Letters to the Editor
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@Aycharaych
I did. You seemed to recall that it was impossible to prove a negative, I said it isn't.
However, I don't bother proving I'm not aberrant. If I did, I would do so by establishing what the standard for aberation was, and establishing that I did not fall on the other side of it. Otherwise, I could not prove I was not aberrant because I would be aberrant. Or, if there was no such criteria, then the distinction would be meaningless.
And it is not true that only the tough and smart survive a full scale nuclear war. If anyone survives at all, it will be because they weren't poisoned, over the entire reasonable lifespan of all the contaminants, and the entire period of accumulation and effects on those accumulating them. Toughness and smartness have nothing to do with pervasive poisons. They only make people fantasize about being survivors, something that is ingrained in the species.
In mathematics, negatives are proven all the time. There is nothing particularly special about them. In biophysics, the criteria for the effects of a radioactive substance on organisms has to do with half-life, exposure, amount of dimerizing radiation, accumulation within the organism, the amount of water in the tissue affected, and the proclivity of the various affected tissues to develop cancer. None of which have much to do with fantasies about smart, tough superhuman winners.
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@Chris Dowd
Thanks for reminding us all of the high road John Edwards took when he said how alright he was with Dick Cheney's daughter being a lesbian- 5 times in one debate.
Your right, we should be furious at John Edwards. If it was up to me, he'd have taken the really high road, and called Cheney a butcher and an out of control maniac with a heart problem 20 times. Then maybe the American people would have had the sense to prevent him from continuing in office.
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@ Aycharaych
I share your scepticism regarding these polls. A few years back when I first heard of this evangelical shift that supposedly was taking over the country, I actually got the Pew numbers and spent quite a while with them. The claimed number of evangelicals/fundamentalists then was (as now) somewhat over 50%. And yet no matter how I defined those two words, and even if evangelicans and fundamentalists were two entirely separate non-overlapping groups (they are not), the highest number I could come up with then was eight percent. Yes, eight percent! And that was with every possible assumption I could make in favor of defining those two terms as widely as possible.
I had to be making an error (massive?), I thought, but then it occurred to me as it should to you: If one of every two Americans was truely of this inclanation, not a day would go by for you at work without someone preaching Jesus to you. Every TV game show would offer "Christian" prizes. Every soap opera would be riddled with Christian advocacy. (Indeed, TV advertizers would demand this.) But this is not happening. None of it. Not even close.
So what are we to conclude from this? From both the Pew raw numbers I spent hours over and your own personal experiences? Are your personal experiences lying to you? Are the Pew numbers lying to you? Mustn't it be either one or the other?
In fact, it is neither. The fact is that most of us were raised to believe in the idea of eternal damnation if we ever denied our various religions, and this idea is indeed scary. This idea is drilled into us before we even learn our ABC's. Even the Pew researchers who make up and ask the questions have had this bias programmed into them at a very core level. So when the polling questions are made up and when we are asked to answer them, even in an anonymous fashion, we quite naturally bias ourselves in favor of more religiousity rather than less. It's simply how we are made.
This is not to say religion is necessarily bad. Indeed, for most of us, it is the source of our morality. We cannot simply erase it and maintain who we are as individuals, nor can we erase it and maintain our national character, which in spite of our many faults is largely good.
But to anyone who tries to pass off some 50% polling number to you, believe your eyes first. Religion in America is still a largely private and personal matter. When pressed people will say otherwise, but when not, most Americans still prefer it to remain largely a private matter of their hearts. Where it works best.
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Ed Morressey was right.
It's always interesting when a really smart non-lawyer manages to out-lawyer a lawyer. Such is what just happened here, where Ed's points about the First Amendment rights of NBC got seconded by the Supreme Court of Nevada. A quick reading of the decision shows the Court turned back every point made by Kucinich, including breach of contract. The resulting mandamus (aka Big Wedgie) to Judge Thompson was just frosting on the cake, so to speak.
Your indignant and obviously uninformed condemnation of Ed's position sort of leaves you twisting in the wind at this point. As you stated yourself,
...and I have no idea whether the court's decision is reasonable, defensible, or right.
Yet, at the same time, you castigated Morrissey's analysis as wrong. Don't you think there's a bit of a disconnect here between what you think you understood and your histrionics?
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unclesmrgol
(If you're still here)
So then, which part of Morrissey's original "analysis" was right?
The part about "torts"?
Or was it the part about "interstate commerce"?
And which part of Greenwald's analysis was wrong?
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A previous instance of Cap'n Ed hurling baseless "judicial activism" charges
Cap'n Ed:
http://captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/006483.php
March 7, 2006
A Direct Assault On Judicial ActivismSouth Dakota apparently set off a trend in state legislatures with its comprehensive abortion ban, signed into law yesterday by Governor Mike Rounds. Since Roe, no legislature has dared to so openly flout the Supreme Court's dictate on abortion rights. Now, however, states have queued up similar legislation in an effort to follow South Dakota into the battle against judicial activism.
[...] No one these days defends the basic legal framework of Roe, with even Justice Ruth Ginsburg noting its legal flaws.
- - Posted by Ed Morrissey at March 7, 2006
But here's Justice Stevens, joined by Justice Ginsburg:
http://lii.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/99-830.ZC.html
June 28, 2000
Justice Stevens, with whom Justice Ginsburg joins, concurring.
[...] during the past 27 years, the central holding of Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), has been endorsed by all but 4 of the 17 Justices who have addressed the issue. That holding–that the word “liberty” in the Fourteenth Amendment includes a woman’s right to make this difficult and extremely personal decision [...]
- - Justice Stevens, joined by Justice Ginsburg, June 28, 2000
"Judicial Activism! Horror!" isn't an argument, it's just blather.