
>>
>>> On 5/29/2015 9:59 PM, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
>> [snip]
>>>> How would you evaluate the stances of the ACLU on Limbaugh's
>>>> doctor-shopping or on the Citizens United vs. FEC case? Broken
>>>> clock right twice a day or a good clock that rules sometimes in an
>>>> inconvenient manner?
>>>>
>>>> https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-asks-court-protect-confidentiality-ru
>>>> sh-limbaughs-medical-records
>>>>
>>>> https://www.aclu.org/aclu-and-citizens-united
>>>
>>> I think they were right in the case of Limbaugh, and wrong in
>>> Citizens United. I despise Limbaugh, but I despise invasion of
>>> privacy by the government even more. And if they can get away with
>>> doing it to a powerful gazillionaire radio personality, what chance
>>> do I have?
>>
>> And yet, freedom of speech is protected by the Constitution, and
>> doctor-patient confidentiality isn't.
>
> Wouldn't that fall under privacy, which via *Griswold* and *Roe* sorta
> emerged from the penumbra of the Constitution/BoR?

Not in the case of medical records being seized as evidence in a
criminal investigation, no.

Limbaugh was under suspicion of obtaining prescriptions illegally by
withholding information about prescriptions he'd already obtained. The
ACLU argued that the investigators should have subpoenaed the records
instead of 'using the more intrusive search warrant process':

https://www.aclu.org/news/seizure-rush-limbaughs-medical-records-violates
-floridas-constitutional-right-privacy-aclu

http://tinyurl.com/p8zf5ov

>> The only issue in the Limbaugh case was whether the Palm Beach County
>> prosecutor had the right to seize Limbaugh's medical records before
>> filing charges against him. If he'd been arrested before the records
>> were seized, nobody would have batted an eye.
>
> For me the issue was the apparent hypocrisy of Limbaugh given his
> stance on the War on Drugs, which has resulted, from programs such as
> Operation Pipeline, in mass incarceration of minorities. It was also
> ironic that an evil liberal organization, the ACLU, would file an
> *amicus* in his favor.

Well, sure. I should have been more specific: I meant the only *legal*
issue. As noted above, even the ACLU would have been cool with a
subpoena.

> Limbaugh's "gazillions" and status in the societal hierarchy may have
> given him some advantage versus some poor schmuck who wound up
> addicted to painkillers and got himself in trouble.

Conversely, he may have presented a more attractive target precisely
because of his social prominence.

>>> The ACLU, I think, made a serious error in CU. Sure, it's important
>>> to make sure political speech is not banned. But that right should
>>> be accorded to real people, not made-up legal entities, whether it
>>> be a corporation or a union or what have you. My feeling is that an
>>> entity deserves those rights if it can be put in jail for abusing
>>> them.
>>
>> Like the people who were imprisoned under the Alien and Sedition Acts
>> for saying nasty things about the president?
>
> Free speech is an ideal. Isn't there some limitation, such as
> copyright infringement or shouting fire in a crowded theater, or
> divulging secrets to the enemy?

Constitutionally, there is no limitation. The text says 'Congress shall
make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...'

Congress has, of course, been trying to evade that requirement ever
since, and occasionally getting away with it, sometimes with the help fo
the Supreme Court. But perhaps you think *Schenck v. U.S.* was decided
correctly?

>> Putting people in jail for abusing their right to speak freely goes
>> against the whole point of giving them the Constitutional right to
>> speak freely in the first place.
>
> If they read out the contents of a bestseller into a digital recorder
> and give this content away or sell it online as multiple files, their
> speech infringes on the copyright.

Publicly distributing the content of a copyrighted work you did not
create and are not authorized to distribute is not an act of speech.

>> Nor is there any good reason to restrict the right to speech to
>> individuals. The same article that forbids Congress from abridging
>> the freedom of speech forbids it from abridging the right of the
>> people peaceably to assemble: it makes no sense to argue that people
>> have the right to assemble into larger groups but those larger groups
>> don't have the same right to speech that every member of them has.
>
> Assemblage rights emerge from individual rights. But at some point the
> assemblage, due to various factors like wealth, power or other forms
> of leverage trumps the individuals who remain independent
> untermenschen.

As far as the Founding Fathers were concerned, that was the natural
order of things.

> The language of the Declaration is that we are all created equal, and
> this carries over to free speech rights of the first amendment in the
> context of the oft abused 14th amendment's equal protection clause.

Yes, the Declaration of Independence holds that all men *start out*
equal. It makes no suggestion that they should all *stay* that way, and
neither does the Constitution. The whole point of the Constitution was
to create a government that would stay out of the landed gentry's way as
they used their natural superiority to achieve dominance over the lower
orders.

> We should enjoy equal rights under the law, but in the sense of
> Orwell's Animal Farm, some are more equal than others.

On the contrary: we do enjoy equal rights under the law, as Anatole
France famously observed.

La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au
pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de
voler du pain.

> 4 legs are good. 2 legs are better. No legs, but occupying office
> space with windows, cubicles and a Delaware charter, is even better.
> By virtue of their ever emerging protected class status, corporate
> assemblages are becoming more equal than humans. There's a power
> asymmetry.

Corporations are typically more powerful than individuals, yup. What the
hell does that have to do with abridging freedom of speech? Rich
individuals are typically more powerful than poor individuals, too.
Should we take away all rich people's rights to speak freely?

> This isn't anything novel.

Or relevant.

> It started getting relevant 10 years before *Plessy v Ferguson* with
> the infamous railroad case *Santa Clara*.

In the real world, corporate entities had been acquiring rights since
1819, when *Dartmouth College v. Woodward* was decided.

> This case was around a decade after the 1877 election compromise that
> put Hayes in the White House and ended Reconstruction.

The fact that Hayes was able to cheat Tilden out of the White House was
incidental: 'Honest Sam' was as hostile to Reconstruction as Hayes was
indifferent to it. And this *still* has no relevance to speech rights.

> The rights of freed slaves were being eclipsed (trajectory of 1877
> compromise toward *Plessy*) , where those of the robber barons and
> their companies were ascendant. And in the era of this gilded social
> darwinism, we got the wonders of good breeding propaganda where
> eventually the "feeble minded" would wind up less equal than others
> and get their tubes snipped or tied by law. What was it that Justice
> Holmes said in *Buck v Bell*? And this was decades before the "welfare
> queen" sent conservatives into a tailspin of fear and loathing.

Justice Holmes was of course the guy responsible for your 'fire in a
crowded theater' analogy. And the *Buck v. Bell* decision came down in
1927: it had nothing to do with 'gilded social darwinism'. Quite the
contrary - eugenics was a popular cause among Progressives: no state was
able to pass a forcible sterilization law before 1907, and the practice
only became widespread following *Buck v. Bell*.

[bloviation deleted]

>> The real problem is that there's no plausible way to distinguish
>> spending money to publicize a political position from publicly
>> advocating a political position, which was the crux of *Citizens
>> United v. FEC*.
>
> *Citizens* may have had narrower implications than popularly
> understood. I'm not sure. It was initially mostly about commercials
> about an anti-Hillary hit piece. But Toobin in _The Oath_ seemed to
> broaden the focus a bit.

Toobin's a journalist. He exaggerates for a living.

> From what I recall the Solicitor General in the original case (before
> it went to reargument) held that books merely mentioning a candidate
> were fair game, which raises my hackles. I'm not familiar enough with
> McCain-Feingold to know if this assumption by the SG was accurate.
> Yipes!
>
>> If financing a political campaign qualifies as political
>> speech, and wealthy individuals are allowed to spend their own money
>> financing political campaigns, there's no logical basis for
>> prohibiting wealthy organizations of people from financing political
>> campaigns.
>
> What about a corporation asserting its personhood and running as a
> candidate?

What about it? The article you cited (from 2010) has the phrase
'campaign stunt' right there in the frigging headline. Did you read past
the first page?

Murray Hill does face a couple of tiny problems in its effort to
get elected to Congress.

For starters, candidates must officially register to vote as a
Republican to run in a Republican primary in Maryland. Late this
week, the Montgomery County Board of Elections wrote to Murray Hill,
informing the firm that its voter registration application had been
rejected.

It seems the corporation does not meet the "minimum requirements"
for voter registration, which include being a U.S. citizen and at
least 18, according to Kevin Karpinski, a lawyer for the county
elections board.

> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/12/AR2010031204127.html
>
>> Fortunately, the Constitution doesn't guarantee a right to
>> privately-held wealth: all we need to do is make it illegal to be
>> rich, and it won't matter whether organizations have the right to
>> free speech. Simple!
>
> Income inequality and wealth concentration can be addressed without
> making wealth illegal.

Sure. Abridging free speech rights would be *much* less tyrannous.
--
S.O.P.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Saturday, May 30, 2015 at 12:13:12 AM UTC-4, Roger Shrubber wrote:
> Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > On Friday, May 29, 2015 at 10:58:08 PM UTC-4, Roger Shrubber wrote:
> >> Peter Nyikos wrote:
>
> ...
> >>> Have the survivors of that Benghazi fiasco been allowed to testify before
> >>> a Senate committee yet about how it all happened?
>
> >> Shades of Milton. "I was told that I could listen to the radio at a
> >> reasonable volume ...". Anybody want to speculate about the radio
> >> in somebody's office? The effect of the echo chamber? I grant it
> >> may not be a radio per se. But the talking.points of the echo chamber
> >> show up again and again. Make sure it's diet Koolaide or you are
> >> destined for diabetes. It sucks to have them chop off extremeties.
>
> > You sound incoherent, Shrubber. Has your seriously paranoid reaction
> > to the idea of human-chimp civil unions completely unhinged you?
>
> For definitions of incoherence that equate to the audience being
> unfamiliar with pop culture references, sure.

You are dealing with style rather than substance here, and in a
limited way at that.

> > If I were to play the propaganda game your way, I would post dark
> > suspicions about you being in deep denial over the fact that we
> > are descended from animals very much like chimps, -- just like a
> > creationist.
>
> So what you are saying is, that you are not posting such suspicions,

No, because if I did do that, I would go about it a lot more
convincingly than I do here. After all, you are a highly
seasoned propagandist, and I would have to summon all my
experience of almost two decades in internet forums to play
the game your way.

Here, I've deleted a longish spiel by you casting doubt on
my not posting such suspicions, to focus on
the complete disconnect between what I wrote below and what
YOU wrote in reply. The word "schizoid" comes to mind here.

> > Will you also post a foaming-at-the-mouth tirade against Jared
> > Diamond, author of _The Third Chimpanzee_?
> >
> > "The title of the book refers to how similar taxonomically chimps
> > and humans are, as their genes differ by just 1.6%, whereas chimps
> > and gorillas differ by 2.3% (p. 19). Thus the chimp's closest
> > relatives are not the other apes with which it is classed, but
> > the human (see Homininae). In fact, the chimpanzee-human difference
> > is smaller than some within-species distances: e.g. even closely
> > related birds such as the red-eyed and white-eyed vireos differ
> > by 2.9%. Going by genetic differences, humans should be treated
> > as a third species of chimpanzee (after the common chimpanzee and the
> > bonobo).[1] Or possibly the chimpanzee's scientific name should be
> > *Homo troglodytes* instead of *Pan troglodytes.* As Diamond observes
> > in his book, this would provide food for thought to people passing
> > this side of the bars of a cage with the label *Homo.*
> >
> > As expected, your ranting and raving against me completely
> > missed every single one of the points I was trying to make with
> > my questions to RSNorman. I've explained these points to him a few minutes
> > ago:
> >
> > https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/bypd3hSHoFk/dfuG7TNEoZYJ
> > Message-ID: <83356848-2ea9-40c6...@googlegroups.com>
> > Subject: Re: Biological Evolution Has Reached Its Limit?
> > Date: Fri, 29 May 2015 20:02:08 -0700 (PDT)
> >
> > But I expect you to remain in deep denial about my real intentions.

And you met my expectations perfectly, deleting not only the three
questions but also my explanation of what they were about. Instead,
you tried to stir up a tempest in a teapot by writing something
completely irrelevant. What's more, the credibility
of what you wrote depends on people over on that thread NOT knowing that
I gave you notice about that post within MINUTES, with the four-line
reference up there.

> Look, Peter, Baby,

Save your terms of endearment for the likes of Rolf. Then they would
be sincere, wouldn't they?

Rolf seemed quite appreciative of the way you evaded responsibility
for your behavior with sneaky selective deletia and misleading
alliterative repartee:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/3M4guCHbKL8/UAy1ib-Ekc4J

> if you want to confess to us about some deep
> compulsion you have regarding having sex with chimps, don't let me
> stand in your way. I can't figure out if you have some special
> attraction to chimps, or if it's more of some strange escape clause
> you imagine about how chimps might be a pliable sex-slave that
> gets you past some of your moral reservations about sex-slaves.

Your wallowing in the mud like this does nothing to counter what I
wrote here or in the thread I linked up there on Friday.
I hope you aren't too far gone to realize that.

Continued after I attend to other matters on other threads,
including one or more in sci.bio.paleontology.

You may have to wait until tomorrow, but that's OK, isn't it?

Peter Nyikos

[Peter Nyikos]

On Sunday, May 31, 2015 at 7:48:04 AM UTC-4, Ron O wrote:
> On 5/29/2015 9:31 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > On Friday, May 29, 2015 at 12:03:11 PM UTC-4, Inez wrote:
> >> On Friday, May 29, 2015 at 4:28:11 AM UTC-7, Ron O wrote:
> >>> Ex senator Santorum is running for president again. Unfortunately for
> >>> the ID perps the creationist IDiot rube has dropped the ID scam and has
> >>> gone back to calling it creationism.
> >
> > Ron O is furiously riding his hobbyhorse. Kalkidas had a great inspiration
> > when he changed the Subject line of his reply to an Okimoto boilerplate OP
> > to read,
> > "Discovery Institute: RonO's co-dependent enabler".
> > https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/sRMGVmCLaZ4/X_HWcol3vEgJ
>
> Projection is a way of life with Nyikos.

Ron O keeps posting this unsupportable claim, but invariably
(as here) fails to show that I am projecting
anything onto him above. Here he isn't even pretending
to try to show it.

The hobbyhorse to which I was referring above is the alleged
"bait and switch scam" by the Discovery Institute, and it is only
in the post to which I am now replying
that Ron O makes an effort to link it up with Santorum.

> This is TO and Santorum was
> one of the the biggest political IDiots there ever was. This was true
> until he dropped the ID scam

...which Ron O sometimes calls "the bait and switch scam" but usually,
illogically, "the switch scam" because he has no credible evidence
that the Discovery Institute (DI) to which he attributes the scam
has posted anything resembling "bait" since the Dover 2005 fiasco
of the school board.

The fiasco was due to the way the school board disregarded warnings
by the DI not to require any statements by teachers in the public schools.

The DI did the best it could to make lemonade out of the school board's
lemon, by arranging for Scott Minnich and Michael Behe to use the courtroom
as a bully pulpit for demolishing claims about the non-ICness of the
bacterial flagellum and of the part of the clotting cascade
which Behe had said was IC (Irreducibly Complex).

> and went back to call what he wanted taught
> creationism instead.

Maybe it WAS creationism, in recognition of the fact that the
scientific methodology of ID (Intelligent Design) is not suitable
for the dumbed-down level of public schools.

> He was the rube that allowed Philip Johnson to
> draft his "amendment" to the no child left behind bill.
> He was the
> IDiot that had the bait and switch run on him in Ohio

Was he a rube or an IDiot? Don't forget, you alleged that
it is vile to denounce rubes back in December 2010.

And what was the bait in Ohio? When I checked your December 7, 2010
post where you first went into detail in Ohio, I found plenty
about the alleged "switch scam" but nothing about the alleged "bait,"
even though without bait there cannot be a "switch scam".

> and was stupid
> enough to write an editorial on how IDiocy was going to be vindicated in
> Ohio in 2002. What happened in Ohio in 2002?

The DI talked about teaching to weaknesses in standard evolutionary theory.
The alternative of intelligent design, being available as an alternative
explanation for unexplained phenomena, is all the "ID science" one can
realistically talk about on the high school level.

You, of course, expected readers to think that YOUR idiotic answer
to the question was the correct one, without even giving it.
Your brain is so drenched with the formulas that you've been spewing
this past decade, that it never occurs to you that many of your readers
aren't familiar with them.

> All of that is real and
> relevant political history for TO. Your stupid harassment is just
> denial of reality.

The so-called reality is your unwritten answer to your MTQ (Misleading
Tendentious Question), "What happened in Ohio in 2002?" which you
didn't have the guts to spell out.

> Like I said this is TO and politics should be associated with the topics
> of TO.

What hypocrisy! You started a thread on turtle genome sequence and
analysis, which is also a TO topic, but when I stuck to the topic,
you demanded that I instead deal with earlier purely personal
attacks by you.

I just went on talking on-topic, and you NEVER posted on that topic
again. Instead, you and jillery went into an orgy of malicious gossip,
the derogatory part of it unjustifiable, despite several participants
wanting you and jillery to go back to the topic. You "turned on them
like a viper" [a phrase from the English translation of the original
_Pinocchio_] and got PLONKED by more than one participant, including
<gasp> Shrubber and <double gasp> Burkhard.

Shrubber was discussing the topic of turtles with Norman and Harshman
and me, whom you wanted to suck into a "black hole" like you
are trying to do next:

> Just follow your link and go to this post and deal with it without your
> usual denial. Why not do something like that for a change?

Because my "usual denial" has to do with false statements you make
about me, and you are tyrannically demanding that I not deny
things that are false.

It has happened that way many, many times in the past four years,
and each time I catch you in dishonesty and/or hypocrisy again and
again, but you just keep slapping bilge on my "catchings" without
ever trying to refute being caught red-handed.

<small snip of redundant bilge by you>

> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/sRMGVmCLaZ4/HjLNH2fucnAJ
>
> Ron Okimoto

Two posts earlier, you had lied that I claimed to have never lost an
exchange on the internet. I denied that, and in the post you've
linked just now, you accused me of lying about THAT, and as
"proof" you quoted a HIGHLY qualified
statement by me. Note the qualifier "wrt malicious lies":

______________begin YOUR "proof"_________________________

The relationship between me and the other talk.origins regulars wrt
accusations of malicious lies here is a lot like the relationship
between Bilbo and Gollum wrt riddles.

If I win, they lead me out of *one* cavern of back-and-forth with
them by ignoring the post where I do it.

If I lose, everyone who has ever decided to become an adversary of
mine gets to join in "devouring" my existence on Usenet.

Fortunately, I have never lost, and if I remain true to my nature, I
never will.
===================== end of YOUR repost===================

Get it now? you and others have accused me of malicious lies,
but cannot possibly post actual proof, and if I remain true to
my conscientious nature, I will never post a malicious lie,
and so I cannot possibly lose such an argument.

Peter Nyikos

[*Hemidactylus*]

The ACLU seemed to think so. Privacy is mentioned in the URL and has 15
hits as search term on the link you provide below. I guess you know
better than the ACLU.

I would uphold someone's right to criticize the draft, but still think
the fire in crowded theater metaphor useful. But maybe going to the
*Reynold's* free exercise decision against the Mormon's I would
distinguish between ideas and actions as applied to speech.

The most recent version of this jurisprudence stands with:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action

That seems like a reasonable limit perhaps, playing devil's advocate.

>>> Putting people in jail for abusing their right to speak freely goes
>>> against the whole point of giving them the Constitutional right to
>>> speak freely in the first place.
>>
>> If they read out the contents of a bestseller into a digital recorder
>> and give this content away or sell it online as multiple files, their
>> speech infringes on the copyright.
>
> Publicly distributing the content of a copyrighted work you did not
> create and are not authorized to distribute is not an act of speech.

I was under the impression that the copyright part of the Constitution
may conflict with the free speech part of the 1st amendment. My example
was at the extreme end of copyright violation. At least fair use
doctrine allows for limited use of other's content when one expresses
themselves.

https://www.eff.org/issues/ip-and-free-speech

>>> Nor is there any good reason to restrict the right to speech to
>>> individuals. The same article that forbids Congress from abridging
>>> the freedom of speech forbids it from abridging the right of the
>>> people peaceably to assemble: it makes no sense to argue that people
>>> have the right to assemble into larger groups but those larger groups
>>> don't have the same right to speech that every member of them has.
>>
>> Assemblage rights emerge from individual rights. But at some point the
>> assemblage, due to various factors like wealth, power or other forms
>> of leverage trumps the individuals who remain independent
>> untermenschen.
>
> As far as the Founding Fathers were concerned, that was the natural
> order of things.

If we wanna play Scalia and ask what the founders and their compatriots
thought of corporations I wonder the results. Ted Nace opens a chapter
of _Gangs of America_ with Jefferson: "I hope we shall crush in its
birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to
challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the
laws of our country". Back then corporations were quite limited,
especially in lifespan and in the extent of what they were purposed to
do. I wonder if Scalia and Thomas had this sort of original
understanding in mind when deciding *Citizens United*.

You are equivocating between corporations and people. My point is mainly
with corporation personhood and goes back with what Chris said earlier
upstream: "But that right should be accorded to real people, not made-up

legal entities, whether it be a corporation or a union or what have you."

>> This isn't anything novel.
>
> Or relevant.

Relevant to my larger overarching point that goes beyond free speech of
artificial beings and more towards what Robert Monks refers to as
"corpocracy".

>> It started getting relevant 10 years before *Plessy v Ferguson* with
>> the infamous railroad case *Santa Clara*.
>
> In the real world, corporate entities had been acquiring rights since
> 1819, when *Dartmouth College v. Woodward* was decided.

Quoting Jefferson via Nace's _Gangs of America_ regarding corporate
charters Nace says making them "sacrosanct" (Nace's words) "would amount
to a belief that (quoting Jefferson) "the earth belongs to the dead, and
not to the living."" So if you wanna go back to that case, we have a
founder's opinion on it.

>> This case was around a decade after the 1877 election compromise that
>> put Hayes in the White House and ended Reconstruction.
>
> The fact that Hayes was able to cheat Tilden out of the White House was
> incidental: 'Honest Sam' was as hostile to Reconstruction as Hayes was
> indifferent to it. And this *still* has no relevance to speech rights.

It does to my larger point where I'm contrasting the loss of rights for
blacks as "Jim Crow" approached and the *eventual* (you apparently miss
this qualifier below) warehousing and sterilization of the
"feebleminded" versus the ascent of corporate power. Civil rights would
set things right for blacks in the mid 60's. ADA would do the same for
the developmentally disabled.

http://www.ncd.gov/publications/1997/equality_of_Opportunity_The_Making_of_the_Americans_with_Disabilities_Act

See subsection: LAYING THE FOUNDATION: DISABILITY POLICY & ACTIVISM,
1968–1988

And post *Santa Clara* FDR helped curb corpocracy, but it resurged with
Lewis Powell.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell,_Jr.#Powell_Memorandum

>> The rights of freed slaves were being eclipsed (trajectory of 1877
>> compromise toward *Plessy*) , where those of the robber barons and
>> their companies were ascendant. And in the era of this gilded social
>> darwinism, we got the wonders of good breeding propaganda where
>> eventually the "feeble minded" would wind up less equal than others
>> and get their tubes snipped or tied by law. What was it that Justice
>> Holmes said in *Buck v Bell*? And this was decades before the "welfare
>> queen" sent conservatives into a tailspin of fear and loathing.
>
> Justice Holmes was of course the guy responsible for your 'fire in a
> crowded theater' analogy. And the *Buck v. Bell* decision came down in
> 1927: it had nothing to do with 'gilded social darwinism'. Quite the
> contrary - eugenics was a popular cause among Progressives: no state was
> able to pass a forcible sterilization law before 1907, and the practice
> only became widespread following *Buck v. Bell*.

Hmmm...when did Francis Galton first publish on eugenics? In the 1900's?
Notice I said: "eventually the "feeble minded" would wind up less equal
than others." Thus I was aware of the timeline. But I may have been
conflating "social Darwinism" of the Gilded Age with the eugenics of the
Progressive era. My bad. Thanks for pointing this out. I since found
this reference:

http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/mistaking.pdf

Which helped clear up the cobwebs for me. Laissez faire types who uphold
individual rights would passively have the poor and developmentally
disabled eat cake, where eugenicists who uphold the common welfare of
society were all about sequestering them to protect the gene pool and
actively snipping their nethers. Social Darwinists might prefer letting
nature take its course with poor people, where eugenicists preferred
intervention through artificial means. That's a core distinction I may
have never pondered before reading Leonard's article.

And the Gilded robber baron folks may have preferred thinking God was
smiling on them for living right ("wealth gospel") over quasi-Darwinian
rationalizations of strong over weak. This attitude predated the
prosperity gospel seen today.

It was a tongue in cheek aside. Did you think I was being serious? See
your ACLU link above where you avoid "privacy" in the URL and multiple
times in the article.

> Murray Hill does face a couple of tiny problems in its effort to
> get elected to Congress.
>
> For starters, candidates must officially register to vote as a
> Republican to run in a Republican primary in Maryland. Late this
> week, the Montgomery County Board of Elections wrote to Murray Hill,
> informing the firm that its voter registration application had been
> rejected.
>
> It seems the corporation does not meet the "minimum requirements"
> for voter registration, which include being a U.S. citizen and at
> least 18, according to Kevin Karpinski, a lawyer for the county
> elections board.
>
>> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/12/AR2010031204127.html
>>
>>> Fortunately, the Constitution doesn't guarantee a right to
>>> privately-held wealth: all we need to do is make it illegal to be
>>> rich, and it won't matter whether organizations have the right to
>>> free speech. Simple!
>>
>> Income inequality and wealth concentration can be addressed without
>> making wealth illegal.
>
> Sure. Abridging free speech rights would be *much* less tyrannous.

Well there's stipulation as to time, place, and manner. Was
McCain-Feingold regulating the timing of such commercials? Outside those
boundaries there would be no such limitations.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-205.ZX.html

[quote Justice Stevens] In many ways, then, §203 functions as a source
restriction or a time, place, and manner restriction. It applies in a
viewpoint-neutral fashion to a narrow subset of advocacy messages about
clearly identified candidates for federal office, made during discrete
time periods through discrete channels. [/quote]

[RonO]

You just can't face reality again. I am going to leave this post intact
because it is classic Nyikosian assoholism. The Santorum denial is
classic Nyikosian IDiocy at its worst. Running from reality is
essentially nothing by comparison.

>>
>> Ron Okimoto
>
> Two posts earlier, you had lied that I claimed to have never lost an
> exchange on the internet. I denied that, and in the post you've
> linked just now, you accused me of lying about THAT, and as
> "proof" you quoted a HIGHLY qualified
> statement by me. Note the qualifier "wrt malicious lies":
>
> ______________begin YOUR "proof"_________________________
>
> The relationship between me and the other talk.origins regulars wrt
> accusations of malicious lies here is a lot like the relationship
> between Bilbo and Gollum wrt riddles.
>
> If I win, they lead me out of *one* cavern of back-and-forth with
> them by ignoring the post where I do it.
>
> If I lose, everyone who has ever decided to become an adversary of
> mine gets to join in "devouring" my existence on Usenet.
>
> Fortunately, I have never lost, and if I remain true to my nature, I
> never will.
> ===================== end of YOUR repost===================
>
> Get it now? you and others have accused me of malicious lies,
> but cannot possibly post actual proof, and if I remain true to
> my conscientious nature, I will never post a malicious lie,
> and so I cannot possibly lose such an argument.
>
> Peter Nyikos
>

Poor Nyikos word games can't save you from your pathetic assoholic
behavior. You have been caught in malicious lies so often that denial
is stupid at this time. Who was the dirty debater and lied to Bill in
such a malicious fashion? You started the whole thread to lie about
people and would not defend your initial accusations? Who made up the
Google story (that could never have happened because Google doesn't work
that way) to make fun of someone else, and eventually claimed it as one
of your pathetic knockdowns that never were? How pathetic can you get?
There is no doubt that your assoholic behavior has made you spout any
number of malicious lies and you have gotten caught at it and what did
you do in all cases? Your qualifiers mean nothing. What was the
difference between "could" and "should" that would mean that you are not
a creationist? What is a teacher doing when they discuss a science
topic in science class? Why did you run from those qualifications? You
made them up to lie about lying. That is just what you do.

You ran, just as you are running from this link and more of your
malicious assoholic lies:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/sRMGVmCLaZ4/HjLNH2fucnAJ

You are getting just what I told you that you would get, so deal with
reality without running away. Just the fact that you can't deal with
this reality means that you are admitting that everything that I have
written is the truth, so what do your word games amount to?

Why come back to be an ass every couple of months if you are just going
to be found to be more of an ass and run away again?

Ron Okimoto

[Rodjk #613]

On Tuesday, June 2, 2015 at 2:13:00 AM UTC+3, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> On 05/31/2015 11:51 AM, Sneaky O. Possum wrote:
> > *Hemidactylus* <ecph...@allspamis.invalid> wrote in

<SNIP>

>
> >>> Nor is there any good reason to restrict the right to speech to
> >>> individuals. The same article that forbids Congress from abridging
> >>> the freedom of speech forbids it from abridging the right of the
> >>> people peaceably to assemble: it makes no sense to argue that people
> >>> have the right to assemble into larger groups but those larger groups
> >>> don't have the same right to speech that every member of them has.
> >>
> >> Assemblage rights emerge from individual rights. But at some point the
> >> assemblage, due to various factors like wealth, power or other forms
> >> of leverage trumps the individuals who remain independent
> >> untermenschen.
> >
> > As far as the Founding Fathers were concerned, that was the natural
> > order of things.
>
> If we wanna play Scalia and ask what the founders and their compatriots
> thought of corporations I wonder the results. Ted Nace opens a chapter
> of _Gangs of America_ with Jefferson: "I hope we shall crush in its
> birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to
> challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the
> laws of our country". Back then corporations were quite limited,
> especially in lifespan and in the extent of what they were purposed to
> do. I wonder if Scalia and Thomas had this sort of original
> understanding in mind when deciding *Citizens United*.

Of course not. "Original intent" is only important when it produces a result that they want.

Rodjk #613

<SNIP>

[Peter Nyikos]

On Monday, June 1, 2015 at 8:23:02 PM UTC-4, Ron O wrote:
> On 6/1/2015 5:36 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > On Sunday, May 31, 2015 at 7:48:04 AM UTC-4, Ron O wrote:
> >> On 5/29/2015 9:31 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:

> >> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/sRMGVmCLaZ4/HjLNH2fucnAJ
>
> You just can't face reality again.

It is you who can't face the reality of everything that passed
between you and me preceding the url. Since you've said nothing
relevant about it, I deleted it all. If you have an ounce of integrity,
however, you will go back to it and explain just what the UWO
[Unidentified Written Object] is that you call "the Santorum denial"
below.

> I am going to leave this post intact
> because it is classic Nyikosian assoholism. The Santorum denial is
> classic Nyikosian IDiocy at its worst. Running from reality is
> essentially nothing by comparison.

Your last sentence is just your pathetic excuse for running from
my question about whether Santorum is a rube, and your earlier
claims of how vile it is to treat rubes shabbily.

And, of course, you are running away from the need to post what YOU
think of as a correction of "the Santorum denial" and also from all
that I said about Ohio 2002--and from the fact that you haven't even
answered your OWN question of what happened in Ohio 2002 that would
contradict ANYTHING I wrote.

You are a disgrace to your race -- the human race.

> >>
> >> Ron Okimoto
> >
> > Two posts earlier, you had lied that I claimed to have never lost an
> > exchange on the internet. I denied that, and in the post you've
> > linked just now, you accused me of lying about THAT, and as
> > "proof" you quoted a HIGHLY qualified
> > statement by me. Note the qualifier "wrt malicious lies":
> >
> > ______________begin YOUR "proof"_________________________
> >
> > The relationship between me and the other talk.origins regulars wrt
> > accusations of malicious lies here is a lot like the relationship
> > between Bilbo and Gollum wrt riddles.
> >
> > If I win, they lead me out of *one* cavern of back-and-forth with
> > them by ignoring the post where I do it.
> >
> > If I lose, everyone who has ever decided to become an adversary of
> > mine gets to join in "devouring" my existence on Usenet.
> >
> > Fortunately, I have never lost, and if I remain true to my nature, I
> > never will.
> > ===================== end of YOUR repost===================
> >
> > Get it now? you and others have accused me of malicious lies,
> > but cannot possibly post actual proof, and if I remain true to
> > my conscientious nature, I will never post a malicious lie,
> > and so I cannot possibly lose such an argument.
> >
> > Peter Nyikos
> >
>
> Poor Nyikos word games can't save you from your pathetic assoholic
> behavior.

"word games" is your deceitful description of a reality you cannot
deal with. You are becoming more and more schizoid, and
projecting your escapes from reality onto me.

>You have been caught in malicious lies so often that denial
> is stupid at this time.

I have never been caught in a single one, and you haven't even
got the chutzpah to identify any of the alleged ones, you
pathological liar.

> Who was the dirty debater and lied to Bill in
> such a malicious fashion?

If either of us fits that description, it is you.

> You started the whole thread to lie about
> people and would not defend your initial accusations?

You don't even have the chutzpah to identify the thread to which
you refer, nor the people involved, nor what the initial
accusations were.

Your habit of hiding behind Misleading Tendentious Questions [MTQs]
and DTQs -- Deceitful Tendentious Questions --
is causing you to sink deeper and deeper into incomprehensibility.

> Who made up the
> Google story (that could never have happened because Google doesn't work
> that way)

Finally, you identify something with enough information for me
(but hardly any other reader) to at least start to figure out
what the hell you are talking about.

Google, at that time, would truncate displays of posts, with ellipses
marking the truncation. Anyone could click on a blue phrase to show
the whole post. You stopped at the ellipsis in your reply to the
post and claimed that Google stopped the post there.

Nowadays, there is a variety: clicking on the blue phrase
causes the display to show it, all right, but sometimes when
you hit the reply arrow, it shows the whole post in the window of
your reply, and sometimes it just shows the part you originally
saw before you clicked on the blue phrase.

> to make fun of someone else, and eventually claimed it as one
> of your pathetic knockdowns that never were?

That wasn't one of the knockdowns; the knockdown came later, after I had
informed you about how Google worked at the time. I can dig
up the posts that marked the knockdown if you start behaving like
a responsible adult and identifying what all your vague and even
incomprehensible allusions are about.


The rest of what you write below is just a mixture of more MTQs and DTQs
that are too vague or too poorly worded to pin down to specific incidents.
That, and some hypocritical (and, at one point, slanderous) ranting by you,
who have responded to being caught in one vile act after another by
demanding that I first deal with this or that bilge-soaked post of yours
before you will say anything about the vile actions with which you
are charged.

The slanderous bit is your use of the word "admitting" near the end (below).

Peter Nyikos

[Sneaky O. Possum]

*Hemidactylus* <ecph...@allspamis.invalid> wrote in
news:BbWdnab6TbfEe_HI...@giganews.com:

> On 05/31/2015 11:51 AM, Sneaky O. Possum wrote:
>> *Hemidactylus* <ecph...@allspamis.invalid> wrote in
>> news:h9-dnQyeQNkI0PfI...@giganews.com:
>>
>>> On 05/30/2015 04:02 PM, Sneaky O. Possum wrote:

[snip]

>>>> And yet, freedom of speech is protected by the Constitution, and
>>>> doctor-patient confidentiality isn't.
>>>
>>> Wouldn't that fall under privacy, which via *Griswold* and *Roe*
>>> sorta emerged from the penumbra of the Constitution/BoR?
>>
>> Not in the case of medical records being seized as evidence in a
>> criminal investigation, no.
>
> The ACLU seemed to think so.

As noted in the URL itself, the ACLU was referring to the *Florida*
Constitution:

https://www.flsenate.gov/Laws/Constitution#A1S23

'Every natural person has the right to be let alone and free from
governmental intrusion into the person’s private life except as
otherwise provided herein. This section shall not be construed to limit
the public’s right of access to public records and meetings as provided
by law.'

Section 23 was adopted in 1980 and amended in 1998. There is no such
provision in the U.S. Constitution, of course.

> Privacy is mentioned in the URL and has 15 hits as search term on the
> link you provide below. I guess you know better than the ACLU.

I guess the ACLU and I both know better than you.

>> Limbaugh was under suspicion of obtaining prescriptions illegally by
>> withholding information about prescriptions he'd already obtained.
>> The ACLU argued that the investigators should have subpoenaed the
>> records instead of 'using the more intrusive search warrant process':
>>
>> https://www.aclu.org/news/seizure-rush-limbaughs-medical-records-viola
>> tes-floridas-constitutional-right-privacy-aclu
>>
>> http://tinyurl.com/p8zf5ov

[snip]

>> Congress has, of course, been trying to evade that requirement ever
>> since, and occasionally getting away with it, sometimes with the help
>> fo the Supreme Court. But perhaps you think *Schenck v. U.S.* was
>> decided correctly?
>
> I would uphold someone's right to criticize the draft, but still think
> the fire in crowded theater metaphor useful.

There may be good reasons to put limits on speech, but if Congress wants
to do that, Congress should proposed an amendment, as provided for in
Article V. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. had no more business making the
laws of the United States than General Motors does.

> But maybe going to the *Reynold's* free exercise decision against the
> Mormon's I would distinguish between ideas and actions as applied to
> speech.

*Reynolds* involved freedom of religion, not freedom of speech. Polygamy
is most definitely not a speech issue.

> The most recent version of this jurisprudence stands with:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action
>
> That seems like a reasonable limit perhaps, playing devil's advocate.

Reasonability is not the issue. Doing an end run around the Constitution
is the issue.

>>>> Putting people in jail for abusing their right to speak freely goes
>>>> against the whole point of giving them the Constitutional right to
>>>> speak freely in the first place.
>>>
>>> If they read out the contents of a bestseller into a digital
>>> recorder and give this content away or sell it online as multiple
>>> files, their speech infringes on the copyright.
>>
>> Publicly distributing the content of a copyrighted work you did not
>> create and are not authorized to distribute is not an act of speech.
>
> I was under the impression that the copyright part of the Constitution
> may conflict with the free speech part of the 1st amendment.

You think there's a conflict between 'The Congress shall have power ...
To promote the progress of sciences and useful arts, by securing for
limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their
respective writings and discoveries' and 'Congress shall make no law ...
abridging the freedom of speech'? Do you think plagiarism is speech?

[snip]

>>> Assemblage rights emerge from individual rights. But at some point
>>> the assemblage, due to various factors like wealth, power or other
>>> forms of leverage trumps the individuals who remain independent
>>> untermenschen.
>>
>> As far as the Founding Fathers were concerned, that was the natural
>> order of things.
>
> If we wanna play Scalia and ask what the founders and their
> compatriots thought of corporations I wonder the results.

I wonder why you would care what a bunch of slaveholders thought of
corporations.

> Ted Nace
> opens a chapter of _Gangs of America_ with Jefferson: "I hope we shall
> crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which
> dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and
> bid defiance to the laws of our country".

I'm sure Jefferson's slaves were all thankful they were owned by an
individual rather than a corporation, yup.

You wanna hate on corporations, feel free. There's no law against hating
on 'em. It won't do a damn bit of good, and it'll warp your view of
history, but that's just, like, my opinion, man.
--
S.O.P.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Convenient for them ain't it :-)

[*Hemidactylus*]

I was carrying it over as an analogy as anyone who would care to give a
fair reading could recognize. Do you think I'm so fucking stupid
(obviously) that I think free exercise and free speech are the same
thing! Maybe so. Duhhhhhh!!! How was Jews for Jesus vs. LAX decided?

Obviously I condone slavery by citing Jefferson therefore my post is shit.

>> Ted Nace
>> opens a chapter of _Gangs of America_ with Jefferson: "I hope we shall
>> crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which
>> dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and
>> bid defiance to the laws of our country".
>
> I'm sure Jefferson's slaves were all thankful they were owned by an
> individual rather than a corporation, yup.
>
> You wanna hate on corporations, feel free. There's no law against hating
> on 'em. It won't do a damn bit of good, and it'll warp your view of
> history, but that's just, like, my opinion, man.

So my view of history is warped then. I think I recall, but I'm so
stupid maybe not, that I thanked you for something in a place you
snipped where I posted a link to someone's article which *topically*
contrasted social darwinism and eugenics. Guess that wasn't worthy of
comment.

[Burkhard]

To that the answer is most certainly yes. Repeating words by someone
else is speech just as using your own, there is no originality
requirement in the 1. Amendment. That becomes particularly obvious if
you look at the history of copyright law, which was born as a Royal
privilege granted on an ad hoc basis also to ensure that all printers
were government friendly.

The most relevant case on this is Zacchini v. Scripps-Howard
Broadcasting Co. The Ohio Supreme court had emphasized the 1. Amendment
over the property interest, SCOTUS reversed with a 5-3 majority, but
everybody agreed that this was a genuine 1 Amendment issue - the
question only is how to balance the two conflicting rights in individual
cases.

From Justice Powell's dissent: "The Court's holding that the station's
ordinary news report may give rise to substantial liability has
disturbing implications, for the decision could lead to a degree of
media self-censorship. Hereafter, whenever a television news editor is
unsure whether certain film footage received from a camera crew might be
held to portray an "entire act," he may decline coverage – even of
clearly newsworthy events – or confine the broadcast to watered-down
verbal reporting, perhaps with an occasional still picture. The public
is then the loser. This is hardly the kind of news reportage that the
First Amendment is meant to foster."

There is a considerable cased law and also academic discussion on
this, with courts sometimes ruling in favour of the 1, sometimes in
favour of the copyright clause. see e.g. Nimmer, Does Copyright Abridge
the First Amendment Guarantees of Free Speech and Press?,17 UCLA L. REV.
1180, 1185-86 (1970). Goldstein, Copyright and the First Amendment, 70
COLuM. L. REV. 983 (1970); Sobel, Copyright and the First Amendment: A
Gathering Storm 19 COPYRIGHT L. SyMP. 43 (1971).

Essentially, the decisions follow the internal logic of New York Times
Co. v. Sullivan, which is also a conflict between a private right and
the 1. Libel and plagiarism are both speech, they are just not
necessarily protected speech, requiring balancing on a case to case basis.


> [snip]

[Burkhard]

OK, that is a tricky one. It is true that Reynolds, and also subsequent
discussions of polygamy, do not frame the issue as a free speech issue.
There are some good reasons for this and many bad ones, given how the
defendants framed their claim (One problem for me is that I consider the
reasoning in Reynolds about as odious as that in Dred Scott, and it is
rather scandalous that SCOTUS keeps citing a precedent that had racism
written all over it from start to finish. There can be good reasons not
to recognize polygamous marriages, but you won't find them there). One
issue why Reynolds is free exercise only, and not also free speech, is
that plaintiffs claimed they really were married, not just in the eyes
of their god but in the eyes of the law - so on their reasoning, the
state was not just wrong for prosecuting their behavior, it was also
wrong for not recognizing polygamous marriages as marriages. Now at the
time, this was a necessary strategy, because adultery laws were still
actively enforced at the time. So they could not just say: "we only live
together as our religion requires us to" because that would involve a
non-speech conduct - having sex with the persons they were living with -
that was criminal at the time. So that gets a non-speech issue bang into
the centre, and that can only be dealt with through a direct free
exercise claim. The second, not quite so god reason, is the persistent
conflation of fraudulent bigamy with religious polygamy, a problem the
US law inherited from the common law which never was quite clear on what
the issue really was (or rather, it was quite clear in what it said that
the issue was fraudulent misrepresentation, just that in practice it was
applied in cases such as religious polygamy where this simply does not
apply) So if the defendant had framed it as a free speech issue, the
problem would have been to argue that their speech was not fraudulent
misrepresentation, which is not protected speech. So the plaintiffs in
Reynolds had to frame it in terms of free exercise only.

Reynolds then spawned Davis v Beason, and here it is even more
difficult to see why this was not (also) a free speech issue . At stake
was swearing of a mandatory anti-bigamy oath, and if that isn't a free
(forced) speech issue, I don't know what is. Furthermore, the oath
prescribed certain activities which in turn are exercise of speech,i.e.
" to advice on" or "counsel for" polygamy (as opposed to engaging in
it). That all this should have been seen (also) as a free speech issue
is a point made e.b. by Martha Nussbaum (Liberty of Conscience: In
Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality)

Now, I guess that the reasons why this was again framed as a free
exercise issue only are historical- religious oath in England had been
the chosen way to establish a state church and destroy dissent, it was
just that experience that had triggered the free exercise and
non-establishment clauses, so it may have seemed natural to put it under
that header, and at the time there was little to gain by arguing the
free speech side.

Fast forward to the present. Common law marriages have all but
disappeared, criminal prosecutions for adultery either abolished
altogether or remain unenforced, so the two historical reasons to frame
polygamy as a free exercise issue have become moot. Furthermore, in the
meantime there was Employment Division v. Smith, and the recognition of
the concept of a "hybrid right". In essence, the Court argued that a
religious motivation can exempt a person from a neutral, generally
applicable law provided that both the right of free exercise along with
some other right is involved.

So suddenly there is an incentive to frame polygamy also as a free
speech issue - and low and behold, this is what we find in Brown v.
Buhman (still under appeal, I think) It's an interesting decision,
extremely well researched and well worth reading. The judge, in finding
for Brown, argues that at least under the facts of this case, the only
thing that separates Brown's conduct from legally harmless adultery is
the "way he presents their relation" to the outside world, that is
speech. It therefore creates a Hybrid Right under Smith where free
speech and free exercise become essentially entangled.

Now, that is how I read Hemidactylus point: Many manifestations of free
exercise of religion will be speech acts (that follows from the symbolic
nature of much religious activity) Speech acts are still speech, just
not "only" descriptive speech. If I say "I do" at a wedding, I do not
(just) express an opinion about my mental state, I perform an activity
with legal consequences. That is essentially the insight by Austin and
Searle. Every time we say something, we do two things - we commit a
locutionary act (the physical utterance with its syntactic and semantic
meaning) and an illocutionary act - the pragmatic "illocutionary
force" of the utterance, as a socially valid verbal action.

If you draw the distinction like this, all verbal behaviour is always
also speech and thus free speech issues potentially involved. But in
law, we often want to distinguish special types of illucutionary acts as
being "different" and thus fall under a different legal regime. Certain
threats are the prime example: "Give me your money or I kill you" is not
a prediction that I want to share with you FYI, it is a specific type of
speech act regulated by criminal law. Still speech, just not protected
speech.

The aw does not follow linguistic categories here in a neat or
systematic way. But from a linguistic perspective, we commonly
distinguish different illucutionary acts (copied for convinience from
wikipedia)

assertives = speech acts that commit a speaker to the truth of the
expressed proposition, e.g. reciting a creed
directives = speech acts that are to cause the hearer to take a
particular action, e.g. requests, commands and advice
commissives = speech acts that commit a speaker to some future action,
e.g. promises and oaths
expressives = speech acts that express the speaker's attitudes and
emotions towards the proposition, e.g. congratulations, excuses and thanks
declaratives = speech acts that change the reality in accord with the
proposition of the declaration, e.g. baptisms, pronouncing someone
guilty or pronouncing someone husband and wife

Assetives and expressives are the paradigmatic "free speech territory"
Declaratives are the ones most likely to be governed through something
else. With directives and comissives, it depends.

[RonO]

Oops, I hit the wrong button and this didn't post, so I'll have to
repost. I will reiterate that I do not want you pestering me further.
You are low life scum as the post below reflects. Why even bring up
your stupid racist tendencies. I am not a race, I am just one person
that you decided to pick on for your own jollies and it blew up in your
assoholic face. That you have to lie about even stupid things like not
running from the posts that you claimed that you would deal with
"tomorrow" is just the typical stupidity that everyone has to deal with.

Deal with reality. If you bother me again, all you can expect is to be
exposed as more of an asshole and you will get the repost of what you
keep wanting to lie about. Even a jerk as badly off as you are must
understand how badly you get burned every time you try to be an asshole.
All I have to do is keep demonstrating that you refuse to acknowledge
reality. There are no new topics that I ever wish to discuss with you.
I cannot make myself any clearer than to just tell you to get lost,
and stop bugging me.

Ron Okimoto

Repost:

Snip, run and lie a lot. What can you not face? What did I tell you
that I would do?

Run in denial or face reality. How many times can you run?

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/sRMGVmCLaZ4/HjLNH2fucnAJ

Ron Okimoto

[*Hemidactylus*]

My point, lost way above somewhere was in the idea vs. action dichotomy.
*Reynolds* had a belief vs. action dichotomy. You are free to believe in
something in a religious sense, you just can't take action and commit an
illegal action. Likewise you are free to speak on something that make be
an avowal of illegal action, but when you actually commit the crime,
then you can be prosecuted. A strained analogy, but I saw fit to cross
from free exercise to free speech using the belief-action dichotomy of
*Reynolds*. S.O.P. in a haste to cast me as a dipshit must not have read
carefully enough, nor pondered this *obvious* implication.

And theLAX v. Jews for Jesus thingy involved IIRC a public space which
*should* be considered a free speech zone. Therefore religious
proselytization could be covered as free speech. If one provides
accommodation to non-religious groups for activities, be they political,
recreational or whatever, one must also accommodate religious speech
(which can also be construed as free exercise more narrowly). I thing
there have been cases where religious student groups can meet after
hours as schools in a similar vein. But what do I know, being a dumbass
and all.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Tuesday, June 2, 2015 at 11:47:58 PM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> On 06/02/2015 04:16 AM, Rodjk #613 wrote:
> > On Tuesday, June 2, 2015 at 2:13:00 AM UTC+3, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> >> On 05/31/2015 11:51 AM, Sneaky O. Possum wrote:
> >>> *Hemidactylus* <ecph...@allspamis.invalid> wrote in
> > <SNIP>
> >
> >>
> >>>>> Nor is there any good reason to restrict the right to speech to
> >>>>> individuals. The same article that forbids Congress from abridging
> >>>>> the freedom of speech forbids it from abridging the right of the
> >>>>> people peaceably to assemble: it makes no sense to argue that people
> >>>>> have the right to assemble into larger groups but those larger groups
> >>>>> don't have the same right to speech that every member of them has.
> >>>>
> >>>> Assemblage rights emerge from individual rights. But at some point the
> >>>> assemblage, due to various factors like wealth, power or other forms
> >>>> of leverage trumps the individuals who remain independent
> >>>> untermenschen.

It's a good thing Mitchell Coffey is on good terms with y'all, otherwise
he'd rant and rave at this use of "untermenschen."

> >>> As far as the Founding Fathers were concerned, that was the natural
> >>> order of things.

I believe Hamilton and Jefferson were divided on this kind of thing.

> >> If we wanna play Scalia and ask what the founders and their compatriots
> >> thought of corporations I wonder the results. Ted Nace opens a chapter
> >> of _Gangs of America_ with Jefferson: "I hope we shall crush in its
> >> birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to
> >> challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the
> >> laws of our country". Back then corporations were quite limited,
> >> especially in lifespan and in the extent of what they were purposed to
> >> do. I wonder if Scalia and Thomas had this sort of original
> >> understanding in mind when deciding *Citizens United*.

Is that the case that dealt with a corporation whose
voting members were agreed that providing abortifacients was
a violation of their view of "Thou Shalt Not Kill" as
practicing Christians? The SCOTUS ruled that they didn't have
to pay for insurance that enabled their employees to purchase
top-of-the-line abortifactients free of any copay.

There are various kinds of contraceptives, and this corporation
had no problem paying for those which did not have an abortifacient
effect.

Your kind had a field day sneering at the decision, with one syndicated
Washington Post columnist pretending that it declared that
"corporations were people".

> > Of course not. "Original intent" is only important when it produces
> > a result that they want.
>
> Convenient for them ain't it :-)

There are two original intents working in opposite directions here:
freedom of religion [Bill of Rights, First Amendment] and limiting the
power of corporations. Which article of the Constitution does
the latter come under?

Peter Nyikos

[Sneaky O. Possum]

*Hemidactylus* <ecph...@allspamis.invalid> wrote in
news:ZredneHFM7v2f_PI...@giganews.com:

[snip]

> My point, lost way above somewhere was in the idea vs. action
> dichotomy. *Reynolds* had a belief vs. action dichotomy. You are free
> to believe in something in a religious sense, you just can't take
> action and commit an illegal action. Likewise you are free to speak on
> something that make be an avowal of illegal action, but when you
> actually commit the crime, then you can be prosecuted. A strained
> analogy, but I saw fit to cross from free exercise to free speech
> using the belief-action dichotomy of *Reynolds*. S.O.P. in a haste to
> cast me as a dipshit must not have read carefully enough, nor pondered
> this *obvious* implication.

You cast yourself in that role; I merely reviewed your performance.
--
S.O.P.

[*Hemidactylus*]

So you're not going to address my explanation for the *Reynolds* analogy
(belief-action vs idea-action), nor the part below you snipped where I
collapse what could be free exercise concerns into free speech, but
revel in your role as snarky old poophead?

[Burkhard]

Just came across this - another copyright/free speech litigation, with
free speech likely to win:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/06/03/city-sues-critic-for-supposedly-infringing-citys-copyright-by-posting-city-council-video-clips-with-commentary-on-youtube/

[Will in New Haven]

Citizens United is probably a bad decision but it is also _irrelevant_ If corporations and unions are not allowed to donate then suddenly there will be individuals donating money in order to further the aims of those corporations and unions.

Santorum is also irrelevant. No one who has spoken out publicly against oral sex is going to get elected.

--
Will in New Haven

[Peter Nyikos]

Hmmm... the above information might come in handy some time.

> My point, lost way above somewhere was in the idea vs. action dichotomy.
> *Reynolds* had a belief vs. action dichotomy. You are free to believe in
> something in a religious sense, you just can't take action and commit an
> illegal action.

You can, but you need to be prepared to take your case for the
law being unconstitutional all the way to the US Supreme Court,
especially if the law is something that was rammed through with
the use of wheeling, dealing, and high pressure tactics, as was
the case with Obamacare.

Specifically, I refer to the Obamacare provision forcing employers
to foot the bill for insurance that gives women free top-of-the-line
abortifacients--no copay, even.

Hobby Lobby won. That just rankles you, doesn't it?

> If one provides
> accommodation to non-religious groups for activities, be they political,
> recreational or whatever, one must also accommodate religious speech
> (which can also be construed as free exercise more narrowly). I thing
> there have been cases where religious student groups can meet after
> hours as schools in a similar vein. But what do I know, being a dumbass
> and all.

Nice to see you are on the side of the religion clause of the First
Amendment in this issue. Too bad we keep hearing of schools and universities
which disagree with you and me on this.

Peter Nyikos

[Peter Nyikos]

On Saturday, May 30, 2015 at 12:13:12 AM UTC-4, Roger Shrubber wrote:
> Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > On Friday, May 29, 2015 at 10:58:08 PM UTC-4, Roger Shrubber wrote:
> >> Peter Nyikos wrote:

Well, I'm doing my second reply to Shrubber's seriously bizarre post
[even suggestive of him being at least temporarily unhinged]
a week later than planned, but here's a little bonus: I'm approaching
something I dealt with from a different angle than in my first reply.

> > If I were to play the propaganda game your way, I would post dark
> > suspicions about you being in deep denial over the fact that we
> > are descended from animals very much like chimps, -- just like a
> > creationist.
>
> So what you are saying is, that you are not posting such suspicions,

> you are just elaborating on and forwarding the potential of such
> suspicions
<snip excess Shrubber verbiage to get to the point>

> And you don't really accept
> that your invidiousness is an essentially dishonest bit of bullshit.

Of course not. If I were to post such suspicions, as opposed to
talking about posting such suspicions, I'd be insincere, because
I HAVE NO SUCH SUSPICIONS!

On the other hand, John Harshman, with whom you are in mutual
"See no evil..." relationship with, HAS posted *alleged* suspicions
that I have my doubts about evolution, that I am a closet supporter
of Feduccia, that I am a closet supporter of Stephen Meyer, etc.

Does/did he actually have such suspicions? Perhaps only God, if there
is a God, knows; Harshman may be a very poor judge of what his own actual
suspicions are.

But back to YOU: you posted ALLEGED suspicions below, and I'm
dealing with them right away.
[...]
Here I snipped some things that I dealt with in my first reply. I
left in most of your mud-wallow, though, to establish continuity:

> I can't figure out if you have some special
> attraction to chimps, or if it's more of some strange escape clause
> you imagine about how chimps might be a pliable sex-slave that
> gets you past some of your moral reservations about sex-slaves.

This "suspicion" of yours was completely insincere, wasn't it?

> I'm assuming that you have moral reservations about sex-slaves,
> please forgive me if I'm wrong.

You aren't: I have moral antipathy to MY indulging in all forms of BDSM,
even were it completely consensual. At the same time, I do not
condemn those who indulge in completely consensual BDSM.

So, if you indulge in it, you may face censure from the likes of FRC,
and probably the Roman Catholic Church to whose rules and customs I adhere,
but as far as I'm concerned, it's "different strokes for different folks"
if YOU do it.

> Alternatively, you might be one of those people who wants to reduce
> all of your personal morality to a concrete set of rules.

Not at all. My morality has undergone a slow evolution in some
tertiary aspects. However, I do firmly adhere to some
rules, such as "Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Thy Neighbor".
OTOH that rule never applied to you, did it?

> Such people
> run afoul of their own attempts to codify rules for all time. For
> example, 'thou shall not steal' seems to get codified as a foundational
> rule which is then equally applied to people who steal because they
> are too lazy to work and children who steal bread because they are
> starving.

You needn't lecture me on this: I learned such elementary distinctions
in a Roman Catholic high school, even before Vatican II took hold.

YOUR problem is in the opposite direction, the way you make up
arbitrary rules of morality like "Thou Shalt Not Split Thy Replies
To a Single Shrubber Post," with killfiling the penalty for one
too many such incidents.

<snip more preaching to the choir>

> The point? I'm unimpressed by your attempt to invoke various rules
> about acceptable behavior to justify your attempts to justify
> fucking chimps. Take a cold shower. Leave chimps alone.

Admit it, Shrubber: you were being completely insincere with
these "suspicions" for the sake of scoring cheap (worthless, really)
debating points against me, weren't you?

Peter Nyikos