good job giving them all that money suckers. its almost like this could have be forseen by looking at how the ACLU has approached nazism and white supremacy for the entire history of the organization but that might involve a single critical thought
they also protect rapists. My city was/is threatened with a lawsuit from them cause the city has stricter rules about where rapists/sex offenders can live than the norm and apparently ACLU considers it a violation of the rapists’ rights since effectively they can’t live in the city cause there are so many schools and the school zones overlap.
The funny thing about constitutional rights is that they still apply to terrible people.
Believe me, when constitutional rights are not protected, nazis and rapists are not the ones that suffer the most, its religious and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ people and left wing activists.
But hey, rally against your own rights to punish rapists and nazis, and watch how quickly they’re forgiven and we’re the ones pursued. Happens every single time.
The ACLU isn’t perfect but they’re vital to the US and that this can’t be understood means they either don’t get law or don’t get how law interacts with society.
Legally we need ALL speech free, on a governmental level.
Sorry. It would probably delight Milo Yappyweinerdog to NO end to get some kinda ruling against free speech so the people he is playing troll for could immediate turn around and use it against those they hated. You know…us? At what point do you think “The Government had the right to control what a person can talk about.” is going to work out in the favor of minorities? You know, the Government currently run by Trump? You wanna give him that power so you don’t have to deal with Milo Yappyweinerdog showing up on your facebook feed?
It’s not like that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t tell him where to shove it.
Re: the ACLU and the rapists, I’m assuming you live in San Diego and you’re talking about the In Re Taylor case.
Here’s the thing: under Megan’s Law, registrants on the 290 registry (”sex offenders”) were barred from 97% of available housing, and the remaining 3% was often not available to them because, understandably, not many private landlords want to rent to people with sex offenses. What that effectively meant is that registrants, including people who were registered for sex work, public indecency or Romeo-and-Juliet violations, were being forced into homelessness by the government. Because if you are on parole and on the registry, you can’t just decide not to live in San Diego. You’re ordered, by the government, to live in the county you’re assigned to until you’re transferred or off parole. If not, you go back to prison.
So what this meant is that San Diego had a huge homeless population of people with sex offense convictions. People who were living on boats – not yachts, but literal canoes – tied to random docks because it was the only place they could live without being thrown back in prison. And you know who suffers from this? Not just the registrants, but the public. Public safety is not enhanced by making people homeless.
People who cannot live anywhere legally will drop off the grid and dodge their supervision. They won’t check in with their parole officers. They won’t bother to follow the law. They’ll commit more crime just to go back to jail so they have a roof over their head and shitty bare-bones medical care. They’ll steal and lie and beg so they can get enough food to fill their stomachs and they’ll get involved in trafficking and drug-dealing and worse just so they’ll be able to rest their head at night.
What the court found in In Re Taylor, which decided the California registration requirements were unconstitutional, was that those registration were putting more people at risk. It put registrants at risk of homelessness and it put the public at risk of registrants breaking supervision and committing survival crime. The ACLU understood that treating everyone with human dignity and freeing people from oppressive government action – even convicted rapists – was in the internet of public safety.
Human rights apply to everyone, even nazis and people convicted of sex offenses. The question should never be “does this person deserve to have their rights taken away?”. The question should be “do we trust the government to take those rights?”. A government with a history of racism, classism and transphobia, with documented history of suppressing leftist voices?
Right now I don’t trust the government with a plastic fork, and neither does the ACLU.
i am sitting here thinking about how “former sex workers should be allowed to live indoors” got turned into “the ACLU loves rapists and thinks they’re great” and i suspect some right-wing spin control happened in the middle of that process
when the people trying hardest to protect your rights somehow turn out to be Ultra Super Problematic and you’re being encouraged to throw them under the bus, you need to stop and think real hard about why that’s happening and who’s trying to make it happen
the Angry Young Activist tendency to demonize anything that isn’t a perfect snowy shrine of absolute purity ultimately works in favor of the bad guys, because absolutely no one who does real work out in the world is completely unproblematic – LIFE is not unproblematic – so they get you to reject everything genuine and embrace useless symbols, or just get disillusioned and give up
you need to be able to see the value in things like “protecting the constitutional rights of everyone, even assholes” and “supporting candidates who, while not perfect, are better than their opponents” because boy howdy did rejecting clinton because she wasn’t flawless not work out for us
about free speech: not all speech is legally protected. For instance, you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded movie theater. You can’t yell racial slurs at minority people you encounter on the street. You can’t verbally harass people. You can’t publish malicious lies about someone to damage their reputation. The government does restrict those forms of speech.
All those forms are context dependent. I can’t yell “fire” in a crowded movie theater, but I can yell “fire” in an empty parking lot. I can’t yell racial slurs at minorities, but you can totally yell them at your white friends, or use them all you want in conversation (legally). I can’t write a newspaper article alleging that my neighbor is a known goat-fucker, but I can tell all my friends that. The government restricts certain forms of speech in contexts where they are damaging to other people.
The government does not and should not constrict speech based purely on the content of the speech. In other words, Milo Yiawhateverthefuck can legally say whatever the fuck he wants to his friends, and whatever the fuck he wants in his own home, but if he gets up on stage and encourages harassment or violence against an individual or group of people, he sure as shit should get in legal trouble for that.
Also, the first amendment does not guarantee you the right to say whatever you want in any place, situation, or to anyone. It merely guarantees that the government will not make laws saying you can’t. Other people, organizations, and businesses 100% have the right to tell you to shut up. If Milo Fuckwad is dis-invited from a speaking event, that’s not violating his first amendment rights, because no one wrote a law saying he couldn’t talk. It’s just that no one wants to hear his shit, and the first amendment doesn’t force them to.
^^^^ From a legal standpoint it’s very hard to restrict hate speech or hate assemblies without jeopardizing the general right to free speech and free assembly (and so on). Police and the government will use any such measures to criminalize peaceful protestors for good causes, if they possibly can. So, yeah, the ACLU tries to make sure that police can’t do that, and the SPLC tries to get hate groups/domestic terrorist organizations recognized as such so that what few anti-hate laws we can safely have will apply to those groups.
like if someone has reading glasses and you see them not wearing them when they’re not reading, you don’t grab them away all “aha! ur not really blind!!” but if someone in a wheelchair stands up for 12 seconds to get something off a shelf you’re like D: !!!! A CRIMINAL
There’s children starving in Africa that could eat your wheelchair for a week!
At every rehearsal during the 1980s and early 1990s, there were announcements about who was in which hospital room and when the next memorial was scheduled.
“I could see all these people dropping all around me, and there was no official response from any health department at any level,” said Tony McIntosh, who joined the chorus in 1985 and lost 25 friends to AIDS. “It was maddening. The chorus gave us an outlet for all that anger and relief from the feeling that nobody in the world seemed to care.”
So basically, this is a case where a gene(s) that gives you a reproductive advantage (just! keep! growing! GET AS BIG AS POSSIBLE!) also has a longterm disadvantage associated with it (you die of growing to death), but since you’ve already had lots of kids and passed on those genes by that point, there’s no way for selection pressures to fine tune that little glitch at the end.
selection doesn’t care if you die eventually, as long as you pass on more of your genes than the other guy.
since the “just keep growing” appears to be built in, sentient lobsters probably couldn’t short circuit that portion of the process. if they don’t molt, they eventually outgrow their own exoskeleton, and if they nutrient-restrict enough to stop growing they probably muck up other physiological processes.
so does that mean a theoretical lobsteresque alien society with good medical care and/or a lot of energy drinks COULD achieve quasi-immortality, or at least create a ruling class of studly, geriatric giants?
In my opinion they could definitely extend their lives, probably a lot, with appropriate nutrition and advanced lobster medical care. But they’d eventually start hitting other hurdles–for example, at some point their exoskeleton’s not going to be able to support their own body weight.
Or, if they get big enough, they’d need to drastically up the oxygen content in their environment to counter the fact that they have an open circulatory system to deliver oxygen to their tissues. Their volume to surface area ratio would be slowly skewing, making that not a very effective plan anymore. And oxygen is a pretty toxic chemical, so that’s going to start having its own problems.
is your labmate’s talk published anywhere i wanna read it
It’s not! which is a shame, because he’s a really good speaker!
I’m going to bug him to see if I can get him to put together some kind of blog post or layman’s science version of it to put online, because even just all the background conceptual material was really, really neat.
I wonder if they could have artificial plumbing installed, for a sort of dialysis-y system for their blood: an oxygenating backpack pulls blood from wherever makes the most sense, and returns it to points deep within the lobster, or perhaps feeding each of its organs. Maybe a separate oxygenation pack for each organ? A truly ancient leviathan would have a surface and body mostly dark and nearly anoxic, except for opalescent healthy patches shining near each of the assisted-respiration points.
Or maybe they’re good at bioengineering instead, and they figure out how to rip the gillfronds off of other species and seat them on themselves, so they wind up bristling with feathery extra external gills. It’d be a wealth/status/chieftan thing–out from beneath every armor plate and joint, a ruff of cultivated xenogills, extending the lives of the biggest and oldest and most influential lobster aliens.
If they stayed aquatic, they might not face as pressing of a structural-support problem with getting too big, right?… or maybe not one that artificial reinforcement to their armor wouldn’t solve (though they’d probs get too big to effectively move themselves).
a movie like my fair lady but where a frat boy is turned into a feminist
omg
SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY
Starring Channing Tatum. It’s still a musical and he dances.
Viola Davis as Henrietta Higgins
She’s his gender studies professor. This was the last GE that he could take; if he doesn’t pass this class he loses his lacrosse scholarship.
after the Big Academic Conference (where he presents his term paper and discusses feminist issues with a bunch of academics and everyone is amazed at him), they argue. he’s become what she wanted him to be but his life is ruined, he can never fully enjoy the things he used to or talk to his friends in the same way. he’s become a feminist but he can never really be a frat boy again.
callanswall 