Actually, I have it on good authority* that while "criteria" are standards by which something is assessed, "Criterion" is the name of a watch or car that costs more than your house.
*Tip o' the hat to Dave Barry aka "Mr. Language Person," who apparently left an impression on me, given that he stopped writing his syndicated Miami Herald column back in 2004!
... it's not healthy for small-d democracy to allow social-media oligopolies to control access to the modern-day "public forum" based on their own private agendas and subjective whims. Nor is it healthy to silo different viewpoints into different forums that are rarely visited by citizens who don't already hold those viewpoints. I believe there are legitimate grounds for regulating social-media companies with significant market shares as common carriers and for imposing a Fairness Doctrine on them.
I can imagine fewer futures more dystopian than one where corporate oligarchs get to effectively control who can say what to their fellow citizens. At some point, we need to acknowledge that the authors of the Bill of Rights did not anticipate today's extreme concentration of media (whether traditional or social) nor the existence of the network effect when they limited the First Amendment's applicability to public actors. Given that our our Constitution was designed to be nearly impossible to amend, it's going to require flexible and enlightened judicial interpretation to avoid turning it into a suicide pact for democracy (a process that is already well under way in other areas, like campaign financing and conflicts of interest).
@z!: Usage and grammar are ultimately descriptive, not normative. What you're objecting to is "disappear" as a transitive verb, and that usage is already accepted by most dictionaries. (Ditto for "ask" as a noun.) You'll be happier if you learn to accept that language evolves. After all, what does it really matter how people express themselves, so long as their intended meaning is clear?
[T]he 1st Amendment only applies to the government and Google is not the government.
And isn't that a convenient legal fiction for a corporation that controls such a huge chunk of public discourse and information flow. Alphabet/Google is ranked # 2 on Fortune's US 500 and # 30 on its Global 500, and its primary shareholders rank high in the Forbes 400. In the US, with its laughably weak conflict-of-interest and corruption rules for politicians and its lack of constitutional protections against "private" abuses of power, that makes Alphabet/Google a powerful member of the de facto government.
In some states, courts or legislatures have found that privately owned shopping malls and the like are de facto public fora and mandate that political speech like petition-gathering be allowed there -- even though the shopping-mall owners "aren't the government."
I'm not arguing that repealing Section 230 is the solution or that Tulsi Gabbard is God's gift to humanity in all things, but the author needs to rein in the one-sided invective. The road to inverted totalitarianism is paved with specious arguments distinguishing private actors from government ones. When Google suspended Gabbard's campaign advertising in the wake of a successful debate performance, that was gross interference in the political process by a leading de facto oligarch, and Google should have been kneecapped for it in court.
First came the emoji defense. Next comes the emoji fatfinger defense, where you have to show that the emoji you meant to tap is right next to the one you actually did. The emoji fatfinger defense is going to be particularly important to us members of Generation Rotary Dial, when we go off on one of our dementia-fueled rants. Thankfully, a lot of appellate judges are members of Generation Rotary Dial, too.
Several years ago, I penned a satirical version of David Bowie's "Space Oddity," with Goldman Sachs substituted for Ground Control and a defensible moniker for Obama substituted for Major Tom. For publication, I was just waiting for the right font to set it to. I think I finally found it. ;-)
There never should have been a ban, since there is no principled way other than religious discrimination to distinguish a burqini worn for religious reasons from a full body covering worn for other reasons, especially for avoiding sun damage to skin. (Contrast the burqini ban with the ban on medically and functionally unnecessary face coverings -- notably the niqab -- which prevent other people from recognizing the woman wearing them, creating an identification problem for law enforcement as well as a social barrier that is inimical to French values of openness and equality.) If the mayors of towns like Nice were genuinely trying to reduce the likelihood of nativist-on-Muslim attacks in retaliation for the Nice massacre, they could have issued a public recommendation to avoid wearing burqinis at public beaches in the area for the rest of the summer, and they certainly should never have actually enforced the ban. But I don't really think that was the mayors' goal. I think it was to feed and cater to wide-spread anti-Muslim sentiment in the National Front's constituency for personal political gain.
