Chris is Angry: “Judge Rules That U.S. Has Broad Powers to Detain Noncitizens Indefinitely“. Almost nothing in “rights” legality angers me more than divisions between the rights of humans and the rights of citizens. The judge here, and anyone who agrees with him should learn a little history. The line was “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”You don’t really need me to tell you where this is from, right?–note that it’s “all men”, not “all citizens”. Ironically (or at least I see irony in it), the judge actually calls out that “This is, of course, an extraordinarily rough and overbroad sort of distinction of which, if applied to citizens, our courts would be highly suspicious.”
Chris is laughing: Once again Ferocious J cracks me up. “I’ve had a lot of conversations with cab drivers that have ranged from the amiably mundane to the delightfully erudite. The one I had just a few hours ago, however, takes the cake. It takes all possible cakes. If you are looking at or contemplating cake, the ownership of the cake is not in question: It belongs to this conversation.” Go read the rest.
Chris is Angry: We had to read Orwell‘s essay Politics and the English LanguageIs it just me, or is this the winner of the “in the most different places on the web” award. Googling for this turns up hundreds of copies all over the place. I see this as a very good thing. I’ve chosen a nice-looking one with a search feature. in high school English class. I wish more people had been forced to do that, and that a good percentage of them had understood and retained the contents. If they had, and they had, then maybe I wouldn’t constantly be assualted by talking points, and maybe Rove wouldn’t have been able to pull his scam off on the American people for so long. Some examples of the manipulation of language for political ends show up in an opinion piece,George Bush’s War on Language by one of the co-directors of “Road to Guantanamo” [IMDB]. This is in reference to the suicides at Gitmo, or “ISBs” as those euphemising bastards probably refer to them. I never stop getting angry about this stuff–you can’t make evil go away by renaming it.
Chris is laughing (a lot): OK, so it’s funny enough on its own that the Royal Academy included an empty base in their showing, without also including the statue it was meant to support, but it’s ten times funnier that when called on it they said “Yes, we meant to do that.” Or, to quote more accurately: “Given their separate submission, the two parts were judged independently. The head was rejected. The base was thought to have merit and accepted; it is currently on display. The head has been stored ready to be collected by the artist. It is accepted that works may not be displayed in the way that the artist might have intended.” Hahahahahaha.
Chris is Angry: Something is seriously wrong with the ethical framework of our society when you can read a story like this: Drugs firm blocks cheap blindness cure. First, there is the fact that there are people (presumably in decision-making positions within the company) who would happily trade human suffering for increased profitsAll the usual pharma-rationalizations don’t really apply here since this is a case of an unexpected benefit of the drug–all the profit from the cheaper use would be “bonus” money anyway; trying to milk that bonus profit at a cost of human pain is flat out reprehensible. Secondly, it’s upsetting because there is a significant portion of our society that would accept that the proper frame for discussing issues like this is that of the balance sheet. Thirdly, it is upsetting because there is no way to identify the actions of the company as criminal–a more advanced society would not only despise such actions, but would provide a way to seek redress–or possibly avoid the whole issue by taking a different approach than patents to the pharmaceutical sphere.
