Bay 12 Games Forum

I think one element of the problem (and one that is hard to fix) is an instilled lack of respect for the law.

There are two main motivators behind this. The first is the idea that those in/with power twist the law to their own will while those without power are subject to the whims of the police, justice system and anyone who wants to see them done for. This is often actually true, but the public perception is even beyond they reality. Exceptional cases (like the last one I linked to) are horrific, but people tend to use them as a blanket attack on the concept of a fair trial for those without power. If the (legal) system is against you anyway why bother trying to play by the rules?

The second is that casual lawbreaking is the norm. Everyone is a criminal, or at least criminal adjacent. How hard is it to got that little bit further?

The biggest examples here are copyright law and drug law, but the clearest explanation of the problem is this look at college and under-age drinking restrictions and the TSA. Absurd security measures that piss off normal people while being largely ineffective, or ineffective restrictions on drinking that are going to be largely ignored except in a few arbitrary cases make people lose their respect for both the rules and those enforcing them.

Getting into copyright, today ignoring copyright or working around it is a lot of what the internet is built on. Patent law is even worse to an extent, especially in the software and technology spheres. The idea of fully enforcing current copyright law is absolutely absurd (and broadly why people are so against the SOPA - it doesn't make much new illegal, but it gives the government the horrific powers needed to enforce it). But at the same time no-one quite knows what a sensible copyright reform looks like, so we end up stuck in a weird middle ground where the law is absurd but the only real solution is to largely ignore it.

Drugs are similar but worse. The law doesn't discriminate between dangerous and safe behaviour, so sensible drug users are criminalised alongside people who are actual risks. Immediately any user is pushed into contact with those who have already committed to a life outside (and opposing) the law. Law enforcement are instantly the enemy. And, again, there tend not to be many sensible discussions on how to progress to a drug peace (well, some), so we are left in a situation where the best solution is minimal or selective enforcement. Which again breeds less respect for the law as a whole, as any enforcement at that point looks arbitrary and targeted (which is probably is), feeding back into point 1.

Maybe look at current detention authority compared to the bill's authority?

Current;

    persons that the President determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, and persons who harbored those responsible for those attacks. The President also has the authority to detain persons who were part of, or substantially supported, Taliban or al-Qaida forces or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act, or has directly supported hostilities, in aid of such enemy armed forces.

That's the administration's extrapolation from the 2001 AUMF, largely upheld by the courts in a range of cases, with a few exceptions.

The NDAA version;

    (1) A person who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored those responsible for those attacks.

    (2) A person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.

This is functionally the same as the current policy. The most worrying part here is the 'supporters' language, which has been seen as the weakest legally and most dangerous policy-wise. Even so, the terms ("substantially support") are slightly narrower than the standard suggested by the DC circuit court (untested at the Supreme Court) of "purposefully and materially support".

The exceptions I noted above are all related to US citizen detention, where the courts have broadly held that citizens can never be denied habeas  rights. These rights may be functionally quite weak (they don't include a right to see or reveal classified information that may be the basis of detention, so functionally shutting down many cases before they can be made) and in many cases the limits and extent of the powers are untested.

The bill doesn't take any position on these undecided issues, explicitly leaving them to the courts to decide. This basically means until and unless the administration decides to hold someone in questionable enough circumstances for long enough for a case to reach the Supreme Court the exact limits aren't going to be clear. Unless, that is, congress actually keeps debating this topic and actually decides to more clearly define the detention program in the future.

So, broadly, business as usual. Just a bit more in the sunlight than it was a month or two ago.

A worldwide tour of euphemisms.

... urg.

Residents of an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Beit Shemesh called Israel police officers “Nazis” on Sunday, after they removed a sign ordering the separation of men and women in a street in that neighborhood.

A SCOTTeVEST hoodie and Thinkgeek Bag of Holding. My encumbrance limit just doubled.

Also the usual pile of books. Given the size of some of them (Reamde in hardback...) I'm going to be needing the bag.

Edit: Paul said that some of his newsletters were ghost written, so that explains some of the more "politically incorrect" statements.

What? No.

The articles were signed under Paul's name in an 8 page monthly newsletter he published, selling it for $50 a year. Even if he managed to not read the few thousand words a month he was shilling, he is fully responsible for the contents of them.

Entirely incidentally, it's long been known that Lew Rockwell was involved in the writing. The association between the two has been entirely open, although Rockwell has denied writing the articles at times. Rockwell was openly advocating a race based strategy to unite libertarians and paleoconservatives. Notably the group they founded has been frequently described as promoting neo-Confederate views.

The racist material was fairly consistent and widely known. Notably the Heritage Front - an openly neo-Nazi group that disbanded after it's members paralysed a Tamil man - included the letter on a list of public racialists. Wayback link to the archived page.

Just looking at some of the worst of those you linked;

October 1992 gives advice on how to get away with shooting "youths" who are taking part in the "hip-hop" trend of carjacking, ending with the phrase "the animals are coming."

January 1993 has a piece on "The Disappearing White Majority" which reads exactly like BNP style racial shit stirring, complete with the ending call to "save your own children".

The July 1993 edition (not on your page, but archived here by an anti-extremist group active in the early days of the web) is one of the most quoted. Notably this section;The statistics there, recycled in the August 1993 edition, appear to be fiction created by Jared Taylor, a white supremacist author. They simply don't exist elsewhere. To get those kinds of numbers you need to deliberately manipulate the data along these lines, ignoring re-offenders and pretending each individual crime represents a unique criminal black man.
Now as for Paul being a racist... that isn't something I'd say. You can't prove what he is thinking and it derails the conversation. Instead I'd say what he said was unacceptable.

I can understand why he published it though. His newsletter was targeted at the late 80's and early 90's pseudo-libertarian right. That movement includes lots of really nasty groups, including many neo-confederates, white supremacist and militia types. He worked closely with these sorts of groups, if only because they overlapped with his part of the political spectrum. He would have known the language, the dog whistles and red meat those groups thrive on. He openly worked with similar individuals and groups, including hard-right Christian reconstructionists - eg, Gary North who was a staffer for him in Congress and came out with the perfect summary of why the reconstructionists loved the libertarians;The fact is that Paul has often has made statements that fit such a hard Christian audience. Take his stand on the separation of church and state, or his language over abortion and gay marriage. That's because today he needs the support of the religious right to survive in the modern Republican party. In the 90's he relied on the support of the NWO conspiracy theorists and (usually racially) reactionary anti-government groups.


FAKEEDIT: Welp, serves me right for digging up my research from the 2007 primaries. Have another two links.

A UN investigation spent millions of US $ on finding out if companies could legally say that water hydrates you. They concluded that there is no evidence to support this, and thus it is illegal for them to put it in advertisements.

SUCCESS.

1) EU, not UN.
2) A few guys sitting in a room =/= millions of dollars on studies.
3) They said a particularly worded health claim could not be used, when that wording was proposed as a test case by some anti-EU German professors to make headlines and mock the EU.

A brief look at that here.

But don't worry. There will be another of these stories along next week. Not to mention we are getting towards presidential election season so there will be plenty of mining scientific funding proposals for things that people don't understand but sound slightly silly.

Wut.

Maybe I spent a bit too long obsessed with the Supreme Court and reading everything I could about them, but I don't see any of this.

Firstly, the court can only act when a valid case comes before them. For the Supreme Court this means a case where;

1) There is a legitimately harmed party (someone with standing). This means they must have already been wronged.
2) There is a question of law in the courts jurisdiction. For the Supreme Court that usually means constitutional or federal law, with few exceptions.
3) The case is still relevant. In the one case of a US civilian detained on (or snatched from) US soil the case never reached the Supreme Court because he was released to civilian authority, making the case moot.

The court does have some discretion as to which cases they hear (choosing which to grant cert., requiring four of the nine justices to want to hear the case), but if a case doesn't fit those three points they simply can't do anything about it. They can't unilaterally declare laws as unconstitutional without a case being brought in front of them.

As for being deferential to administration power, that is true. Of the current court anyway. But there are limits.

There have been a number of major cases, including Hamdi, Boumediene and Hamdan where the court has restricted administration power over military detention. Those three cases together created the current structure of review in place at GTMO and which has been fully formalised in this new law.

As for being paid off, the only case I've even seen tried there is Thomas and that's more low level corruption creating the impression of impropriety than any serious bribery. For the Supreme Court it is far more ideology that motivates their decisions.