By the way, very broadly speaking, I'd say that the main difference between the French conception of laïcité and the American conception of separation of church and state is that the French discourage overt religiosity in any aspect of public life, whereas Americans only ban direct government support for or interference with the practice of religion -- and that, only in theory and when forced to by Supreme Court decisions. In France, you can practice your religion in private but, as with a penis, you can't pull it out, wave it around in public, and shove it down other people's throats. In the US, you can get your church subsidized by taxpayer dollars* (to the tune of ten of billions a year in the aggregate), you can starve, sleep-deprive, and brainwash potential converts and make them slaves to your cult, and you can even deny your children life-saving medical treatment so long as you make the case that your sincerely held religious beliefs require it. I'm much more sympathetic to the French approach, but attentive to hypocrisy and double standards on both sides.
*I'm aware of the special régime in Alsace-Moselle, which was part of Germany when France enacted the 1905 law on separation of church and state. After World War I, Alsace-Moselle threatened to petition the League of Nations to remain with Germany if France did not allow them to keep their their existing arrangements. France relented, so religion in Alsace-Moselle is still effectively governed by Napoleon's 1801 Concordat with the Vatican. As a result, four different top-level French national politicians are the formal heads of the Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran, and Jewish faiths in Alsace-Moselle; the government foots the bill for clerical salaries and places of worship; and religion is a required subject at public schools. At one point, President Hollande said he would try to end Alsace-Moselle's special régime and bring it into line with the rest of France, but he seems to have dropped that plan. (Alsace-Moselle also has better government health insurance coverage and more paid holidays than the rest of France, which could making ending the régime a tough sell, locally.)
Hillary was running against a socialist, though Hillary is one as well.
Bernie is an FDR/LBJ-style social-democrat -- which used to be the norm for Democrats, as much as Party leadership would like everyone to forget that -- and Hillary is a crony-capitalism economic neoliberal and a military neoconservative hawk. Also, recent polls still show that Bernie would mop the floor with Trump in the general while Hillary struggles to maintain a tenuous lead. It really says something about Democratic Party leadership that they would rather risk losing to Trump than win with Bernie.
Thanks for making me chuckle, though. Your comment made me nostalgic for the days when folks of your ilk applied that slur to Obama -- who continued bailing out Wall Street and left underwater homeowners floundering, who flipped on national single-payer health insurance and instead championed a for-profit protection racket conceived by the Heritage Foundation, and under whom income and wealth inequality has grown steadily worse. (I could go one.) Good one.
(1) This could well have been a tactical loss by the corporations staffing the Tribunal, to soften up opposition to the massive victory that passage of TPP, TTIP, and TISA would represent. As someone mentioned, ISDS tribunals aren't bound by precedent, and even some putatively august judicial courts find ways around precedent when the political leanings and financial affiliations of their current occupants make it profitable to do so.
(2) How much did this litigation cost the defense? (Let's go ahead and assume that billionaire white knights are not going to come riding to the rescue of every relatively poor country every time they get hit with an ISDS suit.)
(3) Does the defense get to recover its litigation costs in full?
As a wise man once said, "We make peace with our enemies, not our friends."* I mean, it's not like they secretly worked with the British to engineer a coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran and then replaced him with a torture-happy autocrat, right? Or illegally sold weapons to Iran via an accommodating intermediate country and then used the proceeds to illegally fund an insurrection against the democratically elected government of Nicaragua, right? Or helped destroy Libya and then secretly shipped captured Libyan weapons to Al Qaeda affiliates fighting the Assad régime in Syria, right? Having a little chinwag with Ahmadinejad about curbing nuclear production in exchange for ending sanctions is pretty small beer by comparison.
*Okay, so the wise man in question was Tyrion Lannister. It's important to use references that millennials can relate to. If it makes anyone happy, I can attribute it to Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, or Winston Churchill instead. Really, I have no problem making up an attribution. As Winston Churchill once said, "Americans always end up attributing quotations to the right author, after attributing them to everyone else first."
"Aw, c'mon, guys! You don't need a subpoena! It's us! We're buds, right? Okay, got a pen? Here it is: 192.168.SUCK.IT."
But seriously, if a subpoena is served (and I'm skeptical that one will be), it's a slam-dunk case of abuse of process for the reasons stated in the article.
And Geisel's large estate…
…grew three sizes that day.
Actually, I have it on good authority* that while "criteria" are standards by which something is assessed, "Criterion" is the name of a watch or car that costs more than your house. *Tip o' the hat to Dave Barry aka "Mr. Language Person," who apparently left an impression on me, given that he stopped writing his syndicated Miami Herald column back in 2004!
As an active and loyal member ...
... of Starving Peasants Against Free Bread, I must say that my sympathies lie with Amazon and Google in this controversy.
Notwithstanding current legal precedent ...
... it's not healthy for small-d democracy to allow social-media oligopolies to control access to the modern-day "public forum" based on their own private agendas and subjective whims. Nor is it healthy to silo different viewpoints into different forums that are rarely visited by citizens who don't already hold those viewpoints. I believe there are legitimate grounds for regulating social-media companies with significant market shares as common carriers and for imposing a Fairness Doctrine on them.
I can imagine fewer futures more dystopian than one where corporate oligarchs get to effectively control who can say what to their fellow citizens. At some point, we need to acknowledge that the authors of the Bill of Rights did not anticipate today's extreme concentration of media (whether traditional or social) nor the existence of the network effect when they limited the First Amendment's applicability to public actors. Given that our our Constitution was designed to be nearly impossible to amend, it's going to require flexible and enlightened judicial interpretation to avoid turning it into a suicide pact for democracy (a process that is already well under way in other areas, like campaign financing and conflicts of interest).
Personally, I'm on tenterhooks ...
... waiting to see what lavishly compensated deferred payoff Pai will golden-parachute into.
Re: Re: Downloading is killing streaming!
@z!: Usage and grammar are ultimately descriptive, not normative. What you're objecting to is "disappear" as a transitive verb, and that usage is already accepted by most dictionaries. (Ditto for "ask" as a noun.) You'll be happier if you learn to accept that language evolves. After all, what does it really matter how people express themselves, so long as their intended meaning is clear?
And isn't that a convenient legal fiction.
And isn't that a convenient legal fiction for a corporation that controls such a huge chunk of public discourse and information flow. Alphabet/Google is ranked # 2 on Fortune's US 500 and # 30 on its Global 500, and its primary shareholders rank high in the Forbes 400. In the US, with its laughably weak conflict-of-interest and corruption rules for politicians and its lack of constitutional protections against "private" abuses of power, that makes Alphabet/Google a powerful member of the de facto government.
In some states, courts or legislatures have found that privately owned shopping malls and the like are de facto public fora and mandate that political speech like petition-gathering be allowed there -- even though the shopping-mall owners "aren't the government."
I'm not arguing that repealing Section 230 is the solution or that Tulsi Gabbard is God's gift to humanity in all things, but the author needs to rein in the one-sided invective. The road to inverted totalitarianism is paved with specious arguments distinguishing private actors from government ones. When Google suspended Gabbard's campaign advertising in the wake of a successful debate performance, that was gross interference in the political process by a leading de facto oligarch, and Google should have been kneecapped for it in court.
First came the emoji defense. Next comes the emoji fatfinger defense, where you have to show that the emoji you meant to tap is right next to the one you actually did. The emoji fatfinger defense is going to be particularly important to us members of Generation Rotary Dial, when we go off on one of our dementia-fueled rants. Thankfully, a lot of appellate judges are members of Generation Rotary Dial, too.
Finally!
Several years ago, I penned a satirical version of David Bowie's "Space Oddity," with Goldman Sachs substituted for Ground Control and a defensible moniker for Obama substituted for Major Tom. For publication, I was just waiting for the right font to set it to. I think I finally found it. ;-)
Fixed that for you.
Sad, but recently quite true.
As for Spain's lèse-self-importance laws, I've heard that only legislators with very low IQs and tiny penises vote for stuff like that.
Who knew Hot Fuzz was actually a docudrama?
Every British council is simply vying for "Village of the Year," is all. Yarp.
This whole affair was stupid from the git-go.
There never should have been a ban, since there is no principled way other than religious discrimination to distinguish a burqini worn for religious reasons from a full body covering worn for other reasons, especially for avoiding sun damage to skin. (Contrast the burqini ban with the ban on medically and functionally unnecessary face coverings -- notably the niqab -- which prevent other people from recognizing the woman wearing them, creating an identification problem for law enforcement as well as a social barrier that is inimical to French values of openness and equality.) If the mayors of towns like Nice were genuinely trying to reduce the likelihood of nativist-on-Muslim attacks in retaliation for the Nice massacre, they could have issued a public recommendation to avoid wearing burqinis at public beaches in the area for the rest of the summer, and they certainly should never have actually enforced the ban. But I don't really think that was the mayors' goal. I think it was to feed and cater to wide-spread anti-Muslim sentiment in the National Front's constituency for personal political gain.
By the way, very broadly speaking, I'd say that the main difference between the French conception of laïcité and the American conception of separation of church and state is that the French discourage overt religiosity in any aspect of public life, whereas Americans only ban direct government support for or interference with the practice of religion -- and that, only in theory and when forced to by Supreme Court decisions. In France, you can practice your religion in private but, as with a penis, you can't pull it out, wave it around in public, and shove it down other people's throats. In the US, you can get your church subsidized by taxpayer dollars* (to the tune of ten of billions a year in the aggregate), you can starve, sleep-deprive, and brainwash potential converts and make them slaves to your cult, and you can even deny your children life-saving medical treatment so long as you make the case that your sincerely held religious beliefs require it. I'm much more sympathetic to the French approach, but attentive to hypocrisy and double standards on both sides.
*I'm aware of the special régime in Alsace-Moselle, which was part of Germany when France enacted the 1905 law on separation of church and state. After World War I, Alsace-Moselle threatened to petition the League of Nations to remain with Germany if France did not allow them to keep their their existing arrangements. France relented, so religion in Alsace-Moselle is still effectively governed by Napoleon's 1801 Concordat with the Vatican. As a result, four different top-level French national politicians are the formal heads of the Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran, and Jewish faiths in Alsace-Moselle; the government foots the bill for clerical salaries and places of worship; and religion is a required subject at public schools. At one point, President Hollande said he would try to end Alsace-Moselle's special régime and bring it into line with the rest of France, but he seems to have dropped that plan. (Alsace-Moselle also has better government health insurance coverage and more paid holidays than the rest of France, which could making ending the régime a tough sell, locally.)
Is anyone else feeling a twinge of nostalgia ...
... for Boris and Natasha?
Re: Re: Re: WUT?
Edit: (I could go on.)
Re: Re: WUT?
Thanks for making me chuckle, though. Your comment made me nostalgic for the days when folks of your ilk applied that slur to Obama -- who continued bailing out Wall Street and left underwater homeowners floundering, who flipped on national single-payer health insurance and instead championed a for-profit protection racket conceived by the Heritage Foundation, and under whom income and wealth inequality has grown steadily worse. (I could go one.) Good one.
Three things:
(1) This could well have been a tactical loss by the corporations staffing the Tribunal, to soften up opposition to the massive victory that passage of TPP, TTIP, and TISA would represent. As someone mentioned, ISDS tribunals aren't bound by precedent, and even some putatively august judicial courts find ways around precedent when the political leanings and financial affiliations of their current occupants make it profitable to do so.
(2) How much did this litigation cost the defense? (Let's go ahead and assume that billionaire white knights are not going to come riding to the rescue of every relatively poor country every time they get hit with an ISDS suit.)
(3) Does the defense get to recover its litigation costs in full?
Yet more evidence ...
... that many, many American police officers and commanders do not have the intellect, temperament, and judgment to be entrusted with police work.
What a stupid, stupid thing to bother lying about.
As a wise man once said, "We make peace with our enemies, not our friends."* I mean, it's not like they secretly worked with the British to engineer a coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran and then replaced him with a torture-happy autocrat, right? Or illegally sold weapons to Iran via an accommodating intermediate country and then used the proceeds to illegally fund an insurrection against the democratically elected government of Nicaragua, right? Or helped destroy Libya and then secretly shipped captured Libyan weapons to Al Qaeda affiliates fighting the Assad régime in Syria, right? Having a little chinwag with Ahmadinejad about curbing nuclear production in exchange for ending sanctions is pretty small beer by comparison.
*Okay, so the wise man in question was Tyrion Lannister. It's important to use references that millennials can relate to. If it makes anyone happy, I can attribute it to Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, or Winston Churchill instead. Really, I have no problem making up an attribution. As Winston Churchill once said, "Americans always end up attributing quotations to the right author, after attributing them to everyone else first."
Re: Warehoused FOIA requests
"I pictured the end of Raiders of the lost ark where they wheeled the Ark into the warehouse but instead of the Nazi insignia it said FOIA's."
Yes, the warehouse where the FOIA requests will be reviewed by "Top ... men."
The proper response.
"Aw, c'mon, guys! You don't need a subpoena! It's us! We're buds, right? Okay, got a pen? Here it is: 192.168.SUCK.IT."
But seriously, if a subpoena is served (and I'm skeptical that one will be), it's a slam-dunk case of abuse of process for the reasons stated in the article